Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
The playbook for building high-talent-density teams | Adam Ward, Head of Talent at Cursor
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You have built and are known as someone that can build the most elite high talent density teams. Let's start with how people do it wrong. Something you call the funnel of doom. Companies think about recruiting like a funnel. I'm going to reach out to 100 people. 20% of those are all high. By definition, that is not the top 20%. That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day. The way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage and we hire the remainder. In your mind, okay, there are 50 people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people and you relentlessly pursue and you focus your energy on activating those people, not trying to find them out of the funnel of doom. The mistake that most companies make is they'll say, "Hey Lenny, who's the best product engineer you know?" That is the worst question you can ask. The better question to ask is, "Hey Lenny, of all the product engineers you work with, who stands out to you as the person who's most collaborative with designers or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen?" When you're looking for that first recruiting hire, is there anything you think is important to look for? Recruiters are excellent at 90 to 110 percent capacity and are terrible outside of that. If they only have half a workload, they kind of like are useless, but they're kind of great at this edge of adrenaline rush busy, you want to find those people. What are some things you've learned about building incredible teams, keeping people working for you over the long term? When you look at candidate satisfaction scores, the number one thing that's always there is... Today my guest is Adam Ward. Adam is known in the valley as the most effective recruiting leader at building elite high talent density teams. He co-founded an independent recruiting firm called Growth By Design, which Cursor acquired fully last year, which is not something that you often hear and is a testament to how good he and his team are and how important talent is right now in today's market. Adam is now head of talent at Cursor, helping them scale and build one of the most talent dense teams in the world. Prior to starting his own firm, Adam led global recruiting at Pinterest during the company from 200 to over 2000 employees, and before that he led a global team of 65 recruiters across 10 offices at Facebook, helping them scale Facebook's tech work from 1000 to over 10,000 employees. If hiring the best people is your number one priority, as it should be, this conversation will open your mind up to what it takes to do that. Adam gets super tactical and extremely specific, and you're going to thank me for inviting Adam on this podcast to share all of this incredible advice. A huge thank you to Brie Wolfson, Janet Fishberg, Jill Macquarie, Mike Joiner, and Tim Kendall for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lenniesproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Adam Ward. Adam, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. You've been doing this for 20 years now, hiring recruiting, building teams. How different is the market we're in today? How crazy is the market in the hiring market we're in today? If there's a scale, it's an 11. But yeah, I do think there are similarities to some other markets we've been in over time. You mentioned the years. There was a moment in time where a lot of companies were moving to mobile, and there literally was not a global engineer. An iOS engineer was not a thing. But there was the scramble for talent to build your mobile app and things like that. There was this moment that was the thing. It has some similarities to that market in a moment. I think that really the difference here is everything here is just so compressed. So that mobile moment was two years, maybe, where there were no mobile engineers, then there were mobile boot camps and all these things. Now we're in days, we're in weeks. There are no months or year measures right now. And so that's what makes us feel very different. The other thing that feels very different about this market is there's many people doing extremely well. It's the most competitive, as you said, 11 out of 10 for specific roles. A lot of other people are just really struggling, having a really hard time fighting jobs. Yeah, it's a tale of two cities, really. You can read back-to-back headlines of NBA salary offers to a new grad PhD and the next line being
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