How to build your recruiting pitch

Once you’ve built your early-stage hiring plan and done your role prep, you need to work on your recruiting pitch. Why?

Assume that no candidates have heard of you yet, because most likely, they haven’t. There are a lot of awesome startups out there, and it’s harder to stand out than ever before. It used to be that early stage startups could promise high ownership, a fast pace of development, and interesting work, and that would be enough of a sell for top talent. These days, there are an overwhelming number of early-stage companies to choose from. And, with the advent of frontier AI labs growing at an insane clip, the sell against “large, slow, boring” late-stage opportunities isn’t as salient. 

A powerful recruiting pitch that differentiates your product, vision, team, and approach to taking the market, is key to making those early pivotal hires. You won’t survive without it. 

The good news is that you’re not starting from zero. If you’ve raised funding, you’ve already done some of this work when you pitched to investors. Your job right now is to translate your investor pitch to something that speaks to candidates. A good recruiting pitch will intrigue and/or excite talent on the market and compel them, in practice, to either respond to your outreach, or actively reach out to you.

The strongest recruiting pitches have one thing in common: differentiation. You need only to glance at your LinkedIn inbox to know how critical this element is. Almost every cold recruiting message says some version of the same thing: We’re a well-funded, VC-backed startup; we’re solving big problems in our space; we’re changing the world. It’s a steady din, all at the same volume. If you want your messaging to cut through the noise, you must find the authentic edge.

The two core elements of a recruiting pitch

Your recruiting pitch will consist of two core components, one of which will remain constant no matter whom you’re talking to, the other of which will vary depending on the role you’re trying to fill and the candidate you’re speaking with. The first element pitches the company overall, the second element pitches a specific role. 

1. The company pitch describes your organization’s vision, the impact of the product you’re building, the market you’re addressing and the opportunity therein, and the specific, unique vantage point you have on the market. Your company pitch will look quite like the pitch you’ve given investors, so consider pulling language from your pitch deck. Examples from Eppo and Chainguard are also a good start.
   
   
2. The role pitch answers questions like: How does this role directly impact the company’s vision? What are the most exciting projects or initiatives for this hire? What unique challenges will they help solve for the company? The role pitch will connect directly to the company pitch insofar as it describes how the role upholds the company vision and directly contributes to the company’s product. 

It’s important to note that the role pitch is not a permanent, one-size-fits-all argument. The most thoughtful companies take notes during their candidate conversations and throughout their interview processes and piece together “candidate personas” from those notes. What argument resonates for someone who’s currently at a larger company but is being recruited into your seed-stage organization? For someone who’s been working remotely, but your open role requires they be in the office once a week? As you talk to different candidates, keep a list of personas and your convincing arguments or pivots that have shifted their perspectives or resolved their concerns. This data will be invaluable.

Questions to ask as you build your recruiting pitch

One way to build a differentiated pitch is to ask (and answer) some meaningful questions about your company, its origins, its vision, and how a given role will contribute to its success. Here are some example questions that can guide you in putting together a meaningful pitch: 

• What inspired you to found the company? You chose to dedicate a significant portion of your career and your life to this calling. Why did you choose it? Why does it matter, to you and to others? Don’t be afraid to be candid and personal here.
  
  
• What’s your clear vision for the company, and what’s unresolved about your vision? What questions are you still trying to answer as you refine your vision? Top talent wants to contribute something valuable and have a meaningful impact on your organization. Saying “We’ve got this all figured out and we just want you to come in and execute” isn’t very compelling. Your vision has at its core an exciting opportunity: what unknowns can this hire help you identify and address?
  
  
• What’s the problem you’re solving? It’s critical to think about real-world applications here. If you’re building a developer tool, how are you making a tangible difference in the lives of your users? Be specific! 

• Who are your customers (or target customers)? Identifying the intended users and primary beneficiaries of your product in conjunction with those real-world examples above will allow candidates to see yours as a real business—not just a nice idea. Especially if you don’t have any traction yet.
  
  
• What’s on your roadmap for the next 3-6 months? How will the milestones on your roadmap impact your customers or target market? How will they shape your influence on the industry? Chances are good candidates might be excited by some of these particulars, as long as they’re not too prescriptive and preclude creative input.
  
  Note: This question helps you start to define your role pitch. What projects could this particular hire come in and impact? How does this 3-to-6-month roadmap align with your long-term strategic goals—and therefore, what contributions will this person make to advancing your company goals over the long term?
  

• What does your culture look like? What makes it unique? Startup websites across the board tend to highlight identical employee benefits, similar team pictures, and comparable values. What makes your culture distinctive, and/or how can you showcase it uniquely? (Or if you’re just building it, how do you hope it will be unique?) 
  
  As an example, one of our companies has a culture doc that narrates how specific team members exemplify a company value, and how they’ve evolved within the culture. That’s hard-hitting storytelling: it helps candidates imagine the personal and professional growth and maturation they could experience within the org.

• Who are your competitors, and what gives you an edge over them? Think about this as a mini-investor pitch. Map out the market. Help them understand why you’ll outperform your competition. The candidate is already thinking about your competitors, so don’t pass over them.
  
  
• Why should someone join your early-stage company over a larger, more stable company? As with your product competitors, address this head-on rather than allowing candidates to ruminate and create their own narratives. If you’ve got a great runway, a well-defined business plan, a loyal and growing customer base, or contingency plans, underscore these. They’ll serve as a proxy for stability in the early stages of your company. 

Testing your recruiting pitch (with some hard metrics)

You’ve asked the above questions, turned the answers into fodder for your pitch, and crafted something compelling out of them. Two key places in which you’ll use your recruiting pitch are your outbound messaging (when you source candidates), and your job descriptions (coming up in my next post).

Elsewhere I’ve argued that the recruiting metrics that matter most for early-stage startups are at the top of the funnel and the very bottom of the funnel. This holds for your recruiting pitch:

• At the top of the funnel, are the people you’re reaching out to willing to talk to you? Track positive response rates (i.e. interested rates) to your messaging. If talent in the market engages with you, your pitch has gotten their attention. 
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• At the bottom of the funnel, are the candidates you’re trying to close saying “yes” to your offers? Track offer acceptance rates. If candidates are saying “yes” to you, your recruiting pitch is effectively aligned with their career goals, persuasively lays out your value proposition, and compellingly sells your culture and your vision.

Stay tuned for my next post to bring everything you’ve done together in your job description.