The Recruiter Who Says Resumes Don't Matter & Beat the Giants with a 2-Person Firm | Bryan Lee

Unlocked Professional: AI and Future of Work: The unique thing about being a recruiter is that your work, it's actually so much around the hire. A lot of my job becomes like the consulting and maybe I even call myself like a recruiting therapist, you know, is to kind of hear your pain points. But then from that, what I can do is say, like, all right, like let's make a few of these tweaks. I want to hire some of the best engineering talent.

Can we find the right people? It was more about how do we build a more efficient interview process? Hiring is just a piece of this. Like now you actually have to make sure you build the systems in place to be able to support when you do find that.

right person. In five years I think we're gonna have more and more of these systems talking to each other without us in the loop. Even right now we have market mapping but I still have to manually piece each one of these sections together. The difference between a good recruiter and a great recruiter is gonna look a little bit different.

Whereas I think years ago it was just like your network and your experience and now I think we're seeing what great is actually a little bit more of like are you willing to build a brand? Are you willing to leverage technology to map markets? How do you find emails better? How do you you know how do you do some of these things at scale?

⁓ Most leaders think hiring is simple. Post a job, wait, pick the best person who shows up. But here's the truth. The best person almost never shows up.

They're always working somewhere. They're not looking and everyone else is already chasing them. That is a mess that our guest today decided to fix. He's been inside the rooms where the best hiring decisions get made.

He helped grow the Siri team at Apple. He helped scale the engineering org that kept Uber running for millions of people around the world. Then he stepped back. and asked a harder question.

What if you stopped fighting over the same famous names and started finding the next great ones before anyone else knew their name? That question turned into Subgraph, a recruiting system built for elite talent teams who are tired of guessing. His clients include some of the fastest moving companies in tech, and his recent hires include directors of engineering, heads of product, and deep technical talent across AI, infrastructure, and hardware. He doesn't just find people, he builds the systems that keeps finding them.

Brian, looking forward to this. Welcome to the show. I appreciate it, Jeff. I'm excited for this.

So Brian, you played college basketball as a team captain and later worked inside giants like Apple and Google. When you were growing up, which were you more focused on? Figuring out how machines worked or figuring out how to get a group of people to win together? Sure, it's an interesting journey, right?

When you're 16 to 18, everything is really just you. How do I get a scholarship? How do I become an All-American? It's a little bit like, how do I score points?

It's a little bit less about the team. When I got to college, we were three and 24 my first year and it became like, all right, I need help and I need to get better. I actually got lucky because we got a new coach and he came to me and said, Brian, like you played on some pretty strong AU teams. You seem to have a good network of basketball players.

Can we get any players? So I actually started to call some of my friends that were not getting a ton of playing time at the major D ones and see if they wanted to transfer to that school. And I think that's where I really started to see, okay, one is like some of my friends might be interested. playing with me, so there's something to people liking me.

But also we started to win. And then I just saw this thought of apes stronger together. So yes, basketball taught me how to recruit, how to think of moving better as a team. Now we're in a little bit of a different direction, right?

I think the throughput ends up becoming systems thinking, right? Then that's like a lot further along. As of to start, it was a little bit more like, how do I bring great people together? Cause I need to win.

As you get a bit older and maybe to my junior and senior year, I understand the systems that are needed, the plays that we need to run, the roles that people need to play. And I even had to sacrifice my scoring average to be a better defender and use more energy because we had better scores on the team. So it really like lets you combine both and then other opportunities like that kind of really started to help you refine that muscle and understanding that they feed each other.

like that was actually also one of your early experiences recruiting. Right? Absolutely, and I was a business major and I just got lucky that to me recruiting was the closest I could get to being a computer science major, which I wanted to do. And my coach was like, hey, apparently basketball doing book doing CS is really difficult.

So it was like my closest way to be around technology. So it just played out that way. Cool. full disclosure, we used to work together back in the day too.

So we both have that passion for recruiting and staffing and hiring and building teams. worked basically, I know that you were an awesome recruiter then and I'm really excited to hear about more about what you're doing now. This is, we just talked about earlier, 17, 20 years later, right? Down the road.

And so you're probably a super recruiter and or entrepreneur, business owner, all this fun stuff. So really excited to learn more about that. And that's cool to hear like how it all started too. Here's a fun one.

So you're known for not having a belly button, which is a great conversation starter. So how does leaning into what makes you genuinely different, whether in life or in sports, shape the way that you think about standing out in your work? Yeah, I'm also a 6'8 black mid in tech. You know what I mean?

I think there's no way that I fit in and I never have. My mom's 6'2, my brother's 7'. and I told him early on is that if you don't start to love being tall, you're gonna hate it. You're gonna spend energy every time somebody asks you, you play basketball?

You're gonna be upset. Like how do you now turn that into positive energy? So that's so much what that is, right? Is I think growing up, we spend so much time trying to understand our identity and how do we separate ourselves?

And then you go, but it's like you go through these waves of, right, who am I? My daughter's saying my ball right now, right? then she's gonna transition into how do I do what my friends do. But I think what I really got lucky is that I really had to lean into being different and that's actually the gold in this, right?

Whether it goes back to sports. You need a big man, you need a shooter, you need somebody that dribbles well, and all these skills come together well. And we spend so much time trying to say that other people's differences are a negative. I actually think everybody has their own superpowers.

So it really translates well into what I do is it's... I'm so excited to chat with people about what they're different about. Now you go down this rabbit hole. And then I love that people are experimenting with AI and recruiting.

I think we're different in the sense that we think that the two person company can compete with the Rivieres in quantum, right? We are working on same searches as they are. And a lot of it is, can we produce better with a lot smaller team? I love the differences.

I love the diversity of thought. And I think that like now AI is giving us a chance to. I don't have a hundred employees. can't take 5,000 calls a week.

We can't submit 700 people a week, but what we can do is build signal to map markets faster. How do we build systems to submit candidates faster? There's little places throughout the process that AI can help us be more efficient. How do we filter through mobile profiles?

I think the diversity of like thought and experience and Me growing up without a belly button, right? There's things that you just can't hide and you have to own. And I think the deeper that you can own these things that make us different and really accept that, like that's actually a superpower. I don't know if not having a belly button is a superpower, but.

It's a good conversation starter for sure. Yeah. With that, right? Like I've had this conversation a few times recently thinking of recruiting in the past and how way back in the day we started out, we were recruiting.

IT people and now it's very defined, right? There's very defined niches and specific types of skill sets. It's evolved over time. And so I know based upon, based on in recruiting in the past, it's, you're looking for a specialist now, right?

Somebody that knows XYZ technology inside and out. However, the world is changing. And so now having just a niche specific type of background, maybe isn't what you're going to need in order to build the systems of the future. having like more of a jack of all trades mentality, having a wide range of experience, be able to dabble in different niches is something that I think is more of a positive now, which is cool.

And that gives, again, like what you're saying, small businesses now have that opportunity to bring in people that maybe just know a specific domain, they know recruiting, but with AI tools and advancements, right, and technology, they can start. learning and running a business and learning how to improve upon the specific niche that they're in, or they want to start learning finance and going down that path, those opportunities are now available to them too. I think just the world of recruiting is changing along with everything.

But what I like to see is that there are big opportunities for guys like you and me to start and do whatever we want and go down our own path instead of just having to be very specific. having to be specifically aligned to what we did before. I agree and you can see it with hiring especially in early stage whereas most of the focus right now is hiring like These product engineers are forward deployed engineers where traditionally it was like, let's keep sales and engineering separate.

Maybe we have a backend engineer that scales systems. have a front end engineer to make sure the UX makes, looks great for our customers. Now they're just smashing that together. And that's one role you can see, ⁓ go to market hiring's booming.

Yes it is, but they're also trying to squeeze engineering headcount into that, right? What they're trying to do is you see the forward deployed engineer solutions architects coming back a bit more at early. stage, you see this full stack product engineer, they want people that can not just be deep back in engineers and build for customer and not build for customers. You've got to be willing to touch the full stack.

And I think that's why I've tried to hold on to my career. And it starts in basketball, right? Like I was a power forward, but I could dribble. I played defense.

I ran, right? I could guard full court. Like I wanted to be the person that when it was crunch time, there was never a reason for me to come off the court. And I think the same way about my career set, right?

Is that I, nothing wrong with going to big tech. I've done big tech, but I was a little bit fearful of, I go the route of becoming a director of engineer or recruiting at Apple? And then where do I go from there? There's only so many director of recruiting roles you can go after.

And it started to pull me away from the piece that I love, which is the... interacting with candidates, interacting with hiring managers and solving those challenge, challenges. Yeah. I think just staying close to the problems really helped my skillset.

So that's why I'm big on, even as I talk to people that are in recruiting now and it's me, yes, coordination's awesome. And yes, there was a great route to go into recruiting management, but to really bulletproof your skillset and not to have to worry about some of these layoffs. How do you like. make sure that you're refining the skills that make you extremely valuable to a team.

And I think we're starting to see that even more is that if you're not a builder, like you said, I think we're gonna see a lot more opportunities for people that wanna build as opposed to those that are like managing large organizations. Yeah, just one thing that stands out to me too, which I think is, which I've noticed as I've been on this little bit of a different career path and doing different stuff is that the one part probably that I missed the most And it's not for everybody, but I think most recruiters out there would appreciate it.

I just like talking to people. And if you enjoy talking to people, understanding where they're coming from, trying to help find solutions for them, then that space recruiting where you can actually do that part is the most exciting part. Just like any other job, there's a lot of tactical, boring stuff that you've got to do, right? There's a lot of volume, there's a lot of scheduling, a lot of that tactical.

And that was the stuff that just... drove me crazy. It's part of it. You got to do it, right?

You have to set those appointments in order to have those conversations. You have to make those calls. But I do think that part, obviously connecting with people, talking to people is also the thing that is going to differentiate us in the future as it relates to AI and the tools and the products. And I'd like to think that we have a leg up in that.

Hopefully, and to the audience, I'd just like to say those are the skills that I really like to promote. critical thinking, understanding, communication, connecting with people. I think those are huge differentiators that obviously you've learned throughout your career and look at you now, right? You're crushing it.

And a big part of that is again, just because of your ability to connect with people, right? Identifying strong talent. And I don't think the need for that is ever going away. I agree.

And I think what we get in trouble with as recruiters is trying to protect time, right? If you're an internal recruiter, whether it's you're trying to protect your hiring manager's time or you're trying to protect your time. But what happens is that in-house recruitable talk to three candidates a day that they think are absolutely perfect and they won't talk to anybody else. And I think what we're now seeing is that resumes don't matter.

I honestly take resumes with a grain of salt. I haven't updated my resume in 10 years. I just don't need to. If you can't get enough signal from what I'm building in public, it's hard.

How do you make that decision? And I understand I may turn off some companies that are looking for an IC recruiter, but I think that one is that you're starting to see whether it's companies start to search Git hubs and understand like what's something somebody actually built. I think that's going to become the major differentiator is like, what did you build? And like, how do you show that as opposed to a traditional resume?

And then in terms of like, just talking to people, that's what Subgraph is all about, right? Is I had this dream of, could I be just like sitting in my backyard with headphones on, just talking to candidates and submitting them without needing to sit at my computer all day? And that's what we're trying to get to is like, how do we get people talking to people more? that...

So many recruiters want to have a resume be the barrier of entry. And it's just get on the phone with good people. And what we've also found though, is that whether it gets us intros and referrals to other businesses or candidates, there's people that if I was an internal recruiter, I traditionally might not have spoken to, but now I think it's a little bit more. I just want to talk to smart people and people that are passionate.

And that's what gets me to great hires. And it's not so much, do I only talk to... back-end engineers, like I'm going to talk to back-end engineers, DevOps engineers, product managers, because they all work together and make sure that they know, this is the cool stuff we're working on as opposed to, I'm only going to reach out to this perfect back-end security engineer. And they don't know five of themselves.

There's usually only one of those profiles at a company. I think that's the goal is like what you touched on is critical thinking, communications. How do we spend more time with people? And that's the whole goal of Subgraph is to get people away from the thought of, me just only interact with perfect profile.

tell us a little bit more about Subgraph in general and the work that you do on a day to day. What's your day to day like? Sure. I talk to 10 to 15 candidates a day.

It's me and my CTO. He builds technology that's essentially imagine that if you had an engineer watching what you were doing every day and saying, Brian, that's not efficient. maybe we can improve that. So it started with sourcing.

We really got deep into market mapping. How do we digest a skill set and then understand who's available in that market and what's the most efficient way to interact with those candidates at scale? So we built technology that helps us do that faster than anything I've seen. But we still operate as a search firm, right?

I meet customers that need to hire. I talk to candidates. First, I go through my network. Yes, we built this system to help me source.

But honestly, the first thing I do, I just got a VP of engineering search. And like the first thing I'm going to do is go through my first connections. It might be good for the job and chat with them. But then the nice thing is once I do that, I can also have this system running in the background that's doing a bit of the legwork for me as well.

And then. So we've started with like, can we build a more efficient sourcing system? And we think we're crushing it down that direction. We also are looking at other opportunities of improvement.

What's the most efficient way to submit candidates? What's the most efficient way to go from a candidate screen to now cleaning up those nodes? So some of it is even just, we use granola. It's not like we didn't need to build our own AI note taker.

It's just how do we use the most efficient technology and There's still a lot of companies that can't use an AI note taker. So for us, it's less about are we building and rewriting recruiting. It's a little bit more. We also support a hedge fund called Freestone Grove Partners.

Their mentality is really how do we build technology in for the, and then to the core of what we're doing and then how do we make it our differentiator? So the difference I think between Subgraph is that it's me and my CTO and we build from tech, we use technology as a base of what we're doing as opposed to. building this big recruiting organization, then now saying, how do we inject AI and how do we build efficiencies in that? So for us, it really comes down to what moves the needle in making efficient hires and how do get better at that?

So just for the audience, you're essentially partnering with companies that have hiring needs. A lot of them are tech companies or AI or innovation types of companies. And so what that conversation might look like is, hey, Brian, we're building out. XYZ technology, or we have this type of team, or we have this specific role, and we're looking for you to help us fill this position, help us find these types of folks.

And then, as a part of that, your job, right, and a big part of it that I can tap into for my days is sometimes they're gonna say, hey, this is what I'm looking for. you're like, actually, you're looking for this, right? Or actually, let me give you, so you become more of an advisor, which I think is where the true value is. Sometimes people only know about that recruiting part, which is, ⁓ a recruiter calls me on the phone and talks to me and says, do I want the job?

Maybe they respond or don't respond after that call. There's some potential inefficiencies there, but a good recruiter or recruiting company, what they're really doing is they're helping partner with those businesses to help them roadmap and design what it is that they need and to help them not only identify that talent, correct them, or maybe even coach them sometimes to say, Hey, I know you're looking for something that has these three skills, but they don't actually in nature live together.

So let's focus, let's narrow it down. Would you say that's a big part of your job is doing that advisement? And then also just tell us a little bit more about some of those companies and the skills that you're seeing a lot of these days. Sure.

So you're spot on. I have two examples. The first is I have a customer that's their engineering lead is a data scientist, entitled. His current title is data science or head of data science.

But when you look at his LinkedIn profile, he's a full stack engineer. He's done, he's been on heavy data engineering organizations. So what they did is when they created a job posting, they posted it as a data engineer and a data engineer is not a full stack engineer, right? But even him as he is held the titles and held the roles and they have a senior recruiter that has been working on technical roles.

They posted the job and then sold us the job as it was a data engineer. And then I like looked at the job description. They started to talk about the interview process. Hey, we're going to have everybody's failing the lead code assessment.

They're failing lead code medium problems. So I think that through and I'm like, all right. One is data engineers aren't often going to pass lead code assessments. They don't often have CS undergrads.

It's a little bit of a different path. Like what you're truly looking for is a full stack back-end leaning software engineer that has deep data engineering experience or worked with data teams, maybe has built data infrastructure and ML pipelines. So they really just didn't quite understand even the response they're getting based on the title because software engineers don't want to take a data engineering job description. So that was a mismatch.

And there's another one I think we were just speaking about. We have a customer that's looking at hiring their first recruiting or first talent leader, right? And they're like, is this the head of people? Is this a technical recruiter?

Like now we're creeping up on a hundred employees. What's the best decision to make? So a lot of my job ends up becoming like now sharing my experience. And it was really helpful being at Sequoia Capital and just getting reps with early stage companies, being able to advise founders and understand.

think. One of my biggest disconnects when I got to Sequoia is I thought that every founder knew everything already. It's so great. You're a CTO.

You came from a great VC back startup before this. You're coming from Uber, right? You've hired before. And then you start to go along the process and you're like, ⁓ they don't have an interview process set up.

They don't know why they're doing these steps. They never had the source. So now I'm actually filling in a lot of those gaps. And I think that's what I saw as initial opportunity.

Now the way we get paid is hired. right? Because we're mostly doing much of recruiting is success based. So people very much judge us on do we make a hire or not?

But I think the unique thing about being a recruiter is that your work, it's actually so much around the hire, right? Is the interview process in place? So the compensation band's competitive. What does the market look like, right?

Should we be hiring in Boulder? Should we make this a remote role? I have a customer that's in New York that's trying to decide if they should open up roles in San Francisco and I'm I don't know, San Francisco is really hard to hire right now. So a lot of my job becomes like the consulting and maybe I even call myself like a recruiting therapist is to cure your pain points.

But then from that, what I can do is say like, all right, like let's make a few of these tweaks, right? Whether one of the biggest ones I think I did as I was at the Aon group, it's machine learning hedge fund. And when I joined, were hiring, was like, we were still in academia, right? A lot of the founders are coming from academia.

But when we want to hire some of the best engineering talent, we had to speed up our process. So how do we, it was less about, we find the right people? It was more about how do we build a more efficient interview process? So yeah, your spot on is hiring is just a piece of this.

Like now you actually have to make sure you build the systems in place to be able to support when you do find that right person. I don't know if you've ever zoom out from what you just said. If you rewind the tape on what you talked about, Brian, I'm a fan because I can really appreciate what's going on there behind the scenes. And I think oftentimes like recruiting, just people think of it as something that's very tactical.

But what you've explained there is pretty much what we just started out the show with. Think about all the critical thinking that's going into that. You're talking about market analytics, where these people live, what kind of skillsets are available, all that knowledge that you have, critical thinking, analytics. hiring practices, then you have to be a shoulder to cry on coaching, right?

You have to be able to discuss compensation with them and align on whether or not what they're offering is a realistic package and it's competitive against what other people in the market are. So all that stuff, if you will, that you do on a day-to-day basis is, it's just of extreme value. And as you were talking about, was like appreciating all of that goes into it. And you may not appreciate it, right?

You just... You're just flowing like this is your normal day to day. This is the stuff that you do, but it's really, there's a lot to it. And so having that kind of partnership and having a strong recruiter, I would say is definitely a recruiting partner, whether it's an internal recruiter or external partners, having somebody that can have that strength to advise on what the market looks like, push back oftentimes, right?

the, and call the customer out and tell them maybe they're wrong. Those are all critical things. I have just one last thing that I like to talk about when it comes down to interviews is in particular with interviews, if you're a candidate, you're sitting in the interview seat, you're thinking, hey, this person on the other side who's interviewing me knows what they're doing. They have knowledge, they have experience, they know this is their show, they're running it.

But more times than not, and I talk about this often, it's like a lot of times... people who are doing the hiring were maybe just an individual contributor themselves just doing the job, did the job great and have now maybe moved into a management position or maybe they were a great engineer. But none of that equals you're Brian, right? And can do the type of analysis and understanding and navigate the market and the types of conversations that you would really need to have a productive interview.

And from a candidate side, I just say, my advice always is pretend like that person on the other side. doesn't know anything, you be as prepared as possible going into it. Know all that you can about the company, know all that you can about the job description and come to them, come to the table with solutions for them. That way you show up at somebody completely different because you can't rely on them being the best at that interview.

I'm right there with you is I think that a lot of people see an opportunity and I start my conversations with every candidate. Just tell me about yourself or tell me about some work you're proud of. And maybe I should frame it differently, but I think some people miss the opportunity to say, this is why I'm the best person to solve your problem. And this is how I will.

Like a lot of times people are like, here's my experience and this is what I've done in the past. And Hey, that's great. But I think the people that really do crush it come in. I hired for a company, my buddy, JC is the head of talent for a startup called feature, features and labels in San Francisco.

And they wanted to help hire the product engineer. And what they do is build like a playground for models. specifically for generative AI. So as you're playing around with the different AI models, right, they can create videos and edit, edit videos.

But what's really cool is the person that we found the job was already doing something similar. He had already built like the coolest, like they have their own website for how they host playgrounds. He had already created his own. And like, when I got on the phone with him, he's like, Hey, I've already built something similar like this.

I'm so passionate about this space that I'm already solving challenge. And that's how I think you really stand out. used to work at Boosted Boards, it's an electric skateboard company. And I met an intern that was building an electric surfboard.

I was like, yeah, you're hired. You're already so passionate about doing work in this space. And I think that's why people, that's the toughest thing in this market is that talent is so strong right now. You will see like, all right, somebody posted a job.

I applied in five minutes. Why didn't I get that job? And it's because it's not that there's, I'm not saying somebody smarter than you, but there's so many that passion bled out more than yours did, right? Like they've already been building in this space without getting paid for it.

And I know that can be a privilege, but this is a competition, right? Like I can't just apply to Kevin Durant's job and get it. That's the high. And I think some people don't realize how competitive the spaces are.

Like I saw one of our clients post that it was like, They've gotten something like 30,000 applicants in the last three months and it's like a 0.001 acceptance from that applicant pool. It shows you how difficult the market is, but it's also just very difficult for these top tier roles. I don't know.

I don't know the rest of the industry. No, and you're servicing one niche in general. And obviously there's a lot of different spaces out there, but within, I think it's still the fact remains true. What you were talking about earlier, which I like to call proof of skill.

I think this is the way of the future. So whether you're showcasing yourself on social media, you've got GitHub projects, you have to do something and you will likely need to do something more than just put a resume together to really differentiate yourself from the pack. And I think it's a good takeaway too for the audience to understand that recruiters are, they're doing more most of the time, at least the good ones are. They're doing more most of the time than just looking at your resume and seeing if keywords match up.

They are searching out your backgrounds and experience. They are looking into details of what kind of projects you've worked on. They are looking at work consistency. They're getting referrals or references oftentimes for your experience.

If you want to separate yourself from the pack, those are things that you really should keep in mind. I always say, try to perform the best that you can in the job that you're in. Those people that you work around you will... likely talk to you in the future, just like you and me right now.

And if there's nothing better than having somebody vouch for you and say, hey, Brian's great, man, I know you're a great recruiter and that was 20 years ago. And my expectation is that you're even better now. Again, those things just happen to do with that proof of skill. Like you proved what you've done.

You proved it at those different organizations. And so, yeah, and hear a lot about new, or let's see, recent grads and how tough it is on them right now to get jobs, even in what you guys are doing. But I would say, and again, I'm just guessing on this. I haven't hired in the space that you're in recently, but my thought is if you had somebody that had what you mentioned before, you had the bare bones, maybe you had the experience, you're able to speak to the technology, but you had the passion, right?

You were able to showcase projects that you worked on. You really came into that interview or you had the conversation with the recruiter and you told them and you wowed them that I'm somebody that really cares. And this is well aligned to me. At least that's going to give you a high level of consideration.

Where are you going to be able to apply for a senior level engineer role? Probably not, but you might be somebody that they could even potentially create a role for sometimes if you are somebody that again has proved that you can do. what you say you can and your mentality is in the right place. I'm right there with you is that I think the passion needs to show, right?

Is that like, I wanted to play basketball in college and I've coached basketball players and like I've seen that if you're only playing basketball when you come into the gym with me, you don't want to be a pro, right? And I think that's what people misunderstand is that working for a top venture backed company as a engineer as a product manager, you're playing at the top tier of this, right? So it is the most competitive spaces. And if you're not working on your game on the side, if you're a front-end engineer and your portfolio doesn't look great, right?

That's a reflection. So I think those things really need to stand out. And for new grads, I think it's the same thing, right? I've been selling shoes and CDs on eBay since I was in eighth grade.

The hustle has been there. But so even when I interviewed at my first job, wasn't like, they're like, hey, Brian, can you sell? Like what? I've been selling since I was in seventh grade.

Like I had been finding solutions. So I think what happens is that people just are used to like, I think it still comes down to passion. You really do have to show that you're going above and beyond outside of just the job. I think what's tough is that some people are just looking for a job and I think everybody should be able to pay their bills.

It's just. probably forward to just find a job at a tech startup. Like you really do have to have that passion. I think that's one of the biggest differentiators.

Like maybe you can go to Capital One and a big organization and just do your job and that's what you're most passionate about, but you're not going to join a sports tech startup if you're not playing sports. Which segues well into the next question I had. You have a concept called building through the draft. And that's finding young, talented people early and growing them into experts on your team, instead of spending a fortune trying to hire already famous stars away from somebody else.

For someone who's just starting out, how does this idea change their chances of getting a real shot? Sure. I think there's a lot of companies that want the best talent and just see how expensive it is as candidates get more senior. But also think of if you're from San Francisco, you have two kids, right?

Like you eventually move out to the South Bay or Lodi, right? You start to move out of core San Francisco area. To find people that are available to work from 9 a.m.

to 9 p.m. You probably can't have three kids. You probably can't commute from 45 minutes out.

You're probably 22 to 30, which makes sense. So how do you maximize that? But what I also saw, I used to work at the Volian group. And in the pandemic, A shrunk a bit, right?

A lot of the hedge funds weren't sure what to make of their next move, right? There wasn't just a ton of investment dollars. A lot of people pulled back their cash. But what I saw is that the junior engineers at Bolian that I hired as new grads, our hiring or engineering leaders were constantly like, man, but this new grads crushing it.

Yes, we lost a couple of senior engineers that moved to Montana. But this new grad's crushing it. That's why I really started to bake in. Okay, well, yes, your senior engineers need to bring like stability and like a go-to voice, but if you can make sure that you're growing your junior talent, I think that's absolutely money.

I also think that you can find high slope candidates for just a lower cost point. I will say is that I actually think that gap is starting to shrink a bit, right? Is that senior engineers can do even more. So I think it's, still goes back to you've got to be extremely passionate in this space, whether you're junior, whether you're a senior, I think it's a, you're competing for the best opportunities.

But I think that if you're hiring really based on like pedigree and you want somebody that's been at a VC backed startup, you want somebody from a great school, that profile is getting harder to grab, especially in San Francisco. And I could be wrong, but I think I saw something that they're expecting a hundred times more. AI startups and SaaS startups in San Francisco. But we're not getting a hundred times more graduates.

So what becomes, what is that? Now we're just all fighting over talent. So that's why I actually really look at it as, yes, I still love that high slope talent. I also love, can I find profiles that aren't just like perfect on paper?

Like a lot of people want to steer away from people that have jumped around, right? But if somebody's two years out of college and they've had two... 12 month jobs, yes, they've jumped around, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that they could still be a superstar. So let's chat with them.

So it really still goes back to, can I find something where people do peak at and is there a chance of greatness? Am I willing to talk to the right people? And we take a lot of chances and chat with new grads and recent grads and undergrads. I think there's a lot of gold in there, but I think there's gold in a lot of different spaces.

Yeah. And job hoppers in particular is like the hiring 101. That's the only question on the top of their mind. And when they're looking at the resume, that's the number one question is, why did this person move?

Why were they not there for more than a year or two years, et cetera? So I would just say as a tip to the audience is that be audible ready with that. Have an explanation. There's always good valid explanations.

I would never wanna say anything negative about my previous employer, but have your, it all goes into preparation. Have your... game straight and know exactly what you're going to say. think on the other side, think hiring managers should be going understanding of, like I actually want to hear your story.

Not with the thought of like, all right, I'm going to start this as a negative. And if they give me a story, great. But my dad worked for San Francisco Unified School District for 40 years. My mom worked for San Francisco General for 36 years.

And what they told me is to job hop, be creative with a job. And I worked at Tech Systems with you. I crushed it, right? I saw that I was a top performer.

I jumped to Google. I worked at Google for a year. My buddy called me and said, hey, you can build out the Apple series organization we just acquired. I jumped.

I did that for three years. Great. I saw an opportunity. Uber is the fastest growing rocket ever.

I joined for a year and I'm like, actually, this might not be the perfect environment for me. I actually want to be a little bit earlier stage. I left after a year. So I think there's reasoning behind why people make their decisions.

I also think Stability can be a bit of a privilege, right? Like you have the ability to wait out until you make a bit more money, right? Like, I mean, everybody has different situations, but there was no backup plan here. There's no savings from parents.

There's no, my success or my ability to pay my rent is based on how much income I can generate. if I'm, some of my moves are motivated by. cost of living and I need to pay rent. So there's so many factors that can go into that.

And unfortunately, I think that people often make decisions based off of like pattern matching. Like what was my journey to success? And I'm looking for people that had that same journey to success. I think what's actually the gold in my role is like understanding.

who's just looking to hire great people and who's waiting along until they find somebody that's their twin. And I think if you're waiting along to find somebody that's just that perfect match, you probably need to hire from your network. You need to hire from a venture capital firm because you're not actively looking to hire. But if you're actively looking to hire and you're like, hey, Brian, like who are the best available talent or can we potentially pull somebody from a different opportunity and make it a better opportunity for them?

I think there's a lot of opportunity there. One thing that stands out to me too, and maybe some employers are not gonna like this, I know you work with a range, but one thing in particular that bothers me is multi-stage interviews. You should be able to make a decision within a reasonable amount of interviews, but when I see people doing, would say, more than two or three rounds, probably two rounds is enough. If you have to go past that point, I really wonder...

you know, again, are you in this camp of like people that are really looking for talent in the right way, or are you looking for everything under the sun? And then the other thing I think that's important to consider is that when you go through those multiple round interviews, those people are interviewing other places. So the chances of you losing those great candidates just because of a scheduling conflict, because the director of engineering wasn't available and went on vacation for two weeks, seems like a lame way to go about business, but I'm biased.

So. I'm just curious, are you still seeing a lot of multi-round interviews these days or are you seeing employers that are more flexible? like we see somebody good, we're ready to pull the trigger. What does the market look like right now?

Sure. Honestly, I think you're spot on. The companies that know what they're looking for and that are ready, like we can find a candidate within a few days and have them go through a process in a week and get an offer out, right? When, when companies are dialed in and know what they want, but there's also another set of companies that I think still are trying to understand how to find that signal.

Right? So like, maybe they're not getting the signal that, Hey, they do a link code assessment. Okay. That gives a signal somebody can come on site, but then they still reject 20 % of her 80 % of the candidates that come on site.

So do they really get the signal they need out of it? I think that's actually more of the struggle is that them just not really understanding what they need and just looking. I think some companies are just looking at let's just hire the best talent possible and just let them figure out the problem because I think there's two different realms of hiring. But yeah, I think it's really just differentiated based on what's most important for that customer.

What I think I'm seeing right now is a lot of like work trials and take homes. Hey, let me give you a true problem and see you solve it or work with you to solve it. I think that's the people I'm seeing that are getting the best signal and moving the fastest. Hey, let's have an intro call with one of the founders or an engineering lead.

And then let's throw you into the fire to solve a problem that we think is relevant. And then let's bring you on site to make sure that we communicate well, we can solve a few more problems together. And then like, we should be able to make an offer in the next day or two. So I think it's really moving swiftly and knowing what you want.

But I think you also just like being on my side and interacting with a lot of founders, you really do find that people just aren't, they don't get the reps in hiring like we do. So how do we make sure that they have the support they need? So that's why when I first started with Narwhal, my initial search firm, a lot of the work was actually doing a lot of what I was doing at Sequoia was a lot of coaching. And so I actually feel like I spent more time coaching founders.

And what's interesting is when you run contingent search, you only get paid for the hire. So a lot of people will say, okay, you do contingent search, you just want to spray and pray. And it's no, I only get paid for the hire, but you're still getting the rest of the support. It's a packaged solution, good or bad, you have to do the full life cycle there in order for it to work in the end and for the customer to be happy.

What are you seeing technology-wise in terms of what types of experiences, whether it's with AI or just other types of tech within the roles that you're specifically focused on, what do you see as like trends? It could be tech or interpersonal skills. What would you say are like the top three to five things that you're seeing for the audience that they could dial in on or they should get experienced with if they're looking for work in this space? I think it's right back to what you touched on, right?

Just the tech piece is going to still going to be there, but like it's the curiosity and it's the communication skills and can you solve problems? So like a lot of like I a customer that was basically like rated candidates, communication skills between out of 10 and then send that over to us. And they basically rejected any candidate that wasn't an eight or above. not even super concerned with the resume.

So they're like, if this person's not a great communicator to you, like we can't do anything. So that's one. I also touched on curiosity. I don't think that you necessarily need to be like a Claude wizard or like building your whole business.

Everything you do lives in copilot, but I think the more that you're willing to explore new technologies, especially with something like AI getting as much of this buzz, I find it a bit hard to. I've been, especially because I'm supporting like earlier stage companies, but if I talk to an engineer, they're not touching AI at all. Like maybe I've played with chat GPT. It's pretty hard for them to probably get a founding engineering role or an engineering role at an early stage company.

So you really do have to have the curiosity. I'm throwing every other question that I don't have to bug somebody into chat, BT and Claude, and I'm hopping on YouTube. I'm sitting down with my engineer. Just wanting to learn more and understand what we can build.

And I think that if you're not really going into this with the mindset of like, how can I use my experience to be as innovative as possible? I think that's where a lot of the foam was coming from. A lot of people were like, Hey, we're going to get left behind. But I think it's really just like, why not be as efficient as possible?

And I think that's the question if you're not using latest technologies, like why are you fighting being efficient? But there's also the other side though, is like sometimes a simple tool gets the job done. Like where we're building all this market mapping technology, I still start with my first connections on LinkedIn every time I start to search though. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's important. Just an important takeaway, high level there. AI tools are here.

They're here to stay. If you're out there and you're an engineer or I would almost say any skill set is not going to be untouched with AI in the near future. So if you're not willing to adopt it and or understand it or learn it, then sadly you're probably going to be out of a job, right? Depending upon there are certain jobs that may not be impacted by that, but most professional jobs will be.

So might as well pick it up, learn a tool and Don't be hesitant about getting that experience. And you can see it with coordination, right? Ashby can do much of the coordination right now and there are tools that can help with rescheduling. And that's why I've always tried to get like any coordinators that I'm close with.

I'm like, let's learn, teach you how to source. Let's teach you how to close because like I need you to learn the rest of the skillset because last thing I want is for you to be like, I'm searching for work and I can't find anything because you refuse to pick up new skills. What do you think the future of work is going to look like in the next three, five, or even 10 years out? Yeah, I think in three years, and even just a, I don't necessarily think that AI is going to replace us all.

I think what you're seeing, those of us that are willing to dive deeper and flex on those skillsets and get better and explore these tools, I think we're just going to be better armed. And I do think like the difference between a good recruiter and a great recruiter is going to look a little bit different. Whereas I think years ago it was just like your network and your experience. And now I think we're seeing what create is actually a little bit more of, you willing to build a brand?

Are you willing to leverage technology to map markets? Right. How do you find emails better? How do you, how do you do some of these things that scale in five years?

I think we're going to have more and more of these systems talking to each other without us in the loop, right? Like even right now, like with our sub graph system, we have market mapping. But I still have to manually piece each one of these sections together somewhat. Like I still talk to a candidate, we're working on automating submissions, right?

But I actually think eventually we're going to have a lot of these systems talking to each other. We have a customer that's really thinking through, right? Like API is going to drive a lot of this and just technology to technology interactions. And I think we're even seeing that with what a senior staff engineer right now is that they can run a bunch of systems concurrently.

and start building out, have seven systems building out code, but they still have to manage and support them. So I think we're there. And then in 10 years, yeah, that's a big- I like to ask this because it's fun. I think in 10 years, I think we're going to have more entrepreneurship.

We're going to have smaller businesses. We're going to have more businesses under 10 people as billion dollar companies. I also still- A big shift. Yeah, it's going to be a shift.

And then I think we're also going to still be top heavy, right? Like you can see it with open AI and firing other AI companies, right? I the open AIs and the anthropics, whoever starts to really dominate those races, whether it's Nvidia, Apple, those are just going to get bigger. And I think you're going to see some of the other companies try and get more agile.

I don't know if you want to live in this middle space of not dominant and then not like agile. Then I think that's what we saw with some of the block layoffs, right? It was like, they're trying to get more agile. They don't want to move quite towards that.

Just completely living in what their old space was. So yeah, I actually think that we're going to move more towards small businesses being able to, that's our goal is now is to compete with the bigger players because like technology starts. bridge the gap, right? I don't have to build out a huge DevOps organization or a data science team, right?

The same way, whereas I can still compete based on maybe plugging into different API. I like it, Brian. Yeah, I like your vision. I think it aligns well just to what's trending.

Obviously anything can happen tomorrow, but yeah, based upon the signals that I'm receiving, the conversations I'm having, that sounds pretty well aligned. So where can people go to follow you and find out more about what you're building? I think the easiest thing is on LinkedIn. I try and make sure people know that you can message me.

not standoffish. I think I'm one of the nicer people. I know you can always message me. If you come on my page, send me a message.

Subgraph.Tech is our website. You can check out Subgraph. It is invite only and we mostly build technology just for ourselves, but I'm happy to talk through.

with anybody that's interested in building and they're recruiting tech space, some of the decisions we're making and where we're heading. And yeah, I think LinkedIn is probably the easiest way just to message me. Sounds good. Everything that we talked about today is going to be in the show notes.

And Brian, thanks again for helping the audience stay on lock. Don't be a stranger. Awesome. This is, I so appreciate you, Jeff.

This was awesome. Thanks for giving us a platform to share what our experiences are. Obviously, I think the most of you and was super excited that you were down for this conversation. So thank you for setting this up.