The Unsigned Team

The vast majority of startups treat hiring like a tap that should be turned on and off. Whenever a hire becomes urgent or necessary, the tap is turned on and sourcing begins. Outreach follows, interviews are scheduled and (hopefully) someone is hired. Then the tap is turned off until someone is needed again, and the whole process gets repeated.

In some ways, this tap on/tap off process might feel efficient, because you’re not spending or wasting time on the act of ‘hiring’ unless you actually need to hire at the moment. But it’s this very thought process that keeps startups and scaleups in a never ending cycle of wasted time, choosing to deal with and put out fires on a regular basis, instead of preventing the fires from ever igniting in the first place.

Startups that consistently hire at the top of the market treat hiring quite differently. They aren’t (regularly, at least) spinning up new searches every time they need to hire, and they certainly aren’t expecting the best people around to go from not knowing them at all, to working for them in a matter of mere weeks.

Instead, they are constantly building what you might refer to as your ‘unsigned team’, so hiring never becomes a burden or a ‘fire’ to put out again.

Done properly, 80-90% of all hiring should happen without an active search at all.

Today, you will learn how.

The ‘Ramp Up’ Problem

When an opportunity to hire someone opens up in your company, do you need to ‘ramp up’ the surrounding process? In other words, do you post an advert that wasn’t live last week, run a search that wasn’t already running, go to your network to ask who they know, change the schedule of the team to make time to meet people, and keep those changes in place until the hire is made?

For most reading, the answer will be yes - but hiring should not be something that meaningfully ramps up or down. It is a constant, ongoing process that shouldn’t noticeably change all that much when a role is ‘live’ or ‘not live’.

Some reading may have internal talent teams, and those teams would be quick to state that “the work never stops” - but even in these cases the work is often ineffective. What good is an ATS filled with thousands of candidates who would not pass your interview process, or dozens that would but who have no idea you exist?

The answer is “no good”, which is exactly why almost all startups still need to ramp up when hiring irrespective of whether they have a talent team or not.

Ramping up is the first and most obvious symptom of a dysfunctional and sub-optimal hiring system.

The Best People Choose Their Companies

Almost every company believes it chooses its employees. In fairness, the company does choose who they will or will not offer, so it’s obvious where the confusion comes from - but the best startups understand that it’s them who need to be desired and chosen, not the other way around.

The most talented people get offers from almost everyone they meet. They hold open offers (where companies tell them “there is always a spot for you here, whenever you like!”), and when they resign, a counter offer is all but guaranteed.

For what it’s worth, if the people you’re hiring aren’t being fought over in this way, your talent bar is too low.

They also move on their own timing, not yours. The default assumption should be that they’re already somewhere they want to be - happy, well paid, respected and doing work they enjoy, even if it might not always be true.

What actually moves them is shaped by life as much as work. Factors such as a partner’s career, kids and school years, equity they won’t walk away from, the problem they want to spend the next few years on, or any other personal variable that might be at play.

You don’t control any of these variables, and it would be wrong to try to.

When you accept this, as the best startups do, you understand that you need to be relevant in their world when their timing is right, and you build that relevance before the timing is right.

This is the fundamental backbone of assembling your unsigned team.

What Is Your Unsigned Team?

Your unsigned team is the small group of exceptional people your company could hire, would love to hire, or may need to hire, known well before any open opportunity arises.

Small means small. In the very early days, that might be 15 or 20 people in total. As you grow, it may become the best 30 to 50 people per function. For example, 30 people (each) for engineering, design, product, sales, eventually leadership - across the locations you operate in. As a startup, there is never a need for you to know thousands of people, and building lists, populating spreadsheets, or sending outreach to thousands of people is a giant waste of time.

Your unsigned team should represent the very best around across the functions you may need to hire for, and you should aim to be hiring from that group almost exclusively. (Note: You should know the best at each relevant seniority level, e.g, the best Mid, Senior, Staff and Principal level Engineers, not just the best Principal Engineers who will objectively be the best overall).

This isn’t just a talent pool though - it must be a two way street. To be included in your unsigned team, someone must know you and your company intimately. They need to know what you’re building, the calibre of the team, a high level understanding of what they’d own if they joined, why they might want to join, and more.

What’s missing is timing, and that can show up in a number of ways. It could be personal timing, as previously mentioned. It could be your company’s timing, where you’re waiting for a raise to close, or a role will only open up if a milestone is hit.

Regardless, timing is not a problem to be solved. For most the timing will be wrong. But for some in your unsigned team, the timing will be just right (timing is ‘right’ for roughly 10-20% of the market at a given time), and it’s those people you’ll be able to hire as and when you need them.

Some may be reading this with a level of confidence. “I know lots of people like that!” they might say to themselves. To test whether your unsigned team is real or just a fantasy is relatively straightforward. Could you get a coffee, lunch or a call with them within a week or two, for no reason other than that speaking with you is worth their time? If your bar is actually high enough, the answer for most is likely no.

For that to become a yes, you must become a person of value.

Becoming a Person of Value

The best people aren’t going to meet you just because you have a role open - having a role doesn’t make you worth their time. It might matter later, once they know you and rate you and the timing is right, but on its own it means very little to someone who already has good options. So whether you’re actively hiring or not, you need another reason for them to want to talk to you.

It helps to think about this the way you’d think about sales. A good company doesn’t switch its sales team on and off. It doesn’t wait until revenue is tight and then go looking for a customer. It’s always selling, always building relationships, whether it needs a deal this month or not. And the strongest position it can be in is having someone who wants to be a customer before there’s even the capacity to take them on.

Hiring is no different. When someone on your unsigned team wants to work for you and is happy to wait until the right role opens, you are in the best position you can be in. You get there by being worth their time long before any role exists - by being a person of value.

There are a few ways to be that person, and none of them are easy.

You might be genuinely accomplished in your own right - not just a founder, there are thousands of those in your geography alone, but someone who has built and exited a business of real substance, or been a top operator somewhere people respect. You might be an authority the people in your field actually want time with - the engineer other engineers want to spar with, the designer great designers follow, or the salesperson that other top billers have heard stories about. You might be well networked among investors and founders, where an introduction from you is worth having. Or you might simply be known - through a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, whatever the vessel - the following is more important than the format.

The suggestion isn’t necessarily to copy any of these things. It’s to figure out how you, specifically, are valuable to the people you want - and if you can’t answer that honestly, that’s the first thing to fix. This is one of the more difficult and time consuming parts of building an unsigned team, but likely the most important.

You can test whether you’ve achieved this by asking a simple question. Will these people meet you because you, not the promise of anything in particular, are worth their time? And once they’ve met you, will they introduce you to others they rate?

If the answer is no, you’re not yet valuable enough in the eyes of the people you want on your unsigned team, and fixing that needs to become a focus.

It Starts with 2 or 3

The person of value doesn’t actually have to be you. It might be a co-founder, an early hire, your Chief of Staff - whoever the best people would genuinely want to know. If and when you have an internal recruiter, it should most definitely be them. And for what it’s worth, an internal recruiter that the market doesn’t see as a person of value is an internal recruiter who is not fit to do the job.

Once your person of value is in place, the work begins. But you shouldn’t immediately try to map out every excellent person from the beginning. This isn’t just a spreadsheet or a data collection exercise. You’re not listing the top 20 or 50 people in each function and working down the rows. Your first goal is to find 2 or 3 genuinely exceptional people in each relevant function, and meet them - that’s it, for now.

From those 2 or 3, the introductions come. You ask who else they rate, and you build out from there, one strong person at a time. This is a slow and active process. You’re meeting these people, taking them to breakfast, potentially hosting the odd event to get in front of them - putting in the same effort you would to win your most important customer. At some point in the future, you’ll be asking some of them to deliver more value than your most important customer - trust that this is worth your time.

If it feels easy - if you’re meeting dozens of people and every one seems brilliant - you’re almost certainly aiming too low. Once your unsigned team is in place, keeping it fresh is not all that difficult, but the initial setup and assembly should feel like challenging and slow, but worthwhile progress.

Calibrating the Bar

Perhaps the hardest part of this entire process is comprehending and calibrating to where the bar must initially be set for your unsigned team.

The unfortunate truth is that many reading this will not yet have met someone who operates at the very top of their respective field. Most startups believe they hire at the top. But most startups actually hire in a bracket that is above average, but two or three brackets below the top. From the inside, and when there’s no ‘top bracket’ person around to compare to, it’s almost impossible to tell exactly what bracket you’re hiring in.

Anyone who has played sport at a semi-serious level understands the size of the talent gap. The distance between the best professionals, ‘bad’ professionals, semi-pros, great hobbyists, and average players isn’t a few percent at each step - it’s an order of magnitude. For most hobbyists, the best player they’ll have ever played with in the flesh may be semi-pro, and most semi-pro players aren’t even remotely close to a good professional, let alone the very best.

This is, unfortunately, very difficult to a) comprehend and b) calibrate without clear comparisons. Unless you already know what someone exceptional looks like, it is hard to know whether the person in front of you is actually exceptional, or just better than what you’ve seen. Top 5% will look remarkably impressive if your existing team is top 10%. Everyone in your unsigned team will be well within the top 1% - or ‘world class’.

Although it’s not foolproof, your best bet is to look for work that is genuinely world class to find these people, rather than looking directly for the people in the hope that they’ve done world class work. Behind world class work, such as a world class product experience, marketing campaign, user interface, technological masterpiece, or whatever else, will be clusters of world class people. Find the work, and uncover who’s behind it.

Be clear about what you’re looking for. World class doesn’t mean 10% better. It means 10x, 20x, 30x better. It’s also not cheap. World class talent is well paid and well regarded, and almost never some undiscovered bargain nobody else has spotted.

What It Looks Like When It’s Working

Once your unsigned team is in place, hiring will become noticeably easier. Building it is hard - keeping it alive mostly comes down to staying in touch and continuing to be useful.

For some of those people, that may mean a proper catch-up once a quarter. For others the relationship may be far more ongoing, where you’re speaking or perhaps even collaborating on a regular basis. It doesn’t have to be in person, and it doesn’t have to be formal or an exact science. As a loose rule, though, if you (or whoever in your company owns this) are speaking to someone on your unsigned team less than once a quarter, they’re probably at risk of drifting away and being harder to convert when you need them.

Through all of this you’re still adding value, of course, but you’re not only proving that you’re worth knowing, you’re building the case that the opportunity to work for your company at some point is worth having. Over time, the people in your unsigned team should become more and more familiar with the calibre of your actual team, what they might own, and why this could be something worth moving for when the timing is finally right. You become a person of value, and the company becomes an opportunity of value, at the same time.

Not everyone you meet will make the unsigned team, even if they are above your bar, and that is fine. If it becomes clear that someone is never going to be the right fit, or that you’re never going to be right for them, you can let the relationship be whatever it naturally is. They don’t need to stay on the unsigned team, and keeping people on it out of politeness only clutters it.

The whole thing pays off in a really obvious way when you actually need to hire. When a role opens, or someone’s circumstances change, there will rarely be any need to post an advert, begin sourcing, send lots of outreach, interview people below your bar, or go to an external hiring specialist (like me). You’ll simply go to your unsigned team, speak to the people where timing is right, interview them properly (this is as much for them as it is for you), and hire them. You’ll open and close most roles in a matter of days, and will hire people who are quite noticeably better than whoever you’d likely have hired if ramped up a proper search internally.

When Hiring Stops Being a Fire

In truth, most who read this may carry on treating hiring as something to switch on when they’re desperate and off when they’re not, starting from scratch every time a role opens. It works, in the narrow sense that roles do eventually get filled. But it’s slow when you most need it to be fast, it’s stressful, and it often caps the calibre of who you end up with, because the best people are almost never going to go from not knowing you to working for you in a matter of weeks (without a trusted introduction).

The unsigned team is the other, correct way to do it. It’s harder to set up and far less dramatic, but once it exists, hiring stops being a fire to put out. The right people already know you, already rate the team, and are already waiting for the timing to line up. This is how you get to the position this guide started with, where 80-90% of your hiring happens without an active search. The best hire you make next year might be someone you meet tomorrow, and that is how the best startup teams get built.

The 10-20%

None of this, even when done correctly, means you will never have to ‘ramp up’ again. Your unsigned team covers most of your hiring, not all of it.

Some roles you simply won’t hire often enough to justify building a standing group around them - roles where you will only ever have one, two, or three people in the whole company, at the very top of their field, often with a specific combination of skills that may be hard to predict until you need them. Maybe you’re opening a market you haven’t operated in yet. Maybe the shape of the company has just changed - you can’t plan for everything. Either way, there will be searches where you don’t have the relationships, and no realistic amount of pre-invested effort would have been enough to fix that.

Scouut maintains our own unsigned team who see us as people of value, and who respect and trust our recommendation to have a conversation with the clients we represent. Our unsigned team consists of top bracket candidates in ultra-senior Staff, Principal and Leadership level technical roles that may only make up a small percentage of your hiring, but 100% of ours.

For when you can’t quite secure that person yourself, we probably can, and you’re welcome to ask.