Building a top-tier team requires the same continuous effort as building a sales pipeline. Leaders should not passively rely on HR or external recruiters. Instead, they must actively and continuously 'pipeline generate' for A-player candidates, treating recruiting as a core, non-delegable responsibility to handpick their ideal team.

Hiring managers often create AI-specific roles thinking it attracts experts. Instead, they should frame job descriptions around the complex problems the business needs to solve. This attracts true problem-solvers who can learn any necessary technology, rather than individuals skilled at keyword optimization.

To find top talent, Puberty Group posts job openings on its own social media pages. This unconventional method yielded 15,000 applicants for a single role. It creates a funnel of candidates who are already fans, ensuring they understand the brand's voice and are passionate about the work.

The same marketing funnels used to acquire paying customers can be directly applied to attract and 'close' new employees. This reframes recruiting from a siloed HR function to a core marketing activity, allowing you to leverage skills you already have to build your team.

When a company consistently misses sales goals, the root cause may not be the sales strategy but a failure in the hiring pipeline. A high employee churn rate combined with an inefficient screening process starves the sales team of the necessary manpower to hit its targets.

Your hiring funnel has an ideal customer profile, just like sales. Analyze your top-performing employees to identify common demographics, past experiences, and behaviors. Use this 'avatar' to filter applications and target your sourcing efforts, increasing the likelihood of success for new hires.

Frame your job search as a multi-month enterprise sales cycle. Your goal is to run a discovery process, identify deep organizational pain, build champions across departments, and present yourself as the only viable solution.

Conventional hiring—opening a role and then searching—is inefficient. Chesky advocates for 'pipeline recruiting,' a continuous process of meeting the best people in a field, asking them for introductions to other top talent, and building a deep rolodex long before a specific need arises.

Businesses are constrained by either demand (not enough customers) or supply (not enough talent). While they seem like different issues, the fundamental solution is the same: promotion. You promote to attract new customers, and you promote to attract new employees. It's the same core activity aimed at a different audience.