The playbook for building high-talent-density teams | Adam Ward, Head of Talent at Cursor

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You have built and are known as someone that can build the most elite, high talent density teams. Let's start with how people do it wrong. Something you call the funnel of doom.

**Adam Ward** (0:09)
Companies think about recruiting like a funnel. I am going to reach out to 100 people. 20% of those are old-time. By definition, that is not the top 20%.
That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day. The way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage, and we hire the remainder. In your mind, like, hey, there are 50 people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people, and you relentlessly pursue, and you focus your energy on activating those people, not trying to find them out of the funnel of doom. The mistake that most companies make is they'll say, hey Lenny, who's the best product engineer you know? That is the worst question you can ask. The better question to ask is, hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you've worked with, who stands out to you as the person who's most collaborative with designers, or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:02)
When you're looking for that first recruiting hire, is there anything you think is important to look for?

**Adam Ward** (1:06)
Recruiters are excellent at 90 to 110 percent capacity and are terrible outside of that. If they only have half a recload, they are useless, but they're great at this edge of adrenaline rush busy. You want to find those people.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:20)
What are some things you've learned about building incredible teams, keeping people working for you over the long term?

**Adam Ward** (1:26)
When you look at candidate satisfaction scores, the number one thing that's always there is...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:32)
Today my guest is Adam Ward. Adam is known in the Valley as the most effective recruiting leader at building elite, high-talent density teams. He co-founded an independent recruiting firm called Growth by Design, which Cursor acquired fully last year, which is not something that you often hear and is a testament to how good he and his team are and how important talent is right now in today's market. Adam is now head of talent at Cursor, helping them scale and build one of the most talent-dense teams in the world. Prior to starting his own firm, Adam led global recruiting at Pinterest, growing the company from 200 to over 2,000 employees. Before that, he led a global team of 65 recruiters across 10 offices at Facebook, helping them scale Facebook's tech org from 1,000 to over 10,000 employees.
If hiring the best people is your number one priority, as it should be, this conversation will open your mind up to what it takes to do that. Adam gets super tactical and extremely specific, and you're going to thank me for inviting Adam on this podcast to share all of this incredible advice.
A huge thank you to Brie Wolfson, Janet Fishberg, Jill Macri, Mike Joyner, and Tim Kendall for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's productpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Adam Ward.
Adam, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Adam Ward** (3:08)
Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:10)
You've been doing this for 20 years now, hiring, recruiting, building teams.
How different is the market we're in today? How crazy is the market and the hiring market we're in today?

**Adam Ward** (3:22)
If there's a scale, it's an 11
But yeah, I do think there are similarities to some other markets we've been in over time. You mentioned that the years like, there was a moment in time where a lot of companies were moving to mobile, and there literally was not a mobile engineer. Like an iOS engineer was not a thing.
But there was a scramble for talent to build your mobile app and things like that. There was this moment that was a thing. It has some similarities to that market and moment. I think that really the difference here is like, everything here is just so compressed. So, that mobile moment was two years, maybe, you know, where like, there was no mobile engineers, then there were like mobile bootcamp, mobile engineer bootcamps and all these things. And like now, we're in like days, we're in weeks, you know, there are no months or year measures right now. And so that what makes this like feel very different.