You're Fishing in the Wrong Pond

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, I shared the sourcing playbook I've used to place 250+ engineers without a single job advert. Direct headhunting, target company mapping, compelling outreach.

But here's what I didn't cover. How do you know which companies to target in the first place?

Most founders don't think about this nearly enough. They source based on gut feel, target companies they admire, or don't target at all, they just post a role and see who shows up. The result is the same. Months of outreach to people who were never going to say yes.

You'll learn why your startup's position in the market determines who you can attract, the seven variables that shape who you can realistically hire, and a simple test I use to build sourcing lists that generate replies.

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Most founders treat hiring like they're the only employer in the room. They assume great engineers will be excited by their mission, their equity, their "ground floor opportunity."

Some will. Most won't. And the reason isn't your outreach message.

It's that you're targeting people who have zero rational incentive to join you. That senior engineer at a well-funded Series B with strong culture, good comp, and interesting problems? They're not leaving for your seed-stage startup with no brand and half the salary. Not because your company is bad, but because the move doesn't make sense for them. They'd be taking a pay cut, a stability cut, and a career risk all at once. Why would they?

Before you source a single candidate, you need to honestly assess where your startup sits in the market. That assessment determines everything that follows.

Every startup has a pull in the talent market. Some are magnets. Most aren't. That's fine. You don't need to be a magnet, you just need to know where your pull is strongest. Here's what determines that.

1️⃣ Location: If you're hiring onsite (and most early-stage startups are reverting to this), geography becomes a wall. Based in SF? You have access to the best engineering talent in the world. Based somewhere remote and expecting relocation? That shrinks your pool dramatically before any other variable kicks in.

2️⃣ Compensation: A seed-stage startup is not going to compete with Big Tech on cash. That's just maths. Some people have earned enough to take a pay cut for the right opportunity, and they do exist, but they can't be where you invest your sourcing energy. They're the exception, not the strategy.

3️⃣ Mission: If you're solving a problem in a dull space, you're competing differently than someone building hotels on the moon. Forget about competing on inspiration. Would an engineer at a company that's genuinely changing how the world works leave for your product? Be honest with yourself here.

4️⃣ Founder profile: Experience level, previous successes, exits, where you've worked before. A second-time founder with a successful exit gives candidates confidence the bet might pay off. A first-time founder with no track record needs to win on other variables. That's not a judgment, it's just how candidates calculate risk.

5️⃣ Team pedigree: If someone left Google to join your 8-person startup, that's an incredibly high-signal sign to the next candidate. It tells them someone smart already vetted this opportunity and decided it was worth the leap. This compounds. Each strong hire makes the next one easier. Each weak hire does the opposite.

6️⃣ Tech stack and engineering culture: This one's become a dealbreaker. If your startup is not all-in on using AI to optimise how you build, that's a red flag for strong engineers. Outdated tooling or a conservative engineering culture will cause top talent to self-select out before you even get a conversation started. They'll check your GitHub, your blog, your job posting. If it looks like 2019, they're gone.

7️⃣ Funding: Stage, amount, and who invested. A candidate will Google you. "Raised $20M Series A led by Sequoia" does independent work that your comp package and mission statement can't do alone. It's a credibility shortcut, especially for candidates who use funding as a proxy for whether this thing has legs. (And that's most of them.)

You won't score well on all seven. Nobody does. What matters is knowing which ones are working for you and which ones are working against you.

Once you've assessed yourself across all seven variables, the matching logic comes down to one question. I call it “The Pull Test”. For every company you're thinking of targeting, ask:

"Why would they leave what they have to come here?"

If you can't answer that clearly, stop wasting time on that pond. If an engineer at that company sees your startup as a step backwards, sideways, or just not compelling enough to justify the risk, they're not going to respond to your outreach. Doesn't matter how good your message is.

If you can answer it, because you offer something their current employer doesn't, more ownership, faster pace, a more interesting problem, better tech culture, a stronger founder story, then that company belongs on your target list.

Run The Pull Test on every company you're considering. A senior engineer at a stagnating Series C might see your fast-moving Series A as a genuine step up. Someone at an agency might want to go in-house. An engineer stuck on a boring stack might be craving your AI-first engineering culture. These are all cases where you can articulate exactly why someone would leave.

The sourcing list you build from The Pull Test looks completely different from the aspirational one most founders start with. And it's the one that gets replies.

When you fish in the right pond, everything speeds up. I've seen founders go from 3 months of silence to closing a hire in 4 weeks just by shifting which companies they targeted. Your outreach gets responses because the move makes sense. Your conversations are productive because candidates are genuinely interested. Your close rate improves because you're not fighting uphill on every variable.

When you fish in the wrong pond, you spend months messaging people who were never going to say yes. That's not a sourcing problem. That's a targeting problem.

Go back to the target company list from Issue 11. Run every company on it through this filter. Cut the ones that fail. Double down on the ones that pass.

Your next hire is probably not at the company you wish you could poach from. They're at the company where joining you is the obvious next step.

Cheers
Neil