hiring well

Hiring well is important. It’s also hard.

That’s why most great founders spend a large portion of their time recruiting. Sending cold DMs, talking to candidates, and pitching their companies.

At some point, you’ll want more resources to be 100% focused on hiring.

If you haven’t already, you may try working with a traditional external recruiter.

While it’s probably worth trying for yourself, our experience is that most external recruiters are significantly less effective than founders. They typically have pretty low standards and move slowly.

They can (sometimes) get you good results. But not great results.

And you need great results. This is your one company. The difference between a good team and a great team is huge. You cannot afford to make compromises.

That’s why we built Next Play Talent. Because we think we can get great results for great startups.

How are we different?

I am happy to go into more detail, and also introduce you to some of our existing clients, but to give you a high-level overview of what we do differently:

• We have high-trust relationships with many of the top candidates. We have a team of what we’re calling “talent agents” (kinda like movie stars have) who have developed relationships with the top tech talent in their domain through a program we call Insider. The Insider program is application only—only 5% of people who apply are accepted. Our talent agents are not traditional recruiters; they are former founders, investors, and operators—because those are the types of people we believe top talent trusts, and also because they have “founder-level” taste and speed.
• We have a distribution platform that helps create brand awareness for the companies we partner with. We have built a community of 80,000+ tech people. We also have hundreds of thousands of followers across LinkedIn and X. We can help employers build a strong brand through promoting them in our network.
• We have high service standards. This is easier to show than tell, but in general we protect your time from distraction and noise. One of the most frustrating aspects as a founder in working with external recruiters is having to waste time with boring meetings, having to repeat yourself over and over. We do our best to protect your time and learn quickly from your feedback. We do the little things (like take clear notes in each meeting, send follow-ups, stay organized, etc.) as well as focus on the big picture: getting great results. Some recruiters get distracted by interim metrics (e.g. how many candidates they contacted). All we care about is getting you high quality people to interview.

If you decide to work with us, it should be because you (and we) believe we can get you great results. Hopefully we have the opportunity to prove to you we can.

Questions? hi@insider.careers.