Startup Hiring Advice from Lever CEO Sarah Nahm with Holly Liu

TL;DR

Sarah Nahm, CEO of Lever, recounts her nonlinear path from design consulting and Google to founding Lever, driven by a belief that talent is the key differentiator in a knowledge-work economy. She asserts that hiring is a founder’s number one job, and recommends proactive outbound recruiting, impact-based (not skill-based) job descriptions, motivation fit as the first interview stage, and building

Key insights

• Sarah did not plan to be a founder; she studied design, worked as a speechwriter at Google, and only gradually built toward starting Lever after experimenting with different teams and cofounders.
• The product idea at Lever was not clear for ~2.5 years; they built an incremental solution, threw it out based on customer feedback, and defined the problem iteratively.
• 81% of Lever’s engineering org was proactively sourced, and hires who were nurtured for 2–3 years get hired 35% faster than first-time contacts.