The “Savage” Reference-Check Hiring Tactic Most Recruiters Are Missing

You don't just have to reach out to people and ask if they want the job. You can say, "You're the perfect person I'd want to hire for this role, but I know you have a job and you're probably really happy there. Could you give me 15 minutes of feedback on what would make this role attractive enough that you'd want to leave your job for it?"

Great!

In that conversation, they might realize it's actually a really great opportunity and they'd be interested. But even if they're not, you can say, "Thank you. By the way, you probably know other people like you. Would you share this role with them?" And now you have an advocate in your search. Definitely.

We have to do that. We have to implement this today. Tell me what the future of work with AI looks like. Are we all going to be replaced by robots? Where do we fit in as humans? What are you building?

Yeah, a lot, a lot. Okay.

This is WHO We Hire. I'm Luiz, your host, and today we're joined by Evan Walden. Evan is Founder in Residence at Findem. He previously built AI products that help venture capital and private equity firms find the best talent in the world. So we're really excited to have Evan on WHO We Hire. Evan, welcome.

Thank you. Great to see you. We've known each other for a long time, so I'm happy to be talking with you today.

You were one of the builders of the tools VC and PE firms use for exactly this. So I want to ask: when you joined Techstars, was building products in this space always a passion, or did you fall into it by accident? Okay, did I phrase that right? Do you want to start there?

Yeah, okay. Yeah, that made me laugh. Okay, you'll see. My first company was actually a recruiting agency. We set out to build a talent marketplace, but we didn't have enough experience; we were in our early twenties. We didn't have the skills, the network, the investors or the money. When we started, we raised a little from angel investors, but we also needed to make money, so we started with recruiting as a business model, as a way to bootstrap the company. That worked really well, and over the years the company became a recruiting agency focused on social impact. We worked mostly with nonprofits and social enterprises, probably from around 2011 to 2015. Our passion for talent came from the fact that

a lot of my friends were graduating from college and didn't know what they wanted to do. They were in prestigious jobs in banking or consulting, making money, but they didn't really care about what the company did. Over the years I noticed that led to a kind of stress, a feeling of "I'm not spending my time on something I really care about, and something isn't right." So I became passionate about helping my friends feel more aligned with their day-to-day work. I was also meeting a lot of entrepreneurs who were trying to figure out hiring, grow their companies, and make the world a better place through their products and services, but hiring is really hard. It's not something you learn in school or that anyone trains you on. Everyone has a different view of how it works. If you're a founder, it's not your whole job. It's a big part of your job, but it's not the thing everyone tells you to focus on. So it's critical to the company, but most people struggle with it. It was exciting for me to think, "Oh, I can actually bring together all these smart people who want to make a difference in the world and connect them with companies doing great work they never would have heard of." We got really excited about that, and then we went straight into Getro after that company because we wanted to build software and scale what we were doing. And we joined Techstars.

And then you stopped working on the recruiting agency?

Yeah, I had two co-founders there, and I handed it over to one of them, who was really passionate about recruiting and wanted to keep doing it. Then my co-founder Maverick, whom you've met and who is also a co-founder of Getro, joined that company, left it with me, and we started Getro from scratch.

And was it always focused on VC firms?

No, that's what really made me laugh about your question. No. We went through Techstars, and the initial idea was to build a product for communities, because at the recruiting agency we noticed that many of our best candidates came through our partnerships with membership organizations and shared-interest groups. We wanted to build a product for them that would let them do matching inside their community. Some members are hiring, some are looking for a job, but there's no good way to connect the two. Then, while we were fundraising, which we were struggling with because we'd never done it before, some VCs said, "This is great. I think you're too early for our fund, but could we use this for our portfolio companies? Could we put a job board on our website?" And they asked, "How much does it cost?" And we were like, "Oh, we don't charge for this product... but I guess that's why I'm here, so sure." The VCs' focus was

on revenue.

Yeah. Actually, we were living in Canada at the time because Maverick's U.S. visa had expired, and we were staying in an Airbnb asking ourselves, "Do we keep fundraising and risk running out of money, or do we try to sell this product to as many VCs as possible?" We decided to do that. The product was a job board that aggregated all the jobs from a fund's portfolio companies. We closed about 30 customer deals in the first month, which let us bootstrap the company for about three years before we raised money and did other things.

That's great, and it set you up for a successful acquisition, right? So while you were building that product, what did you learn from working directly with VC firms about hiring, and what were you able to apply to your own teams?

Okay, I think the common bias is that most VC firms are trying to help but struggle to do it. I think they get a lot of criticism for that in some cases, but it's hard when you have a lot of portfolio companies, and not all the time, it's hard to go deep enough into the details of a company's needs to be useful. So the product we built was meant to help platform teams, who are kind of like a fund's community managers, understand who in the fund's network they already know who could be quickly introduced to portfolio companies to solve a hiring problem. That was the main focus of the product, and I think we learned a lot about networks and referrals and how they can be an extremely effective channel, not just for hiring people but for building your network in any role. One practical answer to your question is that you don't just have to reach out to people and ask whether they want the job. You can ask for their opinion and their advice: "You're the perfect person I'd want to hire for this role, but I know you have a job and you're probably happy there. Could you give me 15 minutes of feedback on what would make this role attractive enough that you'd want to leave your current job for it?" Have that conversation while you build the relationship. Maybe in that conversation they say, "This is actually a really great opportunity, and I'm interested." But even if they're not interested, you can say, "Thank you. By the way, you probably know other people like you. Would you be willing to share this role with them?" Now you have an advocate as part of your search, and you've formed an early picture of what the ideal candidate thinks about the role. I think it's an excellent strategy everyone should use, especially for senior roles.

Because we definitely need to implement this today. That's great.

Yeah, it's a similar idea with a slightly different framing, which is applying it to reference checks. Like getting into a conversation with the reference and asking, "Hey, by the way, what are you working on right now?" and using that as a way to build your network. People who get put forward as references are usually doing interesting work, because they're successful and they're giving this recommendation. I was talking with a friend who said he actually hires a lot of the people he does reference checks on, because they're basically handing the company a bonus. And I said, "That's interesting. I've never heard of people doing that." But I think the idea is... what a

bold move! I like it.

It's a bit bold, but at the same time it shows that the person now works at the company that made them the offer, and their reference is someone they respect who respects their choices. So it's a great way to connect with someone who might otherwise be hard to recruit.

Smart. Yeah. Yeah,

I like that. I loved the feedback mechanism. On references, was that also a helpful factor, or did you consult companies about it? How did that show up in the product you were building? Because I'm sure there were elements like, "You know, we ran this agency, so you have a services base, but what do you choose to turn into product versus what do you choose to keep as the human touch?"

Yeah, I think at the start of the company we had a hypothesis that we could build software that automates some of the outreach, networking and warm introductions. Honestly, I don't think we ever fully solved that hypothesis. We had a product and people used it, but it's really hard to automate social capital. People are busy. They want full control of their networks. Nobody wants to feel like they're exploiting their network in any way. So I think a big part of the product's value is giving transparency into the company's network. When you do reference checks, you get some references from the candidate, but you can also see who you know in the network who might know this person. That's useful for backchannel references, especially for funds looking to invest in a founder, where they might say, "I'd like to talk to some people this founder has worked with before. Who do we know in our network who can give us a trusted intro?" They use those backchannels all the time. Often they pay GLG or Tegus or one of those platforms to find experts, but if they can find those people in their own network, it's much cheaper and faster.

Leveraging the network. I love that. So let's move to the team. You were hiring, and you were just talking about Maverick and the visa issues. I've talked to your team. They're in Barcelona. You were ahead of COVID on this. You were building a global company from day one. Was that intentional, and why? And is it something you'd recommend founders do from the start, or steer clear of? How do you think about building teams across geographies? You're in New York, you know. Everyone's everywhere.

Yeah. Man, there's a lot to unpack, and I think it depends on context, but for us, yes. Maverick is Spanish, and we had both worked remotely earlier in our careers, so that flexibility mattered to us. We also had a network of people in Spain we wanted to hire, so it made sense to be based in Spain. We saw an opportunity to hire people elsewhere who punch above their weight but don't see the same opportunities they would in Silicon Valley or New York. This was 2017, our early days. Then with COVID, all the tools got better, which was great for us because we could operate more efficiently. But I think it leveled the playing field: remote work became much easier, and companies' norms changed, so to speak, around what they were willing to take part in. There are global employment solutions that make hiring people easier, Zoom got better, there's Slack, all these remote tools are available, and they keep improving. I think the most important thing, and it sounds obvious, is that if you're going to be remote, your people need to want to work remotely. Ideally they've done it before, because running a company that's primarily async is completely different from running one that mixes both styles. The thing I'd really not recommend is trying to do hybrid, which I've found extremely hard. You have a group of people in one place having conversations, and they're basically creating new context that takes time to spread to everyone else. When your team is fully remote and async, all that context happens digitally. So, especially now with AI, you can capture information passively and route it to the right places. But if you're having a conversation in the office, nobody goes back to their computer to write notes. So it gets hard to keep track of what's going on.

Yeah, until the humanoid robot is sitting there, joins the meeting and goes off to share the info.

We're not far from that. I mean, there are actually really good tools, you know, things like Granola, and call recording has gotten much easier. You can do it on your phone. So for teams committed to it, I think there are good practices you can follow. You just have to be committed to them.

You know, by hybrid you meant part of the team is fully remote and part is in the office, not "we're in three days a week." That's what you mean.

Right. I think three days a week... I don't know. I think that can work. I haven't tried it personally, so I don't have experience with it, but I haven't really heard people complain about it, you know, the people I know running those teams, so it seems like a good setup.

You mentioned you want to hire people with remote experience, right? But they have to start somewhere. So would you advise new college grads to go into the office rather than work remotely? Do you think that experience matters?

I think it can be valuable early in your career, even just for relationship building, because getting to know colleagues remotely is harder. That's a fact. On the other hand, there are people who have kids, want to spend more time with them, and want control over their working hours, so that flexibility is great. Early in your career, it's good to be in the office, meet people and have access to leadership, where you're not asking them to schedule a Zoom call, but you might bump into them in the hallway and learn something interesting. I think that's good. I also think it depends on your personality and what you've learned about yourself so far. If you know you're someone who can structure your time, use it efficiently, set clear boundaries, and you're generally comfortable in a digital work environment, I think that makes remote work easier. But if you're the kind of person who needs to be around people, who doesn't feel a sense of belonging or that emotional drive that motivates you to work otherwise, I'd say don't force it, and try working in person. You'll be more effective, and it'll be more fun if you're that kind of person.

I love that take. And now, after the acquisition, you're a Founder in Residence. You said you've been commuting every day to your studio. So you're an artist and a founder at the same time. And you seem to be enjoying it more than ever; every time we talk, you're so excited about building something for the next 10 or 20 years, and that gets me really excited talking to you. So tell me what the future of work with AI looks like. Are we all going to be replaced by robots? Where do we fit in as humans? What are you building? Yeah, a lot, a lot. Okay, I mean it. I think Findem is a really interesting company to be at right now because it's at the forefront of AI, where we're seeing vertical AI companies emerge. There are the general-purpose LLMs everyone uses that add a lot of value, but they're general. Findem focuses on what they call people intelligence, people problems. They've built a database of nearly a billion contacts and labeled them with tens of thousands of attributes per person. They pull all the public data on the internet about each person and combine it into a profile. And thanks to that labeling and the tools they've built, an LLM can search that data and effectively answer a query. So you can imagine all the cool things that can be built on top of that data as a foundation, right?

That's amazing. Do you help other companies build what they want, or do you build the products and sell them?

Okay, Findem started as a B2B cloud recruiting tool competing with LinkedIn Recruiter. Over the past year they've been getting ready to launch a new version of the product, a headless version of Findem, which you can use as an MCP inside Claude or OpenAI or whatever platform you use. That's really cool, because from wherever you already work, you can query the MCP and get amazing results.

I'll send you a link to the call. Okay,

so here you're suggesting replacing LinkedIn Recruiter with Claude and MCP. Oh my God! I'm honestly blown away.

Well, they've also built an agentic system on top of that dataset. We have agents we've built ourselves based on market knowledge and partnerships with experts in the field. You can also build your own agents. So if you have a specific workflow you think is really important, you can bring it into context using connectors, just like you would with Claude or Codex or whatever you use. You can set up very complex workflows where the model's output is verified, consistent, and uses your own context. You can do that inside the Findem platform, or you can use those agents inside Claude or whatever other platform you work in. It's a very powerful system, and it moves the business model from seat-based SaaS to what we call outcomes, which I think a lot of people are experimenting with. Because, okay, you can use AI to make it easier for Luiz to use his fingers to do something, or you can just ask him: what exactly are you doing when you're at the computer trying to move pixels around? You're trying to get to an outcome that lets you do something bigger and more interesting. In recruiting, that means having a high-quality conversation with the candidate to understand more about the hiring manager or the company you work for, and trying to find the best fit. So think of it this way: there are tasks that take IQ to get done, and tasks that take EQ. For the IQ tasks, AI should be able to help with a lot of them, so you can spend more time on the EQ tasks, which nobody claims AI does particularly well. I think, especially in recruiting and talent acquisition, which runs on human connection, that's really great. Okay, there's a lot more to say on this, but that's where the world is right now. That's where we live.

Well, we have time. We can get into the weeds. I haven't heard anyone talk about IQ versus EQ when it comes to AI, and you're right. No one argues AI will have better EQ, but it's going to beat me at chess and win. Oh.

And it'll also beat you at running the workflow to find a list of people based on a well-structured hiring brief. That's probably a good thing. You know, I don't hear anyone saying they love using LinkedIn Recruiter to run searches and check that a profile is real. It's not good; it's tedious, boring work,

right?

Yeah, the only one it's good for is LinkedIn Recruiter. It's not good for the candidate. It's not good for the hiring manager. It took a long time. Longer. I love that. Now you've joined Findem; your company was acquired. I've talked to a lot of CEOs on this show who do acquisitions, and they have interesting strategies, like culture integration strategies. I want to hear what it felt like joining after you'd built your own values and your own way of working, and now, you know, you'll hit one year next month. Congratulations on the acquisition.

Thank you. Okay, there are two things I want to say about culture. First, your organization's values are what people are talking about when they talk about culture. It's about values, explicit or implicit, and how people behave and treat each other in line with those values or not. I forget who said it first, but values aren't aspirations. When you want to know a company's values, a lot of people will write very aspirational values, but at the end of the day the question is: what do we actually value? You can tell from how we treat each other and how we make decisions. That's the first part. The second part is that I think culture and values are often a reflection, or an indicator, of the founders' strengths and weaknesses. That's where culture comes from; it's like the seeds it grows from. So if you have founders who are great at something, you might see that reflected in the culture, but our strengths also create our biggest weaknesses, and that shows up in the culture too. When you're a founder, you're deep in the details of your work. Maybe you talk to other founders, and people join and tell you stories about how things were elsewhere, but you don't get that full picture of other cultures. So an acquisition is really interesting, because suddenly... I mean, maybe this is what it feels like to be an employee, which is something I've never been, so I've never experienced it. For me it's kind of new, but suddenly you're fully immersed in another organization's culture, and you discover that some of what we were doing was really good, and we can bring that influence here. And some things we were doing, okay, now I understand why they weren't working, because I'm seeing a completely different way of solving the problem, and it's actually much better. We should do that. So,

why? Is there anything specific that comes to mind?

Yeah, on that last point, I'd say enterprise sales is an area where I've learned a lot at Findem. In particular, I learned

more about it.

Yeah, my approach to sales was always kind of: okay, you have a problem, I have a solution. Fine so far. But because I'm really passionate about products and love talking about them, I jump straight to, "Okay, here's what we have. Here's exactly how it works. Can you picture yourself using it this way, yes or no?" And I go way too deep into product details. I think that's a common mistake in sales, especially enterprise sales. Because enterprise sales is more about the future the company wants to move toward. What's stopping you from getting to that future right now? Where's the gap? And how can we help you close it? You have to tell that story and present it in a way that resonates with the organization, so it's motivated to invest. So I told myself, yeah, of course I didn't have much success with enterprise sales at Getro, because I was treating it like a regular sale instead of the bigger picture, a vision-based sale.

That probably makes sense. I recently watched Jen Abel's episode on Lenny's Podcast, a whole episode on enterprise sales. So if you're interested in that space right now, it's definitely a great episode. But, you know, as a founder working on product and building software, enterprise sales is hard to understand. But being immersed in this culture, I saw they have a really effective process, and that process was built by hiring the right people, right? Hiring the right sales leaders and the right reps over time. So, as you

know,

yeah, we have to recognize that this gets built over time.

I think so, and I think founders are really good at this. So, you know, I think the [unclear]...

Yeah, it's like you have pattern recognition for something because you're good at it; you can better understand what you want and what might or might not work. So I think that's another thing I noticed. Yeah.

Then, on your first point about some of the things you're really good at: is it easy to have influence, or is there more politics you have to play to make an impactful change?

Yeah, I mean, you can get acquired by companies of different sizes and in different situations, and it's always a bit different. Getting acquired by a PE firm and continuing to operate independently is completely different from being acquired by a huge enterprise, and that's completely different again from being acquired by a Series C startup, which is our situation. Okay, probably in every case, unless

I've found this scenario the most fun so far. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. I think so. Yeah, it's like: unless it's a true 50/50 merger, you're probably not going to be the organization's top priority, because you're entering a frantic flow of work, trying to catch up, and you start running against the business's priorities. So we tell ourselves, "Our mission is really important. We have goals to hit. This is really important to you, right?" And the team says, "Okay, nice to meet you, what's your product? Who are your customers? What's going on?" And they have their own priorities they're driving toward, because those are their incentives. So I think understanding that ecosystem takes time in any acquisition. It took us some time. But over time, the core picture of our team, our product, our customers, and ourselves as individuals going forward becomes clear. Things calm down a bit, and that took us six months or more. But at this point I think things feel clearer: "Okay, it's predictable. We know what's going on." It took a while to get here, and it was important to try to understand my feelings during that journey, especially as a founder who had run a company for nine years and was no longer the person responsible for all those decisions. It's a relief, but it's also a feeling of losing control, which is something I'm not used to.

I'd love to hear your take. You've been at this for about a year now. On the culture side, what else have you learned from their company culture? And what are some things you'd strongly recommend to any founder who's starting to build their culture now, or raising a seed round, or hiring their first 10–15 people, who can hire from anywhere in the world and in the U.S.? What would you tell them to do with those next 10 to 15 people?

I think the most important advice is to have clear opinions. It can take time to build confidence in those opinions, but it's really worth it. I had a coach who told me, "When you set your company's culture and values, you go up the mountain and write the company's ten principles, then you come back down the mountain and live them." You don't constantly question those principles or think about changing them every day; you go back up the mountain periodically, whether that's a founders' meeting, an exec meeting, or even a whole-team meeting, depending on the size of the company. And you ask yourselves, "Is this working for us or not?" If it is, great. If not, maybe we need to adjust, or maybe a new value is emerging in our behavior that we want to reinforce, name and make explicit. Having clear values is great, because I think, as an early-stage founder, it can feel like fluff. You tell yourself, "Yeah, this seems kind of easy. It's like candor, radical candor, like, so what?"

Everyone wants to skip it, right? It's like, I don't need to think about this right now.

When things go wrong, you're going to have to make hard decisions. And both sides of those decisions will look like they could be good decisions for your company, which is hard; what makes a decision hard is that both sides are arguable, right? That's where values come in, where you say, "Okay, instead of having to think this through from scratch every time, we can go back to the hard work we did to articulate what matters to us, how we treat each other, and how we behave when things are hard and confusing and we need to make tough decisions." And you can lean on those values and make a decision that's aligned with them. That's also great because expectations are clear for your team. If I'm on the team, working for you, and something hard happens, I have some ability to predict how you'll make the decision based on how the values are articulated. And everyone wants to live in a rational world where they can somewhat predict what's going to happen. People differ in how much risk they can tolerate and how secure they feel. If you work at a startup, you're more risk-tolerant than the average person. Even so, it's important for me to know that the people making the big decisions about my future and my livelihood will make decisions aligned with my values. As long as you do that, you'll get a lot of grace from your team if you're clear about how you make those hard decisions. And if you can simply say, "We made a decision. I know it really sucks for these reasons, but it's aligned with our values and this is how we do things," everyone says, "Okay, I get it. Maybe I'm negatively affected, but at least it's consistent." So I think it's a great tool, especially

for founders who've used it a few times before, who'll find their values clearly defined. It's a very practical tool,

and you can hire the right people for your company, promote them, and let go of the people who don't live by them. And as you said, you have to keep reinforcing them. That's a good reminder for us, right? Yeah, you write them down and review them once a year, but your company evolves, and you change. So as your team grows, how do you recommend getting everyone involved in reviewing them and adding their feedback, and making it a living document rather than just something hanging on the wall?

Yeah, I think the review cadence is really important, and I think it changes as the company grows. When you start early, it's more like five people around a table, and we're all defining this shared culture together, because we interact in so many moments that we have a big influence on how we treat each other and how the company's culture takes hold. That's why early hiring is so important and has to be done in a way that matches what you want to build and the team you want to form, because even one person pulling you in a different direction creates a lot of tension and wastes time. So what we did at Getro and at my previous company was bring people together. At the time, we met in person once every three months. We'd set an agenda, not get caught up in the grind of day-to-day work, and run sessions where we exchanged ideas. Sometimes we brought in facilitators or friends with experience in this area, or maybe investors would come help us, depending on who was around, believe me. Maverick and I are both really passionate about this, so we'd run some of the sessions ourselves. You know, I mean we read books about it, so we could learn about it, because it matters. Then we'd say, okay, these are the assets we have. We held all-hands meetings once a week, and over time we cut them back to every two weeks. At the start of every all-hands, we'd put up the values and read them, which sounds repetitive, along with the company's mission and vision. It sounds repetitive and a bit boring, but we emphasize that consistency so the team remembers it, and ideally, especially with small teams, people can recite them word for word. It doesn't matter; what matters is the intent. It's also important to pick values that aren't just generic, indisputable statements. For example, "We treat everyone well" isn't a good value, because of course everyone will say that. They treat everyone well. So it has to be a good test. Do

you treat them like family? Do you treat them like you'd treat your mom? That's more specific.

Yeah, or I think a good test for every value is to ask yourself: could someone be on the other side of this and be right? There has to be polarity, right? Like, we do this instead of that. Because if it's just "we treat everyone well," that doesn't help you make decisions. Nobody wants to say they treat someone badly, so what do you mean? "We prioritize business economics even over our team members' comfort." I don't know if I'd call that a value, but it's a very clear example. If there's a big business opportunity, this company will take it even if it has to let someone go. I don't know, anyway.

Yeah, if that were one of the values, I don't know how many people would stay if it was at the start of every meeting.

The mission, the values, and let's make sure we live by them. Great, Evan. Okay, where can people find you? And who should be checking out Findem?

LinkedIn is probably the platform I'm most active on, so go ahead and say hi. I'm Evan Walden on LinkedIn. And I think Findem is a fit for anyone thinking about what we call people intelligence problems, from hiring to, for larger companies, compensation reviews or org design, and competitive analysis; there are lots of different use cases. But, you know, I think for startups that are hiring and trying to do it faster and with AI, the set of hiring problems is an interesting way to bring AI into the company. Because, you know, I think especially at the enterprise level, if you can't get a perfect result, rolling out a huge AI system is a big risk. It requires behavior change, and if the results aren't good, you have to verify them anyway. It's like asking yourself, did we really get the value we wanted? But with some of these new outcome-based tools, it's more like: we deliver something to you. If you like it, you pay for it. If you don't, you don't. And it depends heavily on the quality of the outcomes delivered. So it's a good way to try AI if you're not an early adopter but want more efficiency in your work.

Again, I was blown away to learn that Claude and MCP are going to take over LinkedIn Recruiter. Really excited to try it. Evan, thank you so much for being on WHO We Hire.

Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here.