All right, this podcast episode is going to be called Almost Everything I Know About Working With Recruits.

So I think in the past definitely, definitely one of the biggest mistakes I've made is not paying the best recruiter I can as much as we can afford for the state of the company [00:00:30] to make key hire, to help us with with key hires. It's been my, it's kind of the mythology of the startup space that you can hire everyone on your own and that you should not hire recruiters. So there's a couple instances where this is actually a bad idea and where folks are making a mistake by not hiring recruiters. 

The first is when they just don't have a lot of time to do the quality of search that they need to do and the thoroughness [00:01:00] of the search that they need to do. When you have a startup, you have a lot of things on your plate and a good recruiting process can take just a ton of time over the course of sometimes six months or even longer for a very niche hire or for a very kind of critical hire that needs a multifaceted skillset. 

So like I said in the past, I've just kind of put out the job offer, [00:01:30] hit up people in my network, tweeted something and left things to chance and I think that resulted in a couple things. One, when you do that, it can sometimes take a lot longer to make the hire than it should take and there's the opportunity cost associated with everything that a hire would've done, an employee would have done during the the extra three or six months when [00:02:00] you would have had them on board if you had gone with a recruiter.

I think the second mistake is that when you don't go with a world class recruiter, at least a recruiter who's capable of hiring a world class person into your position, you can sometimes just not be dealing with the best possible candidate or candidate pool when you go to hire. And I've definitely done that in the past. 

I think the biggest learning, probably [00:02:30] the biggest learning, certainly tied for top three of in life in startups, the biggest lesson has been learning what real excellence looks like in a given position. When you first get started, if someone just knows more than you do about a given area, that's awesome. And because they know more [00:03:00] than you, you kind of give them the benefit of the doubt on everything. But until you've worked with someone who's world class in a given role and in a given position, you just don't know what that looks like and you don't know what you're missing out on by not having that truly. 

And especially for roles where people don't have huge personal brands. Accounting, engineering [00:03:30] and on and on and on. It's not obvious who the world class people are, right? It might be obvious who a world class CEO is or maybe a world class communications person, but when it comes to pretty obscure roles or highly technical roles where people in those positions generally don't want public profiles, it's just super hard to know what world class looks like.

[00:04:00] And when you don't know what world class looks like, you end up getting really attached to external signals, right?

[transcript truncated due to character count restrictions]

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance