Standing Out to Top Talent
Robin Beattie from Akaina Talent wraps up the ‘Standing out to Top Talent’ series by exploring passive candidates, how AI really fits into hiring, and the new questions investors are asking that often catch founders off guard.
Your best hire most likely won’t come from a job ad.
Parts 1 and 2 talked about storytelling, job descriptions, and employer brand. These all assume the right candidate is out there, paying attention, and ready to apply. But that’s not how most great hires happen.
Think about the best person you’ve worked with. Chances are, you didn’t meet them through a job ad. Maybe it started with a referral or a conversation unrelated to any open role. They were already good at their job, settled, and not thinking about your company. You had to find them, or someone who knew them introduced you to them.
That’s the real challenge, and it’s an area where most founders are still trying to keep up.
The shadow funnel
Every company has two hiring pipelines. There’s the formal one with job boards, inbound interest, and applications. Then there’s the shadow funnel, which is the warm network of relationships running quietly alongside.
Good recruiters have always used the shadow funnel. They don’t wait for the right person to apply. They know who they want to talk to and have often already spoken with them before any job is posted.
You can build this habit without adding more hours to your week. The people you want to know are in sector communities, Slack groups, podcasts, panels, newsletters, and roundtables. You’re probably already in some of these places. The key is to pay attention during your usual conversations and keep track of who you meet. The best recruitment pipeline doesn’t look like a pipeline at all. It’s just a list of people you’ve kept in real contact with.
Where AI helps, and where it creates a false sense of progress
Candidates use AI to apply faster and to more jobs. Hiring teams use it to screen faster, too. But speeding up on both sides doesn’t make hiring better. It just makes it cheaper to go through the motions.
There are real ways AI can help, like researching candidates before a call, drafting the first version of a job description, or organising your interview questions. Take advantage of these tools.
But the moment that matters most, when someone decides whether to trust you with the next few years of their career, still needs to be human. If you go silent on a strong candidate for a week because your process slowed you down, don’t be surprised if they accept another offer before you follow up. How quickly you respond is one of the clearest signals of how you work.
Why investors should be asking about this
How well a founder hires is one of the clearest early signs of their quality. This shows up long before any board meeting.
If a founder can’t explain in one sentence why someone should join them, or only starts building relationships after a role has been open for six weeks, that says a lot about how they work. Investors should ask a few simple questions: How does the founder describe their best hire? Do they know what makes someone exceptional at this stage? Are they building relationships before they need to hire?
After investment, the important metrics are simple. Time to hire and quality of hire should be tracked along with your business numbers. Referral rate also deserves more attention, since it shows your culture and whether people would recommend your company to their best contacts. It’s also worth checking if your EVP has changed, because the pitch that worked for your first ten hires usually won’t work the same way once you reach fifty.
Getting this wrong usually costs between 1.5 and 3 times the annual salary, once you factor in management time, disruption, and recovery time. In a ten-person company, one bad hire means ten per cent of your team is heading in the wrong direction. That’s not a small mistake.
Three questions, one honest score
Rate yourself out of five on each:
Can you explain in one sentence why the right person should pick you instead of a bigger company that pays more?
Do your job descriptions speak to people who aren’t actively looking, or are they just written for those already searching job boards?
Are you really present in the places where your next hire spends time, or does your network only come alive when you have an open role?
Start with whichever area you score lowest on.
The best people have choices. They aren’t waiting to be found. They’re waiting to see something that catches their interest, and that starts long before they ever see a job ad.
Finally, take a moment to ask yourself, “How mature is your hiring approach, really?”
You can find out in five minutes with Akaina’s Hiring Maturity Assessment.
If you need help with this, whether you’re hiring or supporting those who are, I’m happy to chat.
robin@akainatalent.com | LinkedIn