Why winning talent feels harder now (and what's actually changing)
The North American tech market has shifted in ways that compound on each other. AI is no longer a specialist concern and now touches every role. On a recent episode of Let’s Table That, we talked with Tonci Hockmann, who is a senior recruiter at Rootly. As Tonci puts it, “every job needs to be thinking about how to leverage AI to increase capacity or output." This perspective reflects a broader change in what hiring managers are looking for, and the skills candidates need to credibly present.
At the same time, the entry-level market has tightened considerably. Recent graduates and co-op students are facing real headwinds, with fewer companies willing to absorb the risk of unproven talent. This speaks to what Tonci describes as headcount becoming more "precious." When a company only gets one hire approved, the calculus changes. Hiring managers who once said "give me smart people and we'll figure out the technology" are now specifying exact stacks to reduce perceived risk. While the generalist era feels like it's behind us, at least for now, this risk-aversion has a real cost: it edges out strong candidates who don't match on paper but would deliver on the job, something every recruiter in this market is quietly pushing back against.
Recruiting at scale: building systems that last
When Tonci describes recruiting at scale, the phrase he reaches for is "process over heroics." It sounds simple, but the implication runs deep. Heroics means throwing more of yourself at the problem by means of more sourcing, more screening, more hours, more hustle. It works until it doesn't. Process means building something repeatable, something you can actually interrogate when it breaks.
In practice, that looks like defined interview stages where every candidate moves through the same evaluation. Once the process is consistent, the data becomes useful. Pass-through rates tell you where candidates are dropping out. Bottleneck analysis tells you why. You can test assumptions, update criteria, and report progress to hiring managers with something more credible than gut feel. Without that structure, you're just guessing faster.
The other half of the equation is hiring-manager enablement. A recruiter's capacity has a ceiling. Scaling past it means bringing the broader team into the interview process, not as a favour, but as a requirement. Hiring managers need to be leaned on, their teams trained and ready to carry real evaluation weight. The recruiter's job shifts from doing everything to designing the system and equipping others to run it well.
Tonci is also clear-eyed about what goes wrong without this. "The false negatives are very expensive," he says, referring to candidates who were actually strong but got filtered out by a process that wasn't calibrated properly. Early-stage startups are especially prone to this, running assessments that are too heavy or interview loops that generate noise instead of signal. Getting the process right is how you avoid leaving good people on the table.
The first three steps to building a recruiting function from scratch
When Tonci joined Rootly, he wasn't starting from zero, but he was close. Fast forward four months into building the Series A startup's GTM and engineering teams, and he had distilled his hiring strategy down to a clear, three-point checklist.
First: understand what good actually looks like by studying the people already succeeding on the team. Early hires often come through referrals and personal networks, which means the process hasn't been stress-tested yet. Tonci's move is to interrogate those early hires to understand why they stand out, what knowledge and experience they bring, and then reverse-engineer that into interview signals the whole team can use consistently.
Second: streamline the interview process by cutting, not adding. "The false negatives are very expensive," Tonci notes, and in early-stage companies they're common. The culprit is often a technical assessment that's too heavy, or an interview loop that generates noise instead of signal. The goal isn't more evaluation, but better-calibrated evaluation that gives the team enough confidence to actually make a move.
Third: build the trackers. In most early-stage companies, candidate information lives scattered across Slack threads, email chains, and someone's personal spreadsheet. Pulling that into one place, and building consistent cadences for outreach and feedback, is what separates a functioning recruiting operation from a series of heroic individual efforts.
Culture add over culture fit: protecting diversity as you grow
Culture fit is tempting.You see a team that works well together and naturally want to replicate it. However, as Tonci identifies, culture fit is merely a snapshot. It reflects what worked in the past, not what the team needs to solve the problems six months from now. Culture add asks a harder, more useful question: what does this person bring that we don't already have?
That distinction matters most when you're scaling fast and headcount is precious. The instinct to narrow scope and hire from the same companies, the same industries, the same pedigrees because it feels safe. It's also how teams end up thinking in circles. Tonci points to a concrete example: when building out Instacart's catalog team, the obvious talent pools weren't delivering. The breakthrough came from sourcing candidates with voice assistant backgrounds. While there was no obvious connection on the surface, once he started talking to those people, the transferable problem-solving experience was right there.
That's where the recruiter's job becomes storytelling. Finding a non-obvious candidate is only half the battle. The real work is translating their unconventional background into a compelling pitch for the hiring manager. That means moving the conversation away from pedigree ("they worked at a FAANG company") and toward specifics: what problems did they actually solve?
Protecting diversity as you scale isn't a separate initiative. It's a direct output of sourcing broadly, evaluating rigorously, and making the case for candidates whose paths don't follow the expected pattern.
How to close senior engineering candidates in competitive markets
When closing a senior engineer, Tonci’s first move isn’t to pitch the role harder but to diagnose what the candidate actually cares about. Almost every candidate is optimizing for just one or two of four things: money, work-life balance, impact, or growth. The job is to figure out which ones matter most to them before you start making your case. As Tonci puts it, "I can't convince someone to take a job. My job is to really provide you with the data and the information that you need to make the most rational decision for you at that time."
That philosophy shapes how he handles the final stretch. When a candidate is close but not signing, he increases the quality of touchpoints, be it coffees, lunches, or dinners. Not to pressure, but to surface the blocker. Sometimes that blocker is personal. Tonci has spoken directly with a candidate's spouse when relocation uncertainty was stalling the decision, walking them through the process. It sounds unusual, but it works.
Sometimes the blocker is technical. Tonci recalls a stellar candidate who declined an offer. Rather than simply moving forward, Tonci and the hiring manager arranged a debrief over lunch and discovered the candidate's core concern: the company’s existing tech stack gave the impression that leadership was unconcerned with innovation. The hiring manager's response? "You tell us what you want to use." The candidate named it, the company committed, and that person went on to become a key leader — a clean win that almost didn't happen.
The pattern across both stories is the same: slow down, ask better questions, and remove the specific blocker standing in the way.
Compensation: how startups can compete with big tech over time
While the "we can't compete with big tech on comp" argument is used often in startup recruiting, it's only half true. Yes, big tech wins when comparing year one to year one. They have liquid equity, bigger base salaries, and structured bonuses that a Series A company simply can't match on day one. But that's not the right comparison to make.
Tonci believes breaking compensation across a four-year window is a more constructive way of comparison. When you average it out, the picture shifts. Startups offer equity that, while illiquid early, carries real upside multipliers if the company grows. Promotions happen faster and career trajectory accelerates in ways that a large organization's levelling structure rarely allows. That's not a soft benefit; it compounds financially over time.
The practical implication for recruiters and founders is to stop presenting comp as a snapshot and start presenting it as a trajectory. Walk candidates through the four-year view. Show them what the equity could look like at different growth scenarios. Make the case that joining a startup isn't a pay cut but a different kind of bet, one where they're wagering on the company and on themselves.
That said, be honest. Some candidates genuinely can't absorb short-term risk. A new mortgage, a growing family, or a partner between jobs are real constraints that no closing conversation should try to talk someone out of. The job is to give people the information they need to make the right call for their situation, not to sell them on yours.
