Building Teams That Scale And What Happens When They Don't | Will Blaze
When I was laid off at Peloton, I wasn't too far into my paternity leave. I think everything kinda worked out and I was Hold hold on.
Chris:Hold on. Hold on. Were let go while on paternity leave.
Will:I learned that you can do that. I will say that the company did put together a generous package, So I wasn't too bummed. Like, would have been great to have a job to go back to, but it wasn't the end of the world.
Nate:You're listening to TRADEOFFS, a podcast about the trials and tribulations of designing, building, and manufacturing hardware, and the people that make it. Each month, sit down with founders, engineers, and other hardware professionals to understand the unique trade offs inherent in building a business that makes physical products. I'm Nate Padgett, hardware community guy and founder of Informal, a freelance collective that helps companies of all sizes design, build, and ship world class hardware.
Chris:And I'm Chris Rill, startup founder, engineer, and fractional CTO, where I help hardware and software companies build and scale their products. TRADEOFFS captures the best of these conversations so you can learn about the numerous skill sets needed to successfully bring physical products to market. In this episode, we sit down with Will Blaze to talk about what's arguably the most important aspect of product building, team building. Will has spent the last fifteen years in the trenches of technical recruiting, helping scale some of the largest and best known brands in hardware and artificial intelligence. He now runs Blaze Talend, where he helps companies like CoreWeave and Andiam scale their teams.
Chris:We cover when to hire full time versus contractors, why structured interviews matter more than most founders think, and the trade offs you have to make when you can't check all 10 boxes. Let's dive in.
Nate:Will, can
Nate:you tell us
Nate:a little bit about you and Yeah. And your practice? We'll dig into the individual companies because I know Chris and I are, like, salivating and talking about Peloton in particular.
Will:Yeah.
Nate:Definitely. But would just love to hear about what you're doing.
Will:Yeah. Go for it. So I've been in the recruiting space for almost fifteen years. Started at a small staffing agency. I did some freelancing work individually after that.
Will:And then I was working with a bunch of startups. So was like, hey. Maybe it'd be better for me to be an internal recruiter and just, be part of, like, a company that's really going to grow. So I joined Birchbox back in 2015, and it was, like, skyrocketing and then left right after things started to to go downhill.
Nate:Everybody was launching a box. They were the
Will:first one. Now there's lots of them. It's kind of an interesting business model. I remember BarkBox launched after Birchbox, and now they're still around and doing really well. It's wild.
Chris:Yeah. Birchbox was the first.
Will:It was. Yeah. So that was a good experience. And then I saw a LinkedIn ad for a recruiter at Peloton. So I was like, why not?
Will:I had no I didn't really know about the company. I did know that they were interviewing people in my pipeline, and I was like, why does a exercise bike company need software engineers? And they were talking to good people, so I was curious just to learn what they were doing. So I applied, went to interview, and then got an offer and was like, let's do it. And I was there for six years.
Will:So when I was there, it was about a hundred hundred and fifty people, and they just closed their series d round, which I was like, this is this seems too late stage to for me to join. But it for what I learned though is hardware companies, lots of capital you need to raise, so they they needed that those rounds to kinda get to where they were. So when I was there, we grew from, like, a 150 to almost 10,000.
Nate:10,000. Oh, wow. What were the years for that again?
Will:It was 2016, and then in 2022, I was part of the first layoff, which there was a lot layoffs in 2022. Oh, yeah. They were kinda like the canary in the coal mine Mhmm. I think. There's lots lots more after them.
Nate:They were growing like a digital business during the pandemic, but they had physical assets and inventory.
Chris:But they were also growing because they were in at home, you know, as we're all digital services. Yeah.
Will:The pandemic was a black swan event for the company. At home fitness company, everyone's at home. Unfortunately, bad situation for the world. What better what better situation does this company have? So we were, you know, gas pedal to the floor, hiring, spending money on marketing and inventory, and they kind of hit a brick wall when demand started to dry up.
Will:They're way over leveraged. So company is a lot different now.
Nate:Peloton was the great hope for hardware in New York. And Yeah. Alfred Jones. He's at Meta now. Right?
Nate:Yes. I remember he moved to New York, and he posted on LinkedIn. And he was like, I wanna build the best hardware team on the East Coast at Peloton. And and then I reached out because at the same time, I was starting informal. And
Will:I just
Nate:remember being so jazzed about that. I was like, oh, yeah. Peloton is gonna make it happen.
Will:He's fantastic. So he he was someone that we reached out to, and initially, he said no. And then, like, the company started growing and we got him on the hook.
Nate:Was that you? Did you land Alfred?
Will:I sent the first message, then someone else got him. Yeah. Very cool. He might have came through an executive recruiter, which, you know, we we were using for leadership roles. He was fantastic.
Will:Sam Bowen is fantastic. He's just talked to
Nate:you yesterday.
Will:He's a great dude. Keep in touch with him. You know, he's just a really good person to know the hardware space. Oh, yeah. Our COO, Tom, was within, you know, deeply in the hardware space and he's at another startup now, started by the Chipotle founder.
Will:They're doing robot kitchen. Oh, cool. If you're looking for hardware talent, it's definitely a good keyword to put in. We've built a really big team there.
Nate:Peloton specifically? Yeah. What was post Peloton? Like, what are doing now? Did you start your agency right after?
Will:So I was thinking about doing it. When I was laid off, I wasn't too far into my paternity leave. I think everything kinda worked out
Chris:and I
Will:was Hold hold on.
Chris:Hold on. Hold on. You were let go while on paternity leave.
Will:I learned you can do that. I I will say that the company did put together a generous package. I don't know if I can go into the specifics, but I was I wasn't too too bummed. Like, would have been great to have a drop to go back to, but it wasn't the end of the world.
Chris:Did they, like, do it via text message or something?
Will:No. My my boss, he he really did care. We did a Zoom. He called me and he kept in touch with me and was trying to make intros. So I'll I'll get to my next layoff.
Will:But, you know, I've become accustomed to like kind of how this industry works, especially if you're in recruiting.
Chris:Yeah. I know.
Will:You gotta be prepared for that.
Nate:Like Yes.
Will:Like, when the work dries up, there's nothing to do.
Nate:If the team's
Chris:not growing, do you really need recruiters?
Will:Yeah. Our recruiting team for tech recruiting between recruiters, sourcers, coordinators, managers, contract, and full time. It was almost 40 people.
Chris:For 10,000 employees. Yeah. Of course, you need that.
Will:We were hiring hundreds of people a year for a couple years in engineering, software, hardware, product, ecommerce. Our team ballooned and then shrunk. That's unfortunate. So I was thinking about starting a recruiting business. I had a recruiting business early in my career.
Will:The hiring market in early twenty twenty two was red hot. Meta hired me not even two weeks after I got laid off, which is wild.
Chris:Double Oh, dipping.
Nate:It's good. They were watching.
Will:Yeah. They were really gearing up for their own hiring spree. I joined Meta in April. I had three sourcing teams. We're hiring AI machine learning engineers for about nine months.
Will:Unfortunately, I was in another layoff. Got laid off twice in 2022. Ugh. At that point, I was like, that's it. I'm gonna do this business idea I have.
Will:So I am three years into it now. We do embedded recruiting. So we'll come into either, like, a seed startup, later stage startup. We'll take over all recruiting or recruiting for some roles. Maybe at the seed company, they just raised their first round.
Will:We'll, like, roll out an ATS, take over all the coordination, outbound, help build that foundation.
Chris:What's ATS for folks that don't know the acronym?
Will:An applicant tracking system. There's a few we work with. It really depends on where you are. If it's like you and a cofounder and you have to hire one person, I would say don't even get one. You know, you can use Google Sheets or your email.
Will:We recommend JEM to smaller startups. It's free for six months for startups under 10 people. I think I have a referral link too. If I could drop it somewhere, I will. And then after that, it's really affordable.
Will:So you'll get TS and some outbound recruiting features for free for six months, which is amazing. When you get a little bigger, Ashby's great. Greenhouse has been around forever. For larger companies, maybe about 50 people, a bigger tool might make sense. For startups, I recommend jem.
Chris:Jem. Cool. Cool. Jem.com. Good URL.
Chris:Yeah. Have you ever had any of your ATS companies start poaching from your company?
Will:That's always something I thought about. Like, literally, they know everyone who's looking. I guess it's kinda like a black box for them.
Chris:I I I had our ATS provider start poaching my team at Canary.
Will:Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. It's unfortunate.
Chris:That was an interesting phone call with the CEO. Yeah. I came to learn there are non poaching clauses in contracts where, you know, your ATS provider can be contractually constrained from poaching from your team, but that was a first. So I won't call them out here, but I will never work with them again. And they're a very well known New York ATS company.
Will:I'm sure we can figure it out.
Chris:That sucks, Chris. They poached our controller and started going after the engineering team. It was a turbulent time at Canary. Like, I don't blame people for going.
Nate:Yeah. So maybe it was more of like a a vulture circling scenario. Yeah. 100%. Yeah.
Will:I was gonna say they're not building hardware. So Gotta be something else.
Chris:But you know this. There's a lot of software and other functions in hardware companies.
Will:Oh, yeah. Definitely.
Nate:I don't wanna get too far afield, but I did wanna dig in actually to this topic of ATSs and setting up kind of recruiting processes, especially hyperscaling your team. There's a bigger topic we can spend more time on later, but are you seeing changes in the requirements from the ATS stack, right, or or less need for that? It seems to me like we're living through a period right now where growth is not necessarily tied to headcount. And Mhmm. Like recruiting super fast is almost less important than deploying technology that allows you to not need to hire.
Nate:Are you seeing that in your work and in what startups require for hiring?
Will:So I think the hiring landscape is kind of interesting right now in startups. There's like some need, like super high demand roles like AI engineers, machine learning engineers, AI researchers.
Nate:Mhmm.
Will:That's top down. Like meta paying $100,000,000. Like, okay. It's it's like on the extreme. But there's also just like startups that are like down to spend like $25,300 k base on like like AI engineers.
Nate:I saw on your website AI is like the top of what you guys recruit.
Will:Yeah. Yeah. I was hiring machine learning engineers for more than ten years. Back at Birchbox, we had machine learning engineers. At Meta, we had machine learning engineers.
Will:You know, the LLM engineers are different flavor
Chris:Mhmm.
Will:For sure. Someone doing machine learning for five years, I think would be a great AI engineer. Mhmm. There's lots of demand there. Are you
Nate:seeing AI being conflated with LLM?
Will:I mean, I know in
Nate:the tech industry in general, it is. But for what you're recruiting for, are you seeing that?
Will:Lots of companies raising capital. They're building different kinds of products using LLMs.
Nate:Mhmm.
Will:And they are looking for software engineers that have experience building products with LLMs. Mhmm. So I know Can you
Chris:give an example? Like Yeah. Using an LLM to assist with coding or some other use cases? I think you have an interesting signal into how hardware companies are looking to the future in terms of innovation. Right?
Chris:So Mhmm. When you look at skill sets and AI for hardware, what scenarios are these companies envisioning the application of AI? Like, we're on the cutting edge. So from a hiring frame, I'm just really curious kind of what you're seeing.
Will:So what I think is interesting is a lot of AI engineers that startups are looking for are like full stack engineers that have experience with building products with LLMs. Mhmm. And I think in the the CEO, Anthropics, said, like, some huge percentage of, like, software engineers are going to be replaced by AI. I'm seeing more of a need for full stack engineers with AI experience.
Nate:I'm friends with a a firmware engineer at OpenAI, and he was saying that it's just him and like one other guy that he's paired up with doing firmware development work. Yeah. And they're, you know, working in cursor and using internal tools that OpenAI has. Oh, yeah. He he's like, we're outputting what a team of 50 would have output five years ago.
Will:Yeah. No. I I that is definitely true. I'm definitely hearing a lot of that. Crazy.
Will:So back to like startups, like, I think there's like a a full stack AI engineer, like product engineer that that a lot of companies are looking for. So they're building web products. There's like some mobile products. Like, I'm seeing more iOS engineers than I would kind of expect. Now, a lot of companies allow the new hires to use AI tools when they start there, but not like when they interview, which is kind of interesting.
Will:So, you know, like, you you can you should use cursor when you're when you're here, but for the interview, no. Like, you know, we we just wanna make sure that you know your stuff first.
Nate:That's so funny. But did you did you just say that you're seeing a surprising demand for iOS engineers?
Will:I think it's more than I would have expected given like all of the tooling that's out there. But there is quite a need, I would say, more than I would expect.
Chris:Why is that surprising though?
Nate:Well, it's surprising for me simply because I heard from a number of iOS engineers that they're like looking for work. Right? Or they're having to like compromise on lower salaries. Like, you can get so far building in the browser and using React Native, then you're just catching up endpoints with Swift development.
Will:I'm just curious if those engineers are remote or in office.
Nate:That's a great point. These are remote. Yep. Exactly. I'm 100% seeing more of a return to office, so you're right there.
Nate:Anyway, I just that was surprising.
Chris:Yeah. Perhaps this is a strategy change in terms of products. Right? I know, like, React Native and a few other of the, like, compiled to iOS technologies are just less performant. And Mhmm.
Chris:If you are trying to build a bleeding edge, like, award winning application, doing it natively is really the only way to get the product to where, you know, some individuals want it to be from a taste perspective. So I've I've just heard in general, like, if you want a very refined interface that is quick and performant, you have to write it natively in the tools that are there. So that just could be that the industry is changing now, especially with the operating system UI update that Apple did, that's where the demand is coming from.
Will:Yeah. The start ups, there's been a huge shift to return to office.
Nate:Mhmm.
Will:And not just five days a week, but sometimes six days a week.
Nate:I know this nine nine six bullshit.
Will:I'm about to publish a
Nate:blog post on this. I have so many feels. Anyway, keep going, Will.
Chris:No. So I'm curious to get your take on that. Are teams actually requiring folks to be in the office six days a week?
Will:Yeah. I I don't proactively look for companies to work with like that. It's a hard sell. But, I mean, you two have been at early stage startups. You probably worked those hours.
Chris:Oh, a 100%.
Nate:I think there's a difference between doing that work because you really give a shit and you care and doing that work because you are required to. And as a community person, I think there is some friction to requiring people to show up in a certain way versus letting them work in the way that is most productive for them.
Will:I I agree with you there. For if you're a seed stage company and you're hiring your first engineer, that first engineer, like, obviously, you're not going to be, like, shipping it in. Like, you're you're going to be working really hard. So I think if you're one of the first few engineers at a company, like, that's just the expectation that you should have going in. Mhmm.
Will:I think a lot of Gen Z founders have, like, defined it. Like, they're being very specific. Like, this is the expectation. If you don't want that, this isn't for you. So I think to that extent, okay.
Will:That makes sense. What I don't like though, and you'll even see it in some job descriptions. Like, they'll say, we're the next Airbnb. We're the next Amazon. We're the next Microsoft.
Will:And they're having their fiftieth employee work nine nine six, and they're not in an engineering world. Like, they're just gonna burn people out Yeah. And not have that equity exit that you would get if you were that first engineer. So I don't like that Yeah. At all.
Chris:Are you finding that those companies are compensating the team so that it's worth it, or are they just taking advantage of the hype and the lack of experience from the team that they're hiring?
Will:Outside of the founding engineers that are getting an equity package that is appropriate and even some companies aren't giving out an appropriate equity package. There's a post. I don't know if you saw it. Like, here's your offer 60. You're gonna be like a founder.
Will:It's in San Francisco.
Nate:Yeah. I saw that.
Chris:Yeah. Nate, I'd love to link to that. That's interesting. I've not seen that.
Nate:We can dig that up. Up.
Will:But I think they are taking advantage of people that are joining later, that are in non engineering roles. You know, when you post a job now, you get hundreds of applicants if it's the right kind of position and in the right place. There's demand for people to join these companies. Some people are joining, and I've talked to recruiters at some of these companies, and they did it. I was like, so you you're a recruiter.
Will:You were in the office on Saturday, like, twelve hours a day. They're like, yeah. This is Yeah. This is the job.
Nate:I can't imagine imagine that that makes makes the recruiter's job easy. I did a brief stint recruiting software architects at Netflix. They were notorious for not offering any benefits, but paying, like, really big pay packages, and the expectation was that you just, like, buy your own shit because you were paying
Chris:you really, really well.
Nate:And it was so hard to sell that to some senior people because they'd be like, fuck your libertarian bullshit and not wanna join. It was hard.
Chris:I would actually say just to to counter that, if you're forward about that, it makes the hiring process easier because that's the filter. Right.
Will:You don't That's true.
Chris:Hire enough about what we're doing and how we're doing it. Like, we're being transparent that we're nine six. You'll opt out real early on and then the folks that are like, oh, no. I believe in the mission of the company. Like, I just wanna be a part of this journey.
Will:I agree. A lot of these companies are putting it right on their application like this is a nine nine six company. Are you okay with that? You have to say yes. For me, at my stage of my career, like, absolutely not.
Will:That's silly. I've got two kids. I don't even spend $9.09 6 with them. Like, it doesn't make sense.
Nate:Also, it people killed themselves in China because of this work culture. Like, it's illegal there.
Will:They don't do it anymore there. Like, what? But we think it's a good idea. Like, there's something going like this. A lot of founders, this is just like the beat they're drubbing right now, and they're all saying the same thing.
Nate:Zeitgeist, and it's like being extremely hardcore. So curious just to tie it back to you and what what you're doing. Obviously, you're talking about what you'd be interested in for work. You're working with some founders that have this expectation. How has your job changed now that you're on your own and we're also in this new territory for recruiting?
Nate:How has the job evolved?
Will:Yeah. It's evolved a lot. You know, back to like a recruiter working nine nine six. That doesn't make sense now with all these new tools that are out there.
Nate:Exactly.
Will:So like every intake that we have for a new job, we're transcribing, we're using GPT. It's helping us really define what the job description is. We can then go and make an interview plan. Like, after you talk to a hiring manager, they wanna go hire someone. It's like, alright.
Will:Now what? Now, like, you can literally, like, in seconds after the meeting, have everything made. You can go to market. You can have your outreach made. You can get so much more done.
Will:Every candidate you're talking to, there's lots of tools that we use. We use BrightHire, which is like a interview transcription tool. This one called LE, MetaView.
Nate:Is LE a transcriber?
Will:They're all like they hop on to your call or you even dial into a phone bridge. As a recruiter, you can get so much more done in less time. I still don't see like the job being completely automated away. Like, there's Nuance and like, there are companies working on completely automating their recruitment work. But if you have been in this space the past few years and you're good at what you do, like, you can get a lot done.
Chris:What's your thought on the recruiting process that doesn't scale? Like, going and grabbing a coffee or really being personalized about growing. And I I looking at more small companies where you're not you you might have like less than 10 open recs and so the founder or the hiring manager is going to, you know, get out of the building and really try to bring in the folks that they wanna bring in. As opposed to trying to poach key individuals from other companies.
Will:So I think if you look at the spectrum, that would be like super personal. Like, hey, I'm the founder. Let's go get coffee. I wanna meet you. To like the other end of the spectrum.
Will:I've heard AI slop more than ever before that term. Like, that's a new one for me, which is blasting blasting out out personalized personalized emails to people you don't even know. Like like, clear someone didn't do that. So I do think that there's going to be more of, like, that shift to, like, very personalized high touch
Nate:Oh, yeah.
Will:Kind of recruiting. And like I was saying earlier in the conversation, there's pockets of demand right now that are just intense. It's like if you wanna get an AI researcher or if you're in the hardware space, you want that electrical engineer that's at meta and that's, like, specific to what you want. Like, if you're the founder, you could use a tool like JEM, get their email, send them an email, try to get get in touch with them. So that doesn't scale, but I think it's going to be important for, like, these key hires and, like, more and more as more of this industry becomes automated, like, that's gonna be important.
Nate:Yeah. It becomes more about helping you move faster versus replacing you. Right? Which Mhmm. Which if you're a really good recruiter, you've been doing this for a really long time, like, you can be infinitely more productive right now.
Will:Yeah.
Nate:And that seems like the holy grail for all these automation tools. Not the not replacing. It's augmenting us and making us all be better. Right. That AI slop stuff, though, is so real.
Nate:Someone reached out to me the other day and was like, hey, Nate. Like other furniture designers in the world, we offer this service. I'm not a furniture designer. Where'd you get that from? I don't even know where that came from.
Nate:It's the I think I must be on some list with woodworkers or something because I have a woodshop in San I don't know.
Will:Yeah. I got a message the other day. It's like, hey, Will. Are you the CEO of Blaze talent? I'm like, no.
Will:I respond. This is so bad.
Chris:I'm just an intern. That's my
Will:dad. Right. It's a family biz. Okay.
Nate:So you're you're saying that we're gonna move back into more personalization. You seem like someone who's in the business of relationships. Right? And that's really allowed you to build your career. With that high touch, but still the pressure to, like, hire quickly and and scale, how do you end up scaling that personalization or that high touch feel at the very least?
Will:So I mean, we don't get me wrong. We use AI with, like, almost everything we do now. It's made us more efficient. We can get more done. But, you know, for example, like, we're gonna send outreach, cold outreach to a candidate, like, we'll have the AI write a message, and then we'll tinker with it, and, like, highlight things that aren't there.
Will:So, you know, I don't wanna shy away that I I'm not doing that because I definitely am.
Nate:Well, but you're not just trusting it and sending it out into the world. You're still checking things and
Will:So some tools you can put on autopilot Right. Like, look away. But, like, someone told me this, but, like, if you think there'll be any fallout from, like, a message being really bad, like, obviously, don't do that. But, like, tools like Gem, for example, you can write personalized messages with AI, but they require you to review everyone before it goes out. I think that makes sense.
Will:So and these are usually for, you know, maybe we're hiring machine learning engineer or iOS engineer, and, like, you know, I've tapped, like, my own network. We have to go to market. But depending on the role, like, New York City hardware, like, if we worked with a new company and they wanted a mechanical engineer or, like, an industrial designer. Like, I know really good people that I've worked with, and like that is really valuable and I keep in touch with them.
Nate:Yep. Is most your client base in the New York area or are you all over?
Will:Most of them are in New York. We do embedded recruiting. So I've got a team of like contractors that I work with, and, like, we'll come in and we'll take over some roles, all roles. We're we're a small business. We got a handful or more of those or less rather of those clients at any given time.
Will:And then we do, like, traditional contingent recruiting. So, you know, we'll get paid if we hire someone kind of a deal.
Nate:Like a clawback clause in that. Right? Where it's like there's like
Will:We do.
Nate:Where it has to work. Otherwise Yeah.
Will:You've paid it back?
Nate:That scares me. How do you do that?
Will:Yeah. To me, it's not your money until the person's been there ninety days. Yeah. Yeah. They pay the invoice, it's just wait.
Will:And like, I I recently had an experience where someone joined one of these like, kinda like high intensity companies and he's like, hey, for Maine, like, friend of mine. Like, don't worry about it. Like, I'll be here for next time. You know, then you offer a backfill and things like that. So it is tough.
Will:That wouldn't be, like, the only thing that I do. There are some recruiting agencies. That's all they do, but that's, like, less than 20 Yeah. Of our business. We really like to do contract work where we're paid on time and we'll wind up being less expensive than those contingent fees, and you'll get a better service.
Will:That's our main pitch.
Chris:In terms of signs and signals you need to grow a recruiting team, what are some of the pain points that founders or teams are having that's like, oh, I should reach out to Will?
Will:Yeah. So at the seed stage, you you probably don't have a recruiting team, so you need to build that initial team. That's one of the personas we work with. Like a later stage, like maybe series a, series b, you've got one or two recruiters, and, like, they're just at capacity, not delivering. You know, we can come in and help on some roles.
Will:And, usually, it's, like, you know, a specialized role, like a machine learning engineer or an electrical engineer or a mechanical engineer. Like like, there's just not expertise internally. It might make sense to then go work with with us or another firm. It does fill the gap. One of the reasons why I started my business when I was at Peloton, we brought on a ton of contract recruiters.
Will:Some were great. Some were okay, some were terrible. So what my vision was is like when when these like when there's needs for for companies and they can't fill all these roles, like we would kinda be like on demand. We can come in and and and help these teams out.
Chris:What makes a terrible recruiter? Like, I'm curious because that seems subjective. So when you said somewhere terrible, terrible how?
Will:This was in like the COVID remote days. Maybe they had four jobs or something. Like, it was hard
Chris:to Over employed?
Will:Yeah. Like, it's like, maybe I don't even know if this person's, like, working. Like, I had one person at Meta. They just joined Meta. I'm like, that's great.
Will:Like, you should be proud of that. Never updated their LinkedIn. Like, can can you, like, just put that on your LinkedIn? Never did it. Wasn't delivering.
Will:I'm like, there's no way this guy's actually working, and we had to go through a lot of process. Back then, I think I think they they they lower the axe a little quicker now there, but it it took a while to to try to remove that person. So I think that would be, like, not good on the extreme. Maybe you're not timely with filing up, following up with people. There's loose ends.
Will:Like, you're ghosting candidates. Like, candidates ghost us. Don't think it's great, but like like, you should not close the loop on a candidate. Yeah. It's just rude.
Will:Even Right. Like, to me, like, there's a big debate about whether you should call someone on the phone to reject them or email them. I'm in the email boat, like, hey, didn't work out. Thanks for coming in. If you want, I'll hop on the phone and give you feedback.
Will:Mhmm. But like, some people I think some recruiters, maybe they're a little less experienced. Like, they they're just so frazzled by, like, having to give, like, negative feedback to somebody. Like, they maybe they they don't wanna do it. They kinda forget about it.
Will:But to me, if it doesn't work out, let them know immediately, move on. If they wanna know what happened, talk to them and give them feedback if you can. Some companies have policies about that.
Nate:When you say you've got a contract with a company, you're placing a recruiter
Will:Yeah. Bidding with them? We usually do hourly work. You know, we we can kinda craft it. Some companies wanna see, like, a success fee if we hire someone to incentivize us a little bit more.
Will:But for the most parts, like, recruiting. Yeah. For for example, we're talking about Sandbar. So we worked with them this summer, helped them hire eight people, and moved on. It was great for everybody.
Nate:Cool. Are you doing engineering technical? Or Yeah.
Will:We've done product roles, marketing roles, performance marketing roles. But, like, our our sweet spot's engineering. Like, just I just think it's what we know really well. There's other companies that do like more corporate roles.
Nate:Mhmm. But this is just what we do. Engineers are very salty when they feel like they're being sold to, I feel, you know, or getting something spammy. So it's a particularly tough population. My
Will:one of my favorite things to do at Meta, we had a hiring freeze, so I had a lot of time on my hands. I loved going into their applicant tracking system, and they had a do not contact list. And I just loved reading the correspondent. Oh my goodness. Kinda leave it to your imagination what they say.
Will:But it
Nate:was awesome. I'm sure there were similar ones in my Netflix experience.
Chris:Curious what my profile says at Meta. I used to get reached out to a lot by Meta, and I think I was pretty salty about the business Meta was in.
Nate:I have a feeling Will read it, he knows, but he's not gonna tell us.
Chris:But as I get older, I feel like, oh, that sounds interesting. 700,000 a year? I think I could do that.
Nate:Yeah. I'm like, your morals melt away.
Will:When I was out of Meta a year or two ago, I was doing his leadership search. I talked to, like, a hardware leader working in Hawaii, making millions of dollars remote. I was like, no. Pinch me. Like, that
Nate:That sounds amazing. Yeah. Curious, since we're just talking about Meta and Peloton, like, some big companies. Are you mostly working with startups now? Or is there like a balance of startups, mid sized enterprise?
Will:Our biggest client right now is Core Reef. So Oh,
Chris:right. I
Nate:saw that.
Will:They're, you know, public company Mhmm. Hiring a ton of people. Mhmm. New Jersey based, proud of that.
Nate:Oh, yeah.
Will:Putting them back on the engineering map after Bell Labs back in the day. So core like, we do work with some public companies, later stage companies. The profile companies we work with are, like, seed stage recruiting team or, like, there's too much to do and, like, they need to bring in some extra help. It's kinda like the idea.
Nate:Enterprises require a lot of high touch. Right? And then start ups, it's a little bit more bursty. How do you balance that internally as a team? Like, it's almost different service offerings completely.
Nate:Right?
Will:Yeah. I I So I think a lot of bigger companies, like, they're ingrained in however they're doing things. So like, what we have to see how they're hiring and adjust to what they're doing. But with seed startups, we can kinda do things that we wanna do, like bring in our own software. But at the end of the day, they just want to hire people.
Will:Yeah. So like, we could talk about candidate experience and good interview etiquette, things like that. But they're just like, we just need to fill this person. Name people. Yeah.
Chris:Yeah. They don't care about the how so much as the when.
Will:Right. I mean, some some founders really care about hiring well and invest a lot of resources there, and it's a good place to invest. You know? If it doesn't work out with someone, they might be a customer one day. Like, that's like all things to think about.
Chris:Right. Nate and I were talking about hyperscalers, and you've been part of a few companies that have gone hyper growth, especially in New York, which is probably on the rare side. Yep. How have teams been able to maintain their culture or not in those phases? Kinda what works and what doesn't work?
Will:Yeah. It is important to, like, understand what your culture is and, like, at Peloton, it was years into me working there where, like, with our our leadership, like, actually wrote down, like, these are, like, our values and what we stand for. So, like, maybe it is good to wait so you can see how everyone thinks about the work they're doing or the products they're building and what your values are. I've also worked with some founders, like, before they even raise capital. Like, they're like, these are our values.
Will:And if you can ingrain that into your interview process to try to ensure that you're bringing in people that care about these things, I think that's important. You know, maybe you're like the Amazon customer obsessed and you have a question you ask every candidate, then you can kinda differentiate between people that are, like, really interested in the work or someone that maybe just wants a job. And maybe some companies, that's okay. At least the later stage companies I've worked with have done a good job at really defining what their culture is, their mission, their values. They've got some kind of rubric for that in their interview process.
Nate:Cool. I do wonder though how do you ensure broad cultural alignment. Right? Like, going from hundreds of employees to thousands employees in, like, a year. I imagine there's ripple effects, especially when you're, like, an outside contractor supporting those organizations.
Nate:So I was at Quirky. Remember Quirky back
Will:in the day? Oh, yeah.
Nate:Yeah. So I joined, and I was, like, employee 50 or something. And I think when they went bust, it was, like, 400. But in the year that I joined, I think they added, like, a 100 people or something. And I just remember that was a really jarring experience for the first 50.
Will:They were
Nate:like, suddenly, don't know everybody that's here. Like, what's going on? I'm just a cog in the wheel. I'm curious. How do you grapple with that?
Nate:And, you know, maybe the answer is that the people that are in in the beginning maybe aren't right for the later stages.
Will:Yeah. We are definitely more on the delivery side. We're, like, really trying to understand, like, what are you building here? What are, like, your p zero rolls, p ones, your p twos? Like, what do you need to fill yesterday?
Will:What can we fill next quarter? What I think is interesting though is, like, I remember when I was at Peloton, like, the early years, people would be like, you know, what's going on? I don't know anyone here. I have all these deadlines that I need to hit. I can't do it.
Will:And now I talk to them now, they're like, that was great. I remember that. Remember those years?
Nate:It feels good to like go hard. You know what I mean? And just like crank. Yeah.
Will:Yeah. Yeah.
Chris:So Type two fun.
Will:And I mean, like, for people that you get into the interview process, like, they're usually pumped about about what's happening there. And then the people that are there Right. They're usually, like, excited to see that kelp is coming.
Nate:Exactly. They're drowning. Yeah. Right. Sure.
Nate:I'm I'm reading Blitzscaling, that Reid Hoffman book
Will:Okay.
Nate:For better or for worse. And then Tony Fadell's book Build, they talk about these kind of inflection points mostly in the context of headcount that companies go through and mostly from, like, an executive standpoint, how you grapple with that. Just curious if you had you had thoughts having been exposed to all of it.
Will:There's been a lot of emphasis recently on, like, quality of hire. I
Chris:don't know
Will:if you've heard of that. Oh, yeah. Lots of, like, debate on how effective that is or if it's, something that recruiters should really own. The best way that I've seen it is looking at performance reviews a year later and trying to see, like, you know, maybe there's some patterns of companies that we're getting people from.
Nate:And you get that data? The teams readily share performance reviews with you?
Will:I think for bigger companies that have this data, like, they are doing that. Like, the more progressive companies that are fairly good at what they do, like, it is something that they're measuring. I've heard quality of hire, talent density has been thrown around a lot. What does that mean? Like, you have a team of people, ex Palantir, hardware Andoril, Lab one twenty six, like, you know, like the best hardware companies.
Will:We have that team here. Sure. It's not about delivery to me or quality.
Nate:It's about logos. Yeah.
Will:That's I personally think, but
Chris:It looks good on a venture capital deck.
Will:When you're raising money.
Nate:Yeah. Kinda like we have nine nine six culture. I think we're seeing a trend here.
Will:We're nine nine six. We're all ex fag. Take our money.
Chris:Have you seen the post on LinkedIn? I don't know the person, but it's like a founder at a company, and all they're posting are grinding nine nine six, like, it's a guy at his wedding and he's not at the altar, he's coding and it's just like, you know, one team member, his wife's into the living room but he's in like the waiting room cranking Yeah. On his Like, I feel like they're doing it as a meme, not because that's truly their culture.
Will:I think it's a meme, but it's it's always like Is that Cluely?
Nate:Is that what we're
Chris:talking Yes. I think it is Cluely.
Will:Oh, stuff is awesome.
Nate:It's probably Yeah.
Will:It's so great. It's There's always generational feeling that the new generation is lazy, but I look at like Gen z, they're savage with this work ethic to an extent where it's like unnecessary sometimes.
Chris:Well, it's because the millennials are lazy. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe.
Will:Maybe. I'm talking about Gen X.
Nate:What are you talking about?
Chris:Teasing. I'm gonna get that cut because that's just going to not be good for me. I'll get canceled.
Nate:No. No. We'll keep it. We'll keep it. But, you know, being a founder is self selective.
Nate:Right? Like, these founders that just wanna crank, you know, they wanna build something I
Will:will say, I there's a there's a startup that we've worked with and, like, someone was working there and they were saying that they're, like, you know, they didn't say six days a week, but they're, like, we're nine to nine five days a week, gotta be in the office. We're gonna be working hard and like, first start working there, then they were like, it's actually like not like that.
Nate:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's just the screening.
Nate:Yeah. To make sure you're ready to be hardcore. Because you
Will:have to say that now.
Nate:Oh, wow.
Will:It's kind of the kind of the thing.
Chris:Changing gears a little bit. Will, what's your favorite interview question?
Will:My I mean, my favorite interview question is gonna be pretty vanilla. But it's like, you know, what are your motivations to look for a new role? Like Mhmm. I really wanna understand like, why are you looking? What do you wanna do?
Will:Where do you see yourself a few years from now? When we ask someone that, they kinda go in a lot of different directions, but I think, like, it's pretty impactful. And then a lot of founders wanna take hiring on themselves, and sometimes they don't ask a lot of these questions. So I think make sure you ask every single candidate the same questions so you can have like good calibration. But I think that is one kind of vanilla one.
Will:I think another one is if I had to ask your manager some things that you could improve, what would they be? The other
Chris:That is my favorite question.
Will:Yeah.
Nate:Okay. Good. Chris, did you ever work with Will?
Will:Not yet. I just landed on this podcast instead. Right. This is the first It's
Nate:all good step, Will. No. It's the first step.
Chris:I tried to work with Will. What can I say? It's complicated.
Will:It's all good.
Chris:Yeah. Yeah.
Will:Yeah. I've messaged people from Canary back in the day. So
Chris:Actually, is really interesting, but I had a recruiter spamming the entire engineering team, and we got a bad reputation from a recruiting perspective because they were just trying to poach this team, and I had no idea this was even going on because I'm not part of that loop. Right? And, like, it was actually kind of embarrassing after the fact. I'm like, what are you doing? I was just sad to hear that because it was more spray and pray as opposed to Yes.
Chris:Being targeted and intentional about the outreach.
Will:Yeah. That doesn't really work. I mean, you need to know what you're looking for. Like, I don't think every single person at a company is going to be a good fit for like whatever role you have. So Right.
Will:You
Nate:know. But I imagine there's an element of vetting and like all that stuff. But have you had anyone go rogue and do something like what Chris was describing?
Will:A lot of the people that I bring in to projects I've worked with before, I've already vetted them after years of working with them. So, you know, I I've definitely had you've got you have junior recruiters. They kinda do their own thing. When I when I joined Meta, for example, like, I was surprised. We were hiring machine learning engineers.
Will:There was like 25 people on my team. And like some of them, like, it was their first tech recruiting job. Like, they were hiring so there was 5,000 people in the recruiting team in early twenty twenty two at Meta. The whole Meta recruiting org was 5,000 people? That's with like everybody.
Will:Like recruiters, sourcers, managers. Woah. They would have been one of the biggest staffing firms in the world. There's a ton of people there. I'm just like looking around like, why there ain't me, like but, you do gotta reel it in.
Will:I mean, a lot of these tools, it makes it really easy to keep tabs on that. You could see, like, people's outreach stats, open rates, reply rates, how many offers they've made, how many are accepted, rejected. Recruiting is very measurable.
Nate:Obviously, your bread and butter is knowing talent and being able to match that talent, screen that talent, and all that stuff.
Will:Right? Mhmm.
Nate:But how do you gauge and get to know some of that nuance about the companies? Right?
Will:We do discovery meeting, and we've got, like, a list of questions that we like to go through. What's the team in place today? What's the product that you have? What's revenue like or not like? What's the vision of the company?
Will:What's the culture? What's the work in office requirements? You know, how flexible are the work hours or taking time off and things like that? What's the pay? What's the equity situation?
Will:What are the benefits?
Nate:Mhmm.
Will:So, like, all these things kind of go into, like, where we see an opportunity. You know? Maybe they are that nine nine six company. I don't wanna deter anybody, Pierre, but, like, you know, maybe first time founders and the VC funds that they're working with, like, I've never heard of them before. The pay is not great.
Will:The equity situation doesn't make sense. Vacation policy or benefits aren't great. Those companies, like, oh, like, okay. Cool. Doesn't make sense for us.
Nate:Yeah. On that note, talking about compensation, I feel like there's been a lot of volatility in salaries within the hardware ecosystem. Like, 2021, really senior mechanical engineer in the Bay Area could be commanding, like, $2.50, $300 an hour. But for the last, like, two years, it's probably been closer to $1.50 to 200. Have you been seeing that kind of pressure within salaries?
Nate:Is that compensated with benefits? What is the mix for comp right now in the hardware ecosystem?
Will:I think that there's pools of in demand kind of talent. And, like, I I can't, like, broadly speak for, like, the whole industry because, like, we've just worked with, you know, startups that are, like, you know, building out, like, a, like, a sounding team. And, you know, we've gone and talked to, like, the usual suspects in the hardware space that have worked lab one twenty six, Meta, you know, the Peloton's of the world. You know? I think that those companies, like, the compensation, I think, has gone up.
Will:But broadly speaking, for the larger hardware companies, like, maybe there's been a shift down, but I personally haven't seen that.
Nate:Have you seen it go up? Like, are people being paid more on average for early stage startups in hardware?
Will:So I will say the seed funding rounds are much higher than they were five years ago. You know, you used to raise a few 100 k. Now they're raising, like, a few million Mhmm. For seed rounds. So I think I'm seeing more competitive salaries than I used to at the seed stage.
Will:Even in the hardware space, like, they might even pay, like, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, like, $1.50 plus if they're, like, good and, like, mid level.
Nate:What about on, like, equity or, like, you know, other benefits?
Will:Yeah. Every founder approaches this differently. I think if they've been a founder before, they just really understand it. So they've got, like, a philosophy and, like, what's a handout. Like, some founders, they've got, like, diminishing equity packages for, like, their first 10 people.
Will:Like, that first person's gonna get 1%. The next one's gonna get point eight. The next one's gonna get point six, or they have got some flexibility. Like, if if this person's amazing, I'll flex up to 1.5.
Nate:Do you help them develop that or are they usually coming to you with that in mind already?
Will:I'll give feedback. Like, if it's too low, I'll I'll be like, hey, like, I think point 1% for your pre revenue SaaS startup doesn't make sense.
Nate:SaaS is a foreboding word on this podcast actually.
Will:So Oh. Only speak in terms of hardware. Software as a service.
Chris:Hardware as a service is what we like
Nate:to refer to. Haas. Yeah.
Will:Yeah. For your point 1% pre revenue humanoid robot startup.
Nate:There you go. Go. Love it. Most exciting company you're working with right now. Not Sandbar because we're talking about Sandbar.
Will:I was
Nate:gonna was They're pretty cool. They're pretty cool audience.
Will:Sandbar is great. We wrapped up with them. We're doing a lot of work with CoreWeave right now. They are hiring a ton of people. They do have some hardware hiring.
Will:I think mechanical engineers in in New York, not not a large team, but they are creating some of their own hardware. Like, they're
Nate:creating their own servers, their own compute shards.
Will:I think it's like racks, you know. So they're the data center space. They've got 33 data centers, 250,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Yeah. They've got really good people.
Will:They can
Nate:get a lot of press too. What's the mix Yeah. Hardware versus AI for you and your clients?
Will:So I love the hardware space. There's just not a ton of companies. Like, I don't think I can just do hardware.
Nate:Especially in New York.
Will:Especially in New York. Yeah. X Control Labs, Anthony Michella is at this new humanoid Fauna. Yeah. That that one looks really cool.
Will:I don't know what's going on there.
Chris:He knows how to pick companies to work for.
Will:Yeah. Anthony, if you're listening to this, I've pinged him about trying to get my foot in the door. Nothing yet, but Anthony is fantastic. I've seen some good people go there, so that's exciting.
Nate:Are you helping for working with Figure?
Will:I've talked to them. It it hasn't made sense yet, but they're they're all in on the West Coast working in office. Like Yeah. If we could be in the office there, it would have been a little different, but that would have been super cool.
Nate:Do you have a presence on the West Coast?
Will:We're all remote. I mean, I'm in New Jersey. We've worked with companies in the Bay Area and made hires there.
Nate:You don't have any of your contract recruiters here?
Will:No. Let's change do have someone on the West Coast, Bellevue.
Nate:Oh, cool. Bellevue, just as I say, oh, that's great. Yeah. Well, maybe we can change that, work together, get some good people on the West Coast for you. I'd love to do that.
Nate:That'd be fun. 100%.
Chris:So I see a ton of books behind you. What are some of your favorite on hiring and company building?
Will:There's this book called WHO? WHO? Yeah. Yeah. So WHO, the a method for hiring.
Will:So I actually worked with a startup, like, eight eight years ago. And before I started working with them, the founder's like, I want you to read this book. And I was like, this is like some bullshit homework. And I actually liked it. I it was it was good.
Will:And so it's all about structuring your interview process. The one thing I pulled from that book is something that I that I really do all the time now, and it's something that I kinda tout. You know, just ask all candidates the same questions. Like, you'd be surprised. You go into an interview process.
Will:You just bullshit with somebody, or companies are doing that with candidates, like, completely unstructured. So, like, if you could do anything as a start up, ask candidates the same questions, and you 'll get a way to measure the differences between all the interviews.
Chris:What's the craziest interview experience you've had in the last year with the advent of technology and deep fakes? Like, have you been on a call where someone's done, like, face shifting?
Will:They have.
Chris:Tell me more about that situation. Like, what was going on?
Will:Yes. Like, I have a if someone's gonna be fake, like, I kinda have an idea. Again, it's usually with remote companies. If we have a remote role, there's things that we do to, like, not waste my time before we even do that. Like, we wanna see if your LinkedIn's verified.
Will:If you have a phone number that you're sharing, we use carrier lookup and see if, like, you have got a VoIP number, which usually, like, kinda like a dead giveaway. We'll look at emails of how an resume is formatted. It's kinda like a taste thing now. Like, I could, like, look at it. I'm like, yeah.
Will:It still doesn't feel it doesn't feel right. It looks it looks like it's it's been automated. There's a little bit of human intuition. If all those things don't click out, I wanna talk to someone. But every now and then, it's almost slips through the cracks.
Will:But, yeah, I definitely talked to someone. You could hear that they were in, like, a call center. They would mute and go back on. This person said they lived in Vegas. And I actually have family that lived there, and I used to go to Vegas once or twice a year for, like, Thanksgiving.
Will:So I'm, like, very familiar with, like, the neighborhoods. So I was just kinda growing. I'm like, where in Vegas do you live? And they're like, you know, downtown. I was like, you know, where?
Will:Downtown. Right. You don't you don't live Downtown Vegas. No one lives in downtown. It is gross there.
Chris:Professional poker player. You're not living downtown.
Will:Even then, like
Nate:Even then. It's just a hotel.
Will:So but even normal candidates for companies that don't use AI, like, you'll notice that there someone's like looking, like, on another screen with their eyeballs. There's a lot of that and a lot of interviewers. I'm seeing a lot of notes on that. Like, interviewers are looking for that. So like Interesting.
Will:Don't do that. If you are doing that, just know that. I think Like, Keep
Chris:your notes by the camera.
Will:Yeah. Yeah. Right? These folks are gonna use AI when they start working anyway. It's like, so should you just let them?
Nate:Right. Are you using like, you know, AI tools that are also watching the video and, like, this person doesn't know what they're talking about or, like, this is obviously
Will:a bot. Yeah. There there are, like, interview coding tools that are out there. They'll, like, look at the code and, like, say, hey. This is likely fraudulent or this has been copied.
Will:Me personally, like, tools I'm using aren't doing that.
Nate:Yeah. No. Still, it's a
Will:a brave new world with
Nate:all these tools and, you know, people creating synthetic versions of themselves. Pretty wild. It is.
Chris:I joked before this call that Nate and I would have our AI avatar podcast host interview your, you know, recruiter avatar. And then we could just sit back and watch three AIs have a conversation. That's a future episode. Yeah.
Will:So I I was working last year with this startup. Former Peloton employee started it called jars.ai. Kinda like Direct TV or your cable network meets like Twitch meets AI. So like they're trying to make twenty four seven AI entertainment. It's like interactive.
Will:Oh
Nate:my god.
Chris:So funny.
Will:So there's a courtroom channel and two avatars walk into court and like, you can like input like what you want the topic to be and like I'm
Nate:so into it. That's fantastic. Oh, I love it.
Will:Lot of like super interesting weird things going on around there.
Nate:Are you mostly working with consumer hardware companies or industrial, medical?
Will:I mean, a lot of my work's with consumer. I know Chris was doing some commercial and interested in military, but, at least for me, it's been consumer.
Nate:Since we're starting to think about the future, Will, what are you, like, most excited about in hardware specifically? Right? But then in in the tech industry broadly since you're so enmeshed in multiple sides of it.
Will:Definitely the robotics space in hardware. It seems like there's a lot of like new companies that are starting to raise capital there. I mean, I think humanoid robots are so cool. I've talked to a few companies there. I haven't worked with any yet, but we've we've done some prospect calls and just like kinda seeing what's going on in that space.
Will:It's been interesting.
Nate:Cool. Any other areas that you're really stoked about?
Will:AI companies in the biotech space. There's some really interesting stuff going on there, creating drugs or getting drugs through development faster. That's really promising. Like, LLMs are really unlocking a lot of exciting things. Like, I I saw a new cancer treatment found with a good Google product.
Will:That that is exciting.
Chris:Cool. Definitely.
Nate:You know, as we're coming up on the end of this, I'm curious, what about your process or the way that you approach recruiting would be atypical? Like, what's unique about the way that you and your agency are are going about finding talent and and helping, you know, helping build world world class teams?
Will:We really do use AI for intakes, creating sourcing lists, job descriptions. Like, I think that there's some people that are, like, you know, dipping their toes in it or, you know, they're using it on a day to day basis, but I think we really understand, like, the tooling that's out there. And I'm, like, a good example. Like, I'm doing a ton more than I than I could have done, like, a few years ago. Mhmm.
Will:The locations that we're in, I mean, we're very ingrained in the New York space, worked with a lot of great hardware companies there, got a good network in the AI space. But, like, again, I've been doing machine learning hiring for, ten years now. So Mhmm. I think we we really kind of got a good network there and and understand the way it's been.
Nate:Are there any trade offs that you think hardware teams should be mindful of as they're thinking about growing?
Will:Yeah. I I think this goes back to, like, where we're talking about, like, talent density and pedigree. I think, like, at your early stage, like, I think you you will need to make trade offs with the kinds of candidates you're talking to. You know, you might not get that ex fan candidate as your first hire. So I think, like, being clear about, like, what the job is, what the outcomes are, having a good interview process to really try to determine if someone could, like, can do the role.
Will:You know, I I think there's a level of expectations some founders have of, like, who their first hire is gonna be and, like, kinda like what they start to see. So at the same time, don't settle. Like, don't, like, just hire someone just to fill a body. Like, try to bring in someone that you think is gonna really do well, go above and beyond, but, like, maybe understand, like, they might not have that, like, amazing pedigree. Depending on what you're doing, your funding, like, everything's different.
Will:But, you know, there's always gonna be some kinds of trade offs you're gonna make with hiring.
Nate:Of course. Especially if you don't have infinite leverage.
Will:If you got 10 boxes and you could take eight, that's great. But sometimes, there's like, we need all 10. Right.
Chris:What are your thoughts on full time team versus freelancers? Yeah. I want you and Nate to duke this out because Nate's like freelancer.
Nate:No. No. We're gonna have a we're gonna have separate conversation after this call about how we can work together.
Will:Yeah. So I bootstrapped my business and like, I really see firsthand like, if you're gonna hire someone, hiring full time is risky. And I've been laid off twice before. So, like, I've seen, like, how that can go.
Nate:It's risky on both sides. Right. For the hire and it's risky for the talent.
Will:Right. So, like, your eggs are kinda all in one basket. From a company perspective, you know, you need to payroll somebody. You need to pay for their benefits. You know, if it doesn't work out, like, your unemployment rate's gonna go up in your payroll.
Will:So, like, there there's a lot of risks. Like so if you were gonna hire someone full time, you need to really understand the risks and be sure that you need someone full time. Is the work gonna be around two years from now? I think that's really what you need to think about. So, you know, contractors I specialize specialize in in contract contract recruiting.
Will:So I think recruiting is very cyclical. You're hiring one day, next week, you're not. Bringing in contract recruiters makes a lot of sense for startups.
Nate:100% it does. And then when should teams start thinking like, no. This needs to be a salaried person that, like, we get for infinite infinite time, not infinite time, but you get what I'm Nine nine six.
Will:Yeah. No. Yeah. I mean, there's gonna be a lot of, like, tangibles there. If you're a startup and you've raised capital, you need to deliver a product, like, look at your budget and try to understand, like, what are you building and, like, what can you deliver with this headcount?
Will:Mhmm. You know, you don't wanna hire too many people, of course. Like, so you need to be diligent about what it is that you actually really need. Right. Or you're like a bootstrapped company and, like, you're very on top of your numbers and only gonna bring in people.
Will:Like, if you get, like, a new project or you landed a big client, like, there's so many different ways of looking at it. But, you know, to me, like, especially the hardware, you've got different cycles, pre product, pre revenue, prototyping. Are you going to build tens of products or millions?
Chris:Like Right.
Will:There's all different kinds of people you need for different stages. Maybe you need contractors for different stages. Mhmm. You know, maybe, you know, if the if the product's in market and you're scaling, like, and it seems like you're gonna have years growth, like, maybe then you start to build out more of a full time team. Mhmm.
Chris:So it sounds like you're advocating potentially not hiring somebody full time if you don't have to.
Will:I think yeah. Definitely. We focus on full time hiring for the most part, but yeah. It makes a lot of sense to hire contractors.
Chris:Full time recruiter advocates for informal. Well, look.
Nate:This this isn't this isn't an informal advertising. This is about talking to people who have perspective and influence within the ecosystem. But what I always say is if you need to embed that knowledge in your team and you need to be able to share it with future employees, bring that person on full time and just on your bench, and they're there at all times. That's essential. And then if there's, like, sustaining work that you just need someone to kinda crank on constantly, like, gets prohibitively expensive on a contract.
Nate:Right? So you really wanna control your cost by putting them on salary. And those seem like the two scenarios in which you absolutely need someone to be w two. And the rest of it, because it's so lumpy Right. You could get away with perpetual contract, I think.
Nate:I I agree with you there.
Will:I've seen the pitfalls of scaling a large full time team. Even like Peloton, for example, they work with a lot of manufacturers too. So, like, some of these manufacturers have a lot of the same people that you wanna hire in full time already. Right. So you you can lean on them too.
Will:So it's very dependent on the product and part of life cycle that you're in with the product and where you are.
Chris:Yeah. So I know you represent companies that are hiring. I don't know if there's any companies you wanna shout out or
Will:The hardware space on the West Coast work with a really cool company called Andronom.
Nate:Mhmm.
Will:They're in the defense space working on sonar to track underwater submarines and other malicious activity. So they're hiring electrical engineers, firmware, device engineers, acoustics, I believe. So we're really excited about them in the hardware space. We're also working with a company in New York called Andiam. They're making devices for oil and gas fields.
Will:They're definitely hiring software engineers there. And then CoreWeave, I mean, not a lot of hardware hiring, but there is a few nuggets fire hardware there and just like a super exciting company that's on, like, an incredible growth trajectory. Awesome.
Nate:And how can people reach you?
Will:They can add me on LinkedIn. I mean, I'm I'm I don't think it'll be floodgates of people adding me, so feel free to add me and let me know who you are. Burn. You know, I mean,
Nate:who wants add
Will:a recruiter on LinkedIn?
Nate:Touche. Touche.
Will:I don't get a lot of perfect candidate to LinkedIn. So, hey, if you're amazing, add me. And if you're not, add
Nate:me anyway. Why not? Perfect. Hey, Will. This was really fun.
Nate:Thank you so much for Yeah. Doing this with us. Wealth of knowledge on the recruiting side, but also in terms of this ecosystem. I hope that this will be the first of many conversations.
Chris:Thank you, Will. I I appreciate it.
Will:Yeah.
Chris:TRADEOFFS is hosted and produced by Chris Rill and Nate Patchett. Editing done by the illustrious Alex Michael. Our logo is designed by the talented pixel alchemist, Tanya Cica. If you'd like to be a guest on the show, reach out to us on our website at tradeoffs.fm. If you made this far, please rate and subscribe to the pod.
Chris:Nate and I appreciate your support.
