The playbook for building high talent density teams | Adam Ward, Head of Talent at Cursor

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 am going to reach out to a hundred people. 20% of those are all five. By definition, that is not the top 20%. That is just the twenty people who you caught on a bad day. The way we all recruit is we kinda weed people out at each stage and we hire the remainder. In your mind, like hey, there are fifty people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people. And you relentlessly pursue 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've worked 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 ninety to hundred ten percent capacity and are terrible outside of that. If they only have half a rec load, they kinda like are useless. But they're kinda great at this like edge of adrenaline rush. Busy? You wanna 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.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.