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Our 6 Must-Reads for Hiring Tactics That Actually Break the Mold
Hiring at early-stage startups is not getting easier. If anything, it’s getting noisier. There’s no shortage of advice, frameworks, or hot takes, but very little of it survives contact with reality. What founders and first-time managers need aren’t platitudes. They need tactics that actually work when the clock is ticking, the inbox is exploding, and the team is already stretched thin.
That’s why we pulled together six standout reads from operators who’ve gone off the beaten path. These aren’t theory-heavy HR manifestos. They’re practical, sometimes uncomfortable, often unconventional approaches to hiring that hold up across every stage of the process, from setting your hiring vision to sourcing candidates to closing them when it actually counts.
Why hiring momentum dies so fast
The start of the year always brings a surge of activity. Performance reviews wrap. Budgets get finalized. Headcount opens up. Hiring plans look clean and rational in a spreadsheet. Promotions and team growth feel just around the corner.
Then reality hits.
That early-year energy burns off quickly as founders, new managers, and recently funded teams all collide with the same truth: hiring at an early-stage startup is hard. Not conceptually. Operationally.
Hiring becomes a full, end-to-end grind. Outreach emails go out. Applications flood in. Interview scheduling turns into calendar Tetris. Writing job descriptions, building pipelines, aligning interviewers, calibrating feedback, chasing references. Every step is fragile. Every handoff is a chance for things to break. And every delay increases the odds that your best candidate quietly disappears.
So it’s no surprise that leaders go looking for shortcuts. What actually helps isn’t hacks. It’s better systems and sharper judgment. The six pieces below offer exactly that.
1. Set a real hiring vision and stop ambushing candidates with pop quizzes
Dan Pupius spent six years at Google before moving on to lead engineering at Medium and later co-found Range. Despite surviving Google’s famously intense interview process, he’s convinced he mostly got lucky. Watching others get hired and rejected only reinforced that belief. He saw plenty of false negatives and false positives. Smart people rejected for the wrong reasons. Polished candidates hired who ultimately didn’t fit.
So instead of copying big-tech hiring rituals, Pupius rebuilt the process from first principles. What surprised him most was how closely hiring mirrored product development.
Strong products start with a clear vision. Hiring should too. But most companies settle for vague ambitions like “world-class team” or “mission-driven people.” Even slightly more detailed versions like “focused, hardworking believers” are still useless. They don’t repel the wrong people. And if your hiring vision doesn’t repel anyone, it’s not a vision.
Pupius argues that founders need to define, in concrete terms, the type of person who will succeed at their company specifically. What traits are essential? What behaviors matter? What kind of people will struggle here? The goal isn’t to collect talented individuals. It’s to build a coherent system, the same way you’d build a product.
At Range, the founding team took this literally. They went on a hike together to step outside the office and brutally assess themselves. They listed their own strengths and weaknesses and used that to identify what they were missing as a group. In their case, they realized they were heavy on intuitive introverts and light on process-driven extroverts.
The result wasn’t a slogan. It was a working list of traits, values, and skills that every new hire would need to succeed and balance the team. Every hiring process now starts with that list.
From there, Pupius recommends documenting hiring principles the same way you’d document product principles. Ask hard questions:
Where can bias creep in?
Where do bad decisions usually happen?
Where are interviewers blind?
Where are you likely to miss someone great?
At Medium, one principle was “give candidates multiple ways to succeed.” Instead of forcing everyone through the same narrow evaluation, candidates could choose how to demonstrate their skills: whiteboarding, take-home projects, design exercises, tech talks, or short builds.
They went one step further and sent candidates the hiring rubric in advance. No surprises. No gotchas. People came in prepared instead of anxious. And the signal got cleaner fast.
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2. Expand your candidate pool by killing clichés and sourcing like a human
Aubrey Blanche, Atlassian’s Global Head of Diversity and Belonging, learned the hard way that fixing interviews doesn’t matter if the right candidates never apply. After redesigning Atlassian’s recruiting process, they opened applications and received zero female applicants for weeks.
So Blanche focused on the top of the funnel.
First, language. Generic equal-opportunity statements don’t work. Worse, lazy ones can hurt. What does work is clear, customized language that explicitly encourages underrepresented groups to apply. Tools like Textio back this up with data, but the principle is simple: say what you mean and mean it.
She also pushes founders to eliminate tired tech clichés. Words like “rockstar,” “ninja,” or overly corporate phrasing signal exclusion whether you intend it or not. Even small word choices matter. “Managing a team” skews male. “Developing a team” skews female. “Leading a team” stays neutral.
Second, sourcing. Blanche openly admits to “gentle stalking.” She follows hashtags associated with underrepresented groups and reaches out directly. She scans Amazon book reviews to find credible technologists. None of this is creepy. It’s intentional.
Third, background flexibility. Blanche argues that people don’t have career paths. They have growth paths. Skills show up in non-linear ways. Product management experience can come from coaching a team, organizing communities, or running complex projects outside a formal PM role. If you only hire people with linear resumes, you’re filtering out real ability.
3. Treat interviewing like a core team responsibility, not a side task
Marco Rogers has built engineering teams at Yammer, Clover Health, and Lever. His core belief is simple: interviewing is a team sport, and it should feel expensive.
At Rogers’ teams, experienced engineers conduct 12 to 16 interviews per month. That level of involvement often triggers objections. It’s too costly. Not everyone should interview. Leaders should handle it.
Rogers disagrees. Interviewing is one of the most critical business activities a startup has. If it feels costly, that’s because it is. And it should be.
If you don’t trust someone on your team to interview candidates, that’s not an interview problem. That’s a team problem.
Rogers trains interviewers deliberately. He pairs new interviewers with experienced ones, observes their techniques, and gives feedback. Interview debriefs are used to improve both candidate evaluation and interviewer skill. Over time, strong interviewers mentor weaker ones, raising the bar across the team.
The result is better signal, less bias, and a team that actually feels ownership over who joins.
4. Hire originals, not yes-men, and test for real nonconformity
Adam Grant’s research shows that startups don’t fail because they hire too many rebels. They fail because they hire too many conformists.
Founders need people who challenge assumptions, especially early on. Grant calls these people “originals.” They’re often mistaken for troublemakers. They may have been fired. They may have annoyed managers. That’s not a flaw. That’s a signal worth investigating.
Grant recommends looking beyond resumes and asking questions that surface curiosity and creative volume. Ask what candidates tried and abandoned. Originals generate lots of ideas. Most fail. That’s the point.
He also suggests turning candidates into culture detectives. Ask them to talk to team members before the interview and come back with observations. What’s working? What isn’t? The quality of their insights tells you far more than polished answers ever will.
5. Start reference calls early and bring the feedback back to the candidate
Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta doesn’t treat references as a final checkbox. He starts them early and runs them in parallel with interviews. He also doesn’t ask candidates for references. He tells them he’s going to talk to people who’ve worked with them.
Strong candidates welcome this. Weak ones hedge.
Zappacosta speaks to 10 to 20 people across a candidate’s career. Peers. Managers. Reports. He spends as much time backchanneling as interviewing. He’s looking for patterns, not anecdotes.
What makes his process unique is the final step. He shares the feedback with the candidate. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Then he asks one question: why do you think I heard that?
The answer tells him everything about self-awareness, growth, and accountability.
6. Close candidates by obsessing over details and going out of your way
Florence Thinh Chialtas, VP of People at NerdWallet, believes closing starts long before the offer. Candidates are people first. Treating them that way compounds.
NerdWallet personalizes outreach using small details. Favorite foods. Sports teams. Interests. It’s not manipulation. It’s attention.
They also remove friction wherever possible. Candidates get interview outlines in advance. Transportation tips. Benefits summaries designed to be shared with family. Every detail reduces stress.
And sometimes, going out of your way means literally going out of your way. Chialtas once met a candidate for lunch the same day she spoke to him. That effort mattered. He joined. He stayed.
Her rule is simple. Whenever you think your hiring process is “good enough,” ask how to make it easier, clearer, and more human. Your future team depends on it.
