Building the Talent Engine: Hiring Your First Recruiter

For the last decade I have joined recruiting functions from the earliest stages at Palantir, Uber, and Sonder, and from the ground up at Threads. Now in my role advising the Craft portfolio on hiring, one of the most common questions I hear from founders is: “When should we hire our first recruiter?”

There’s no perfect moment or milestone. In reality, the timing depends on one thing: your readiness to build recruiting as a core company function.

It’s a lot to cover so I’ve broken it into two posts. This first blog covers when to bring on a recruiter and what that hire should look like. My second post will dive into your first recruiter vs. first head of talent, when a recruiter should leverage external agencies, and how to get the whole team involved in the recruiting flywheel. Let’s jump in.

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Doing the Math

The cost of a first recruiter is not trivial. In the US tech industry, compensation typically ranges from $150,000–$200,000+ depending on experience and growth trajectory from IC to manager. You need to have enough consistent headcount growth to make this investment worthwhile.

In a nutshell: if you plan to hire more than one person per month over the next 12 months, you should bring recruiting in-house.

Let’s do the math. Agencies typically charge 20–25% of first-year salary for individual contributor roles. For a $150,000 engineer, that is a $30,000-$37,500 fee. For an executive hire, fees are often 33% or more, which means a $300,000 VP hire can cost you $100,000 in agency fees. If you expect to make 12–15 hires in a year, agency fees can run $500,000-$750,000. Not only is an in-house recruiter cheaper, but you are investing in someone who will build repeatable processes and improve hiring outcomes over time.

Laying the groundwork for scale

A strong first recruiter doesn’t just fill open roles. They lay the groundwork for a scalable hiring engine that helps make data-driven decisions:

• Setting up an applicant tracking system
• Establishing structured interview processes
• Building an amazing candidate experience
• Creating scorecards that reduce bias and improve hiring consistency
• Tracking metrics such as time-to-fill and onsite-to-offer conversion rates, and overall funnel health
• Training and educating interviewers on how to evaluate candidates based on the company’s values

Candidates judge your company not just on your product, but on how you run your interview process. A recruiter, along with the executive team, designs the candidate experience to be competitive against other companies and ensures candidates leave every interaction feeling respected and excited about the mission and team.

Most importantly, recruiters protect founders’ and hiring managers’ time. Every hour spent interviewing or sourcing is an hour not spent building product or selling. A recruiter ensures that your time is focused on the top candidates most likely to succeed and accept the offer.

What Makes a Great First Recruiter

Your first recruiter needs to be more than someone who can post jobs and schedule calls. They must be a builder: someone who thrives in ambiguity, communicates consistently, and knows how to keep founders and hiring managers aligned.

A strong recruiter has an operations mindset. They track funnel metrics and diagnose where candidates are dropping out. They report weekly on pipeline health, anticipated challenges and recommended solutions. For example: “We have 15 candidates in process, but our screen-to-onsite conversion is low. I recommend adjusting sourcing criteria and adding an earlier technical screen.” Or: “We are losing senior engineers on comp. Let’s expand to new markets; I will provide benchmarks.”

Influence and expectation setting are hallmark qualities. Great recruiters can rally reluctant hiring managers, push back on unrealistic timelines, and make sure everyone is accountable. They are scrappy and hands-on, personally sourcing candidates to expand the top of the funnel.

Finally, they are builders. They can implement an applicant tracking system (ATS), design interview loops, train interviewers, and create playbooks. They are problem-solvers who adapt quickly when the market is tough or brand recognition is low. Above all, they have grit and thrive in messy, resource-constrained environments where persistence, speed, and creativity make the difference.

How to Evaluate Your First Recruiter

When interviewing candidates for this role, don’t stop at “have you filled roles like ours before?” Your goal is to understand whether they can build, influence, and communicate in a way that scales.

Ask for examples of processes they have created: implementing an ATS, building interview loops, or designing structured scorecards. Push for specifics on funnel metrics they have owned such as time-to-hire, screen-to-onsite ratio, and offer acceptance rate. Ask about a time they influenced a reluctant hiring manager or flagged a challenge early and paired it with a solution. Probe for examples such as when they had to fill difficult roles for a company without brand recognition or when they succeeded in closing candidates with many offers.

Ask them to prepare a short presentation that covers:

• Sourcing strategy and skills: How they approach building top-of-funnel. Strong recruiters do not rely solely on inbound applicants; they can identify target companies, use tools like LinkedIn Recruiter or new AI sourcing tools, and design creative outreach campaigns. A good way to test this is to have them show you sample profiles for one or two of your open roles. If your roles are not publicly listed, see if they proactively ask you for them — that resourcefulness itself is a positive signal. Their ability to find strong profiles, explain why they chose them, and describe how they would pitch your company reveals both hands-on sourcing ability and the strategic thinking required to keep your pipeline healthy long-term.
• Funnel metrics: Which top-to-bottom metrics they would track from day one and what “healthy” ratios look like. They should also explain how they would use those metrics to flag bottlenecks and make adjustments. This area should highlight that different roles will have different metrics.
• 30–60–90 plan: What they would do in the first month: implement ATS, build scorecards, run a sourcing jam; in the second month: calibrate funnel health, train interviewers, start reporting weekly; and in the third month: optimize conversion ratios, build referral programs, improve candidate experience.
• Anticipated challenges: Where they expect friction in your company’s current hiring process. For example: “hiring managers not returning feedback quickly” or “comp not competitive for senior engineers.” These should be paired with concrete solutions such as “weekly hiring manager check-ins with pipeline updates” or “expanding sourcing to new markets with comp benchmarks.”
• Activating the team: How they would engage founders, managers, and employees in the process. For example, setting up a weekly sourcing sprint where 10 employees each find 40 candidates, resulting in 400 new leads per week, or introducing a structured referral program with tiered incentives.

This exercise gives you insight into how they think, how they communicate, and whether they can both get into the weeds and step back to operate strategically. It also tests their ability to do what the best first recruiters do in practice: report clearly, anticipate problems, and bring forward solutions.

Stay tuned for part two of this series which will dive into more of the frequent topics I cover with founders when they’re thinking about standing up the recruiting function for the first time.