Lenny Rachitsky argues that the standard recruiting funnel—reaching 100 candidates and filtering down—selects for who responds, not who's best, causing teams to regress toward average. Instead, identify the top 20% of talent first, then validate with assessments.
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companies think about recruiting like a funnel, you know, maybe akin to a sales funnel where they think about different stages, pass-through rates and things like that. I am going to reach out to 100 people. 20 people will reply. By definition, that is not the top 20%. That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day. And so you're starting with a suboptimal set. You're not starting with the top 20%. And then the way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage. And we hire the remainder. So this remainder hiring is the output of the funnel of doom. When you say that out loud, you're like, that's kind of messed up. If I, if I think about building a talent-dense company over time, is that really the best approach? Or does that kind of get me just above average over time, assuming I have really good interview process and hygiene and all these things? You kind of regress to the mean over time as you get to volume. What if you had confidence up front? of who the top 20% was. And then you use your assessment process to validate that thesis of who those are. There's this funnel, Jim, but there's like within a funnel, Jim, there's this like pillar of excellence. What if you started with the pillar of excellence and went from there versus having this wide funnel?
