Venture Scaler

“Seriously? We don’t even have 23 good candidates in our pipeline!” ~founder friend of mine They said this to me after I shared data from Ashby that says you need to talk to 23 candidates to hire 1 great one. My founder friend also said they didn’t have the time to screen that many candidates. “Many early-stage teams underestimate how many candidates they need to speak to to make one hire... You will either need a lot of inbound, or more likely, you will have to fill the funnel with sourced candidates and referrals.” ~Benji Encz, CEO of Ashby Hard Truth: Recruiting at your startup is a numbers game. You need volume and targeted searches to find the right candidate. For most startups, this means you’ll need to do your own outbound sourcing. At Venture Scaler we’ve helped startups like Pepper, Veho, Honey Homes and UpSmith with sourcing and making great hires. 👉Need help with hiring? Let's chat! DM me or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

Your best candidates keep disappearing after round one. Why? One pattern I've seen: Your hiring manager is bad at "selling." Early stage hiring has a weird rule: Every interviewer is a closer. Most founders miss this, then blame the market when candidates go cold. Here’s what candidates are actually hearing on your first call: A vague role. A list of tasks. A meandering company story. No clear reason this job is career defining. So the candidate thinks: “Cool people. Unclear opportunity.” And they move on. Fix it with a simple pitch system: 1. Start with the mission in one sentence: Not the product, the problem you exist to solve. 2. Paint the 6 month win: What does “crushing it” look like, with specifics? 3. Define what you are not: Who will hate this job, and why? 4. Connect the dots to their story: Why them, why now, why this role is a step up. Pro Tip: Flip the script: Spend the first 5 minutes selling the opportunity with confidence, get them excited, then run your interview. This is one of the sneakiest places a fractional recruiter helps. At Venture Scaler, we help build the pitch, coach hiring managers, and keep the process tight so every interviewer tells the same compelling story. Be honest: do your interviewers sound like recruiters, or like they’re reading a job description out loud? DM me if you want my hiring manager playbook.

Recruiting commission fees are a stealth tax on your runway. Most founders don’t feel it until it’s too late. You finally find the right candidate. You’re celebrating. Then you do the math and realize you just paid the equivalent of a senior engineer’s monthly burn for one hire. And if you need 3 hires this quarter? Congrats, you just funded someone else’s growth. Traditional recruiting is built for big companies. Big budgets. Big margins. Big hiring volume. Early stage startups are the opposite. Every dollar has a job. So here’s the question founders should be asking: "Do I want to pay for outcomes theater?" "Or pay for execution?" Because most of what gets a role filled is boring, repeatable work: Sourcing Outbound messaging Screening Scheduling Follow ups Pipeline triage Weekly reporting Offer coordination That’s why I’m bullish on fractional recruiting. You rent an experienced recruiter who runs the engine without the long term commitment, the giant contingency fee, or the “we’ll get back to you” agency black box. Pro Tip: The cheapest hire is not the lowest salary. It’s the hire you make fast, with a tight process, before the role creates more drag across your team. At Venture Scaler, founders use us to keep recruiting costs predictable and their momentum high while they stay focused on product, revenue, and fundraising. What’s your take: would you rather pay a huge fee per hire with a "guarantee", or pay for a recruiting engine you can scale up and down? DM me if you want a simple breakdown of the fractional model.

In 2 months my rent-a-recruiter service saved our client over $230k 🤯 Here’s how ↓ We sourced, screened, interviewed & hired 13 new employees: → 2 senior ops managers @ $110k → 9 operations managers @ $75k → 2 CS coordinators @ $50k If our client (Series A startup) was working with a traditional recruiting agency, they would have paid 25% commissions on first-year salaries, totaling $250,000 😱 But by working with Venture Scaler on our flexible hourly plans, they saved over 90% (not a typo). And by saving them $230k, they effectively hired 3 ops managers for “free.” That also means we helped them avoid $100k+ of monthly burn. Imagine what you could do at your startup with an extra $230,000. That’s a pre-seed round for a lot of startups! 👉 If you're thinking about (or already started) working with a traditional firm, let's chat. DM me or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

Hot take: if you’re leading recruiting as a founder, you’re paying for every hire with your best hours. Most Seed and Series A founders don’t fail at hiring because they can’t spot talent. They fail because founder led recruiting turns into a daily game of whack a mole: Inbound comes in. You skim resumes between meetings. A great candidate waits 6 days for a reply. Someone “owns scheduling” until they don’t. Pipeline notes live in 4 places. Then the search “mysteriously” drags for 10 to 14 weeks. Here’s the real issue: nobody owns the hiring engine end to end. So it runs... whenever the founder has free time. If you want hiring to stop stealing your best hours, you need one clear owner for: 1. Sourcing 2. Screening 3. Scheduling and follow ups 4. Pipeline hygiene and weekly reporting 5. Offer process and close plan That’s exactly where a fractional recruiter shines. Not a full time headcount. Not a big fee agency. Just an experienced operator who drops in, runs the machine, and keeps momentum week to week. Pro Tip: Before you post the job or message a single candidate, calibrate with 5 to 10 real profiles. If you can’t agree on what “great” looks like in a stack of actual people, the rest of the process is just expensive guessing. That’s also why at Venture Scaler we start with a quick alignment sprint, then move fast with a tight weekly cadence. _____ What’s the part of hiring that’s draining you the most right now: sourcing, scheduling, or decision making? If you want a fractional recruiter to take the wheel, DM me and I’ll send a simple overview of how we plug in.

If a role has been open for 90+ days, you’re not “still searching.” You're stuck. You’re stuck in a broken hiring loop. Here’s what usually happens at Seed and Series A: - You post the job. - You wait for inbound. - You ask your network. - You run a few interviews. - You get busy. - The candidates wait. - The momentum dies. Then you tell yourself: “The market is tough right now.” Maybe. But most “stalled searches” stall because nobody owns the engine. So the process runs... whenever the founder has oxygen. A quick reset that works shockingly well: 1. Recut the profile Stop debating hypotheticals. Define the must haves, the dealbreakers, and what success in 90 days looks like. 2. Rebuild the target list List 25 companies and 50 titles you actually want. Stop hoping the right person randomly applies. 3. Relaunch outbound Send tight, specific outreach. Not “excited to connect,” but “here’s the problem you’d own.” 4. Tighten the cycle time Screen to first interview in 72 hours. No exceptions. Run weekly pipeline reviews 15 minutes. Same day. Same time. Decisions get made or the search dies. Pro Tip: If you can’t produce 10 qualified conversations in 10 business days, the problem isn’t volume. It’s targeting, messaging, or speed. This is exactly where a fractional recruiter from Venture Scaler is a cheat code. We step in, rebuild the machine, and run cadence so founders can get back to product, sales, and fundraising. Be honest: what’s causing your longest open role right now: weak pipeline, slow response time, or unclear profile? DM me and I’ll send a simple “stalled search reset” checklist we use with founders.

“Oh no... We don’t even have 23 good candidates in our pipeline!” ~founder friend of mine They said this to me after I shared data showing you need to talk to 23 candidates to hire 1 great one. They also said they didn’t have the time to screen that many candidates. “Many early-stage teams underestimate how many candidates they need to speak to to make one hire. In our data we also saw that only 13% of inbound applicants even make it to the first screen. You will either need a lot of inbound, or more likely, you will have to fill the funnel with sourced candidates and referrals.” —Benji Encz, CEO of Ashby Hard Truth: Recruiting at your startup is a numbers game. You need volume to find the right candidate. For most startups, this means you’ll need to do your own outbound sourcing. At Venture Scaler we’ve helped startups like Pepper, Veho, Honey Homes and UpSmith with sourcing and making great hires. 👉Need help with hiring at your startup? Send me a DM! Or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

“We got 400 applicants in 48 hours... and not one was qualified.” That’s what a founder told me on a call last month. Series A company. Hiring their first operations manager. They’d posted the job everywhere—LinkedIn, AngelList, Indeed, even Reddit. The result? A flood of inbound noise. Hundreds of résumés. None from the right background. And no one on the team had time to sort through it all. So we jumped in. Our fractional recruiter started by tearing down the job post. The original one read like a corporate handbook— vague, generic, and built to attract anyone. We rebuilt it using our Impact Job Description format: ✅ Started with the problem the role was solving ✅ Focused on outcomes, not tasks ✅ Added a story about what success actually looks like Then we went outbound—mapping 60 “right-fit” profiles and reaching out directly. Within 10 days, they had 5 interviews lined up with qualified, excited candidates. One of them got the offer. And the founder said something that stuck with me: “I thought my problem was pipeline. Turns out it was positioning.” That’s the beauty of having an experienced recruiter who’s built startup hiring machines before— they know how to attract the right people, not just more people. Be honest—how many of your recent applicants were actually qualified? DM me and I’ll show you how we fix that in week one.

Does your growing startup need a r̶e̶c̶r̶u̶i̶t̶e̶r̶ Erin? The founders who work with us—they get it. They get how we’re different and a better fit for them: - Startup-friendly flexible terms - Expert recruiters (like Erin) - Zero commissions Our client results speak for themselves: - 6x more applicants - 90% cost savings - 4x faster hires And not only that, they talk about us with their founder friends. Fun fact: Marisa came from a referral from another one of our clients! ___ 👉 Need help with hiring? Let's chat about getting you your Erin! Or check out 𝗩𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗥 in my bio to learn more.

“We need three hires in 2 months or the launch doesn’t happen.” That was the text a founder sent me at 10PM on a Thursday. They’d just closed a new enterprise deal that required opening a pilot market in 30 days. The problem? No local team. No recruiter. No time. By the time we hopped on a call Friday morning, they’d already tried posting the jobs themselves. Zero traction. The clock was ticking. So we dropped in one of our fractional recruiters—someone who’d scaled markets at Uber and Instawork before. Here’s what she did in week one: 1️⃣ Built a market map of 120 target candidates in the city using LinkedIn Recruiter. 2️⃣ Personalized every outbound message (no automation, no spray-and-pray). 3️⃣ Ran first-round screens herself and held daily standups with the founder to align on feedback. By day 50, all three roles were filled—two operations hires and one market lead. Each one hit the ground running and helped launch on schedule. And when I checked in after, the founder said: “That month could’ve buried us. Instead, we scaled like a company twice our size.” Speed doesn’t have to mean sloppy. It just takes a recruiter who’s built the playbook before—and can drop it in overnight. What’s the fastest you’ve ever gone from open role to offer? DM me if you want to see how our fractional team makes hiring sprints actually work.