Hiring Top Talent - A Course for Founders

Cohort-based Course

Learn the industry-vetted hiring practices that work for every stage—from building your founding team to your first 100 hires, and beyond.

Hiring Top Talent - A Course for Founders

Cohort-based Course

Learn the industry-vetted hiring practices that work for every stage—from building your founding team to your first 100 hires, and beyond.

Hosted by

Adam Ward and Jill Macri

Course overview

A three-part series designed to help founders engage, assess, & close top talent

Great leaders know how to attract great talent. But hiring isn’t about luck or magic, it’s a skill.

Learn the fundamentals of attracting, assessing, and closing the best talent to support the growth of your product and your culture. In this course, you'll be given tools, frameworks, and tactics for efficient and effective hiring for early and growth-stage companies.

Who is the course for?

Seed to mid-stage founders who do not have a recruiting team in place.

Executive leaders at any stage looking to put on their "Head of Talent" hat.

Seed to mid-stage founders who do not have a recruiting team in place.

Executive leaders at any stage looking to put on their "Head of Talent" hat.

What you’ll get out of this course

Candidate engagement and discovery best practices

You’ll learn three ways to build a healthy candidate pipeline.

A step-by-step process to assess talent and hire for values

You’ll learn how to choose the right candidates for your company.

Three key skills for successfully closing candidates

You’ll learn how to close strategically and get candidates to accept your offer.

What people are saying

Growth by Design are a true partner and the best recruiting team I have ever worked with. They take the time to understand your business and then through a combination of data, rigor, expertise, and focus help you build out a world-class team. I could not recommend them highly enough.

Michael Akkerman

Cardlytics, Chief Product & Strategy Officer

I appreciated GBD providing us with actual exercises and frameworks for understanding candidate motivations. Thank you for an amazing workshop series.

Dave Chung

Twelve Labs COO & Co-Founder

A great opportunity to cover a breadth of topics, taught by world class recruiting leaders. Good mix of open sessions, shared experiences, and lessons learned over the years.

Julie Smith

Greylock, Partners Talent

The longer you've been around in this industry, the harder it is to find great mentors. Every person on GBD's team has had success at the highest levels in talent acquisition. It's like getting all of the answers to the test for the hardest questions we'll face in scaling companies.

Chris Shaw

Apollo, Vice President of Talent Acquisition

Excellent crash course into the framework needed to scale. Helps you understand what the unknown-unknowns are and gives you the tools to build your own customized recruiting machine.

Arthur Chang

Sonder, Chief of Staff & VP of Strategic Initiatives.

The balance between content presentation and real-world scenarios in break-out rooms made this more real. I had one manager who came from a larger company say: "This is the most in depth training of this kind that I've ever had."

Becca Axvig

Mux, Head of Employee Success

They’re not only builders but true consultants; they’ll help dig into the problems with you and find the underlying issue you’re trying to solve, and will help guide you through it with their expertise (or if they don’t know, they’ll look into it). I definitely appreciate their diligence!

Stefan Young

BREX, Head of People Analytics and Compensation

If you work with the Growth By Design Talent team, you'll have the good fortune to geek out with the industry's best and brightest. They've managed and extinguished the fires that you're probably walking through right now, and you'll benefit from their experience and intellect.

Kanji Kawanabe

Valora, People Partner

GBD came strongly recommended with high expectations and exceeded even those. Having worked with a variety of recruiters over the years, I can say hands down this team is just in a different league.

Justin Barad

Osso VR, Founder & CEO

Meet your instructor

Adam Ward

Founding Partner, Growth by Design Talent

Adam has been recruiting for start-ups and high-growth tech companies since his sophomore year of college. Since then, he’s led recruiting teams at both iconic companies during their early growth stages and early stage startups. At Facebook, Adam was one of the first recruiting leaders, building the engineering teams through their IPO. At Pinterest, he led the recruiting function as the company grew from 200 to 2,000 in his five years there.

In 2019, Adam took his breadth of recruiting experience and co-founded Growth by Design Talent. Since its inception, Adam has worked with over 100 early and growth-stage companies and their founders — including Airtable, Figma, ClassDojo, Brex — to establish the recruiting foundation needed to help them scale quickly and with intention.

Jill Macri

Founding Partner, Growth by Design Talent

Jill specializes in recruiting that supports growth without sacrificing values and mission. Previous to co-founding Growth by Design Talent, she was the Director of Global Recruiting at Airbnb for over five years, growing the company from 150 to 4,500 people, with a focus on building diverse teams and maintaining values.

Through her consulting work the last four years, Jill has worked with over 100 companies and founders, including Figma, Noom, Plaid, and Airtable, advising leaders on how to operationalize hiring the best talent for their companies. She's especially passionate about supporting women in leadership roles.

Be the first to know about upcoming cohorts

Hiring Top Talent - A Course for Founders

Get reimbursed

Bulk purchases

Course syllabus

How to find and engage great talent

Top candidates are getting tons of messages each week from companies trying to hire them. How do you stand out among the crowd? We’ll teach you how to build credibility as an early-stage company, and what the data says about optimizing your outreach messages so that candidates will actually respond.

How to assess talent and effectively hire for values

It’s one thing to define your company values; it’s another to actually assess candidates for those values effectively. We’ll demystify how to hire for values in a way that enriches your culture, prioritizes diversity, & reduces bias. You’ll also learn how to make predictive hiring decisions based on true qualifications, as you scale.

How to make compelling offers to top talent

If you’ve ever been surprised by an offer decline, this is the session for you. You’ll learn a closing framework based on what the best recruiters know: closing happens from the first time you talk with a candidate. Learn how to connect deeply with candidates, how pitching candidates is different from investors, how to best frame equity, & more.

Course schedule

Three 90-minute sessions

April 5, 2023
10:00am - 11:30am PST
April 12, 2023
10:00am - 11:30am PST
April 19, 2023
10:00am - 11:30am PST

Learning is better with cohorts

Active hands-on learning

Trainings are highly interactive and facilitated 100% virtually. Participants will be given tools and tactics that can be implemented immediately.

Interactive

This is not a webinar—you’ll get to meet and learn from other founders and leaders through breakout rooms and group discussions.

Learn with a cohort of peers

The format is designed with a combination of content delivery, small group discussions, and interactivity.

Practical and applicable

We focus on practical advice, not just high level theory. You'll leave each session with a workbook and optional (but highly encouraged!) homework, to apply learnings right away.

Small group format

We keep our trainings small to maximize your learning during live sessions. That said, throughout the course our facilitators are available for one-off questions in between sessions as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens if I can’t make a live session?

I work full-time, what is the expected time commitment?

What’s the refund policy?

What other materials and support will I have?

Hiring Top Talent - A Course for Founders

Get reimbursed

Bulk purchases