Hey everyone, Neil here. You're reading High-Signal Hiring. Hiring systems from 20+ years of global recruitment experience and 500+ technical hires. Zero noise and instantly actionable.
Last issue, we covered why your ideal candidate profile is probably wrong and how fixing it fixes your process.
I was going to cover evaluation next, but several of you reached out asking about sourcing, specifically where to actually find engineers who want to join early stage. So….sourcing it is.
You'll learn why your current channels work against you, how I placed 250+ engineers without a single job advert, and the sourcing approach you can start using today.
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| Job boards are a waste of time
If you've posted a role recently, you already know. Hundreds of applications land within days. Almost all AI-generated, optimised to pass your filters, and completely useless.
Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait calls this the "AI Doom Loop." Candidates use AI to mass-apply to hundreds of jobs. Employers use AI to filter them back out. Both sides escalate and quality collapses. Candidates are even hiding prompt injections in their CVs to bypass screening tools.
As an early-stage founder, you don't have a talent team to wade through this. And even when a real candidate does apply, your listing is sitting alongside Google, Stripe, and every well-funded Series B. Your logo is unknown. Your description sounds like every other "fast-paced, collaborative environment" out there.
Traditional job boards are becoming less relevant by the day and, in my opinion, a complete waste of time for early-stage founders. (The one exception being YC's job board, but I'd argue that doesn't fall under the "traditional" banner. It's very good.)
| How I did it
Since starting Functionn, in 2016, I've placed over 250 engineers. Not one came from a paid job advertisement. Every hire came from direct headhunting, mapping companies with similar cultures and stacks, researching their engineering teams, and reaching out knowing exactly why each person was a fit. When someone receives a message that references their actual work, the conversation starts completely differently.
You can't do this at the scale I do. But you can absolutely run a stripped-down version that's far more effective than posting and waiting.
| How to do this yourself
Here's a lightweight version of the headhunting approach that any founder can run in a week.
1️⃣ Map 10 target companies. Think about where your ideal engineer is working right now. Similar stage, similar stack, similar problem space. These companies are where your future hire currently sits. Start with companies you admire, competitors you respect, or startups building adjacent products.
2️⃣ Find specific people. Look at their engineering teams on LinkedIn and GitHub. Check their commits, blog posts, side projects. You don't need to deep-dive on everyone. Five minutes per person is enough (you’ll get quicker). You're looking for one specific thing you can reference in your outreach. Build a shortlist of 20-30 people.
3️⃣ Get warm intros or reach out directly. For each person, check if anyone in your network can make an introduction. If there's no warm path, go cold. A short, well-crafted, founder-driven message that references someone's actual work can generate a 25-40% response rate (this is a conservative estimate). Keep it brief. Use the 300-character outreach framework from Issue 1 to force clarity. (The idea: compress your opening message into 300 characters. If you can't, the role isn't clear enough.)
4️⃣ Run a parallel referral sweep. Ask every founder, investor, and advisor you know one specific question: "Who's the best engineer you've worked with in the last two years who'd thrive in ambiguity and has shipped something from scratch?" That question is ten times more useful than "do you know anyone?"
5️⃣ Post on your personal feeds. Not a job listing. A personal post from you as a founder explaining what you're building, why this hire matters, and what kind of person you're looking for. The posts that generate real inbound are specific and honest about the stage you're at. "We're pre-PMF, it's three of us, here's the problem we're solving, and here's why this engineer matters right now" beats a polished job ad every time. I've watched this work across multiple recent YC batches and the inbound these posts generate is significant. (Plenty more are DMing directly.) This is amplification, not your primary channel. Do the direct work first. Then let your feed do the follow-up.
| Your week
Monday: Map your 10 target companies. Check their engineering teams.
Tuesday-Wednesday: Build your shortlist. Five minutes per person. One reference point each.
Thursday: Send your referral question to 20 people. Start warm outreach to your top candidates.
Friday: Post about the role on your personal feeds. Start cold outreach to anyone without a warm path.
If you run this properly, expect real conversations within days. A completely different timeline to posting a role and waiting a month for a pipeline that may never arrive.
Your best hire is either two introductions away from someone you already know, or one message away from someone whose GitHub you should be reading right now.
Cheers
Neil