Candidates blast their resume to every job board, slap #OpenToWork on their LinkedIn photo, and wonder why nobody calls them back. Founders post a generic job description on their careers page, share it on LinkedIn, and wait for the right person to find them.

Both sides are doing the same thing and getting the same results. This is passive recruiting, and for companies under 100 employees, it’s the default that leads to mediocre hires.

The best people aren’t looking

The people you most want to hire aren’t looking for jobs. They’re well paid, appreciated by their bosses, doing interesting work. According to LinkedIn’s talent research, roughly 70% of the global workforce are passive candidates.¹¹ Active vs. Passive Candidates: The Latest Global Breakdown Revealed The source for the 70/30 passive/active candidate split. When you post a job and wait for applications, you’re fishing from the 30% who are actively looking, and competing with every other employer for the same people.

If you’re a startup, the math gets worse: you have no brand. At $15 million in revenue, your company feels like it’s taking off. But you’re not competing with the Fortune 500 for talent.The minimum revenue to make the 2025 Fortune 500 was $7.4 billion. At $15M, you’re 500x smaller than the smallest company on that list. You’re competing with Stripe ($5 billion in revenue last year), Notion ($300 million), and every well-funded startup with a compelling story and a real employment brand. At $15 million, you’re a rounding error. The candidates you want have never heard of you.

Recruiting is sales

If you sell a product, you already know what active looks like. You don’t post a link on Twitter and wait for enterprise customers to sign themselves up. You build a pipeline. You identify targets. You get meetings. You learn what they care about. You make the case that your product solves their problem better than whatever they’re using now. Then you close.

Recruiting works the same way. The best people are already “customers” of another employer, and they’re satisfied. You need to convince them to switch. That means identifying who they are by name, getting their attention with personalized outreach (not a form email; great people can smell a template from a mile away), figuring out what matters to them, and making the case that working at your company is the better product.See: The Other Product The card on designing your employment offer as a competitive product.

Most founders’ next move is hiring an external recruiter. This feels active. But external recruiters are usually representing candidates too, like a real estate agent working both sides of the deal. Their candidate pool skews toward people who need a new job, not people who are thriving. A great recruiter can help, but a recruiter is a supplement to active recruiting, not a substitute for it.

If your account executives were running your sales process the way you run your hiring process, you’d fire them. Posting a job and hoping for inbound is the recruiting equivalent of putting up a billboard and waiting for the phone to ring. No serious sales organization operates that way.

Passivity is gravity

The real danger isn’t starting passive. It’s sliding back into passive at every stage of the funnel. Most founders who think they’re actively recruiting have only been active at one stage while coasting through the others.

1. Awareness. You’re building a brand, creating content, making noise. People have heard of you. Founders tend to be decent at this. But awareness is not recruiting. It’s marketing. And it’s where most founders stop.
2. Targeting. Have you identified the 15 or 20 best people in the world for this role? By name? This is where most founders start bullshitting themselves. They’ll say they’re recruiting actively, but when you ask for the target list, they can’t produce one.
3. Conversion. Have you met with those people? Not a Zoom screen. Not a LinkedIn message. Have you bought them dinner, sat across from them, figured out what they care about, and made the case for why they should leave a job they’re happy in? Have you engaged with their work, read what they’ve written, shown them you actually know who they are?

You can be genuinely active at any one of these stages and completely passive at the next without realizing it. The self-test is brutal: can you name the 20 best people for this role, and have you actually met with them?

I have this conversation at least once a month. A founder says, “I can’t believe we’re having such a hard time hiring.” I ask if they’ve identified 20 people who’d be great at this job. No. Have they met with any of them? No. That’s not a hiring problem. That’s a not-recruiting problem. You wouldn’t say you’re having trouble selling if you haven’t talked to 20 qualified prospects. Same thing.

It’s not optional

Active recruiting isn’t just the founder’s job. It’s everyone’s job. If your first five or ten hires aren’t helping bring in more great people, the problem compounds. Great people attract great people. Mediocre people don’t recruit at all.

If someone on your team doesn’t think recruiting is part of their job, that tells you something important about that person. Everyone should be looking, all the time, for people who would make the team better. If that instinct isn’t there, you’ve got the wrong person.

Here’s the habit that makes all of this compound: end every conversation (every calibration call, every coffee, every investor meeting) by asking for three names. Not “do you know anyone who’s looking?” but “who are three people you’d consider exceptional in this function?” Each name leads to another conversation, and each conversation leads to three more names. A founder who does this consistently for a month will have a target list that dwarfs anything a recruiter could produce.

Patrick Collison described early Stripe hiring as value investing: looking for human capital significantly undervalued by the market.²² The Founders of Stripe and Pinterest on What You Should Look for in the First 10 Hires Where “think like a value investor” comes from. Five minutes of Collison and Silbermann on early hiring. That’s not something one person does. That’s a mindset the whole company has to share.

Yes, all of this is a lot

Running a truly great recruiting process on top of a great sales process, a great product, clean financials, and everything else it takes to build a company is so much fucking work. When you’re going from 1 to 20 employees, you can’t do it all perfectly.

But knowing what good looks like means you can start moving toward it. You don’t need to nail every stage of the funnel on your first hire. You do need to stop pretending that posting a job and waiting is a strategy.

The first word in hiring isn’t hiring. It’s recruiting. And recruiting is not a job description on a careers page, not a form email blast, not a prayer that the right person will find you. Recruiting is getting up, going out, finding the people, and convincing them.