How early-stage startups should approach hiring, culture, and inclusion

Executive overview

The biggest constraint on startup growth is not product or funding — it's talent. Hiring is strategy, and founders who treat it as an afterthought will hold their own companies back.

Sarah Nahm, CEO of Lever, shares a concrete playbook for proactive sourcing, motivation-fit interviewing, writing impact descriptions instead of job descriptions, and building inclusive culture from day one.

The shortest path to strong results is becoming genuinely great at hiring.

Founding story and the leap to starting Lever

• Left Google not to start a company, but to grow — founding emerged gradually, not from a lightning-strike moment
• Co-founders "auditioned" each other through collaborations before officially committing; co-founder fit credited as a key driver of success
• Core belief that launched Lever (2012): talent was becoming the primary driver of competitive differentiation as software ate every industry
• Built a full product, got feedback that it was merely incremental, scrapped it, and rebuilt from customer truth

Why founders must treat hiring as their primary job

• A great founder who hasn't prioritised hiring will actively hold the company back
• Hiring is not an HR function at the early stage — it is the strategy
• Founders should expect to spend ~50% of their time on hiring; the cliché exists because it's true
• Culture is defined by who you hire, who you fire, who you promote, and how you do all of those things

Proactive sourcing beats job postings

• Posting a job and waiting is the wrong default; go outbound the same way you'd go outbound for customers
• Start with your network, but plan for it to run dry — diversify sourcing early
• Non-obvious sources: Meetups, Eventbrite, GitHub, book clubs
• 81% of Lever's engineering team was proactively sourced
• Candidates who have been nurtured over time are hired 35% faster than first-time contacts
• Invest in relationships with a 2–3 year horizon; when someone is ready to move, they already know you

Helping your team recruit authentically

• People feel awkward selling job opportunities to friends; address this directly
• Run a team offsite focused on helping everyone articulate their authentic "why I joined" story
• No need to pitch anyone — just sharing a genuine story is a powerful recruiting tool
• Enable employees to build that personal narrative before expecting them to recruit

Motivation fit as a hiring stage

• Lever's first hiring stage is called motivation fit — not a phone screen
• Questions to ask: Where are you taking your career? What past decisions felt most meaningful? What do you want more of? What are you not getting now?
• Listen for: comfort with ambiguity, desire for real scope, self-awareness about what impact means to them personally
• Generalised "I'm looking for impact" is a red flag; specificity signals maturity
• Finding people who thrive with ambiguity is essential at the early stage

Behavioural interviewing and career trajectory

• Brain teasers reveal little; concrete examples from a candidate's own career reveal patterns
• Use behavioural interviewing — ask people to walk through their career chronologically from college onward
• Listen for patterns of success and patterns of failure, then match to your company's contours
• Lever's process is adapted from "top grading" — easily searchable for founders who want a template
• Particularly valuable for roles you've never personally performed

Impact descriptions replace job descriptions

• After their Series A, Lever built internal "impact docs": what should this hire achieve at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months, framed as outcomes not tasks
• Candidates lit up when shown these docs; it took six months to realise they should just use them as job postings
• Impact descriptions attract top-decile talent because high performers want to know what they'll own
• They also broaden the applicant pool — removing lengthy skill requirements removes implicit signals about who "belongs"
• Inclusive by design: non-traditional backgrounds, career changers, and "tech outsiders" self-select in rather than out
• Skills lists are used sparingly, only for entry-level roles with genuinely hard prerequisites

Remote work trade-offs

• Remote hiring expands the talent market but requires culture infrastructure to support it as a first-class experience
• Think through: how meetings work, how information flows, how tribal knowledge is documented
• Lever stayed co-located intentionally until late-stage; credits this for accelerating culture-building and knowledge transfer
• Go eyes wide open: if you cast a wide net, prepare the culture first

Building inclusive culture from day one

• Inclusion is not about demographic representation first — it's about making the culture ready to support diverse hires when they arrive
• Founders in a majority shouldn't conclude they lack credibility to lead on D&I; waiting until demographics improve is a common and costly mistake
• Surface area of culture is everywhere: who does the dishes, which holidays you recognise, how you run meetings
• Culture surfaces will appear unexpectedly; what matters is building the capability to surface them, discuss them, and act

Practical inclusion mechanisms at Lever

• A Slackbot assigned rotational dish duty after research showed women disproportionately did office chores — simple, immediate, symbolic
• Revised the holiday calendar after employee feedback flagged missing recognition (e.g. Martin Luther King Day); used the moment to establish that holiday scheduling is cultural surface area
• Ramp Camp (week-long onboarding): all new hires, all functions, including an explicit D&I session in the first week
• Employee resource groups (ERGs) cover 65% of employees; groups are asked to help draft real policies, not just exist
• Manager group coaching runs every six months; managers are key vectors for spreading inclusive practice
• Colour-based personality assessments (used in Ramp Camp) give everyone shared language for discussing difference without invoking demographics or stereotypes

Dismantling the technical/non-technical divide

• Silicon Valley's ingrained hierarchy around "technical" people creates self-handicapping in non-engineers and blind spots in engineers
• Lever ran internal workshops ("I'm technical and so are you") to spread engineering mindset to all functions
• Engineers were pushed to deeply understand customers and go-to-market; non-engineers were pushed to build scalable systems thinking
• The stereotype was holding the company back on both sides