Natasha helps Amplify founders build their teams from the ground up. She has a decade of experience building repeatable early stage recruiting pipelines, most recently as the first recruiter at Segment. In her 4 years there, she took the team from 50→500, built the core interview program, and owned all of technical recruiting. Natasha is who you look to when it’s time to learn how to recruit (and build a repeatable system for doing so), from sourcing to evaluating and closing.  

How do you work with Amplify companies?

My team operates very differently than most talent functions at VC firms. We help our founders figure out how to build teams. Most of them come from technical backgrounds and haven’t had to build teams from scratch (with no support) before. Being a recruiter is one of a founder’s main jobs, and forever will be – we work with you to figure out how to make it one of your strengths. I focus on core recruiting skill sets with founders: sourcing, evaluating, closing, and building enough structure so that recruiting becomes a system that can be analyzed, diagnosed, and improved.

What do technical founders get most wrong about recruiting?

Many of the founders I work with want to outsource recruiting: they haven’t done much of it and it’s uncomfortable for them. But you need to figure this out yourself! Without a fundamental, personal understanding of how your company and story can attract top talent, outsourcing is always going to fail.

But maybe the most important mistake I see is not focusing enough on your story. So many founders pitch the exact same thing as everyone else: high ownership, well-funded company backed by top investors, we’re changing the world, and so on and so forth. Everyone is saying these things! What actually makes you unique? And how do you sell that to candidates in a clear, believable way?

How do I get better at closing candidates?

Once there are competitive offers involved, closing gets very hard. Recruiting isn't quite like selling a product: your candidates only have one choice, and they’re making a major life decision. Many founders treat closing as an exercise in making the best possible monetary offer, but it’s so much more than that. Making an offer that was never going to get accepted is a waste of time for everyone.

The first step is to understand that people, by and large, are predictable. Your job is to be constantly gathering information about what matters to a candidate so their decision is a tractable, predictable activity. What’s guiding their choices? What’s their timing? What other processes are they involved in? Who else is a part of the decision making besides themselves? People tend to make assumptions (“she’s leaning towards us for sure”), but remember that nothing is true until a candidate explicitly says it to you. Closing is a discipline - learn how to suss out what actually matters to your candidates, and show them how you'll be able to give it to them in a way that stands out.