Hiring as Marketing, Sales and Product
Run recruiting like a business funnel — brand, discovery call, and an iterative role spec
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Shah maps hiring onto the three motions of a business. Marketing: what has a candidate already inferred about you before they walk in — do they know anyone there, have they read your posts, are you even worth interviewing? Sales: understand the one or two things that actually motivate this person, exactly as you would a buyer's pain points. Product: the job description is a spec, and specs are supposed to be iterative — so mould the role around the outstanding person in front of you rather than fitting them to a frozen requisition.
Origin
Jason Shah's own synthesis, built by hiring across the full spectrum: a zero-person startup trying to convince a Google engineer to join; Amazon and Airbnb with world-class recruiting orgs, formal calibrations and interview panels; and Alchemy, where it's scrappy and the founders still meet every candidate. The 'sales' leg comes directly from his failure at outbound sales at do.com, where he pitched features instead of listening to buyers' pain points.
Core principles
- 01The label shapes the behaviour: 'hiring' and 'recruiting' sound like admin. Reframe it as 'the people you will work with every day' and it becomes obviously the most important thing a leader does.
- 02Founders reportedly spend 30-40% of their time on recruiting because deep down everyone understands how valuable it is.
- 03Marketing is lower-case: reputation and authentic brand, not a hard sell. Anything inauthentic ultimately fails.
- 04Sales is listening, not matching: understand who they are and what motivates them, don't mirror back whatever they say.
- 05Care about the post-hire outcome as much as the pre-hire close — you want them to work out, be happy, and be effective.
- 06Job descriptions are the only product spec nobody ever iterates on: written once, posted, ignored until someone is hired, then deleted.
How to run it
- 1
Reframe recruiting as the job, not the overhead
Stop calling it hiring or recruiting in your head. Call it choosing the people who will make the company what it is. That reframe alone changes how much of your calendar it deserves.
- 2
Marketing — build the inference before they arrive
Ask what a candidate has already concluded about you and the company before they step in the door. Do they know anybody who works there? Have they read your posts? Are you a known quantity? Are they even willing to take the interview? Invest in an authentic company and personal brand so the answer is yes.
Pro tip This is the top of the funnel and it is entirely built before any specific role opens. It cannot be manufactured on demand.
Watch out A hard sell, or any inauthentic positioning, will ultimately fail. Lower-case marketing only.
- 3
Sales — find their one or two real motivations
Treat the candidate like a buyer with pain points. Does this engineer want to be in a world-class engineering organisation? Are they primarily excited about crypto and looking for a way in? Understand who they actually are and what motivates them — then honestly assess whether you are the best place for that.
Pro tip Shah's outbound sales at do.com failed because he pitched features while CROs cared about revenue and heads of people cared about culture. Same error, different funnel.
Watch out This is not about misdirecting or parroting back whatever they say. If you are not the right place for their motivation, the post-hire outcome fails anyway.
- 4
Product — treat the job description as an iterable spec
Recognise that a JD is a product spec — responsibilities, requirements, qualifications — that gets written once and never iterated, which is absurd for a product person. When you meet someone who would clearly be a rockstar but doesn't map to an open req or a clean seniority band, mould the role instead of rejecting the person.
Pro tip Iterate the role against both the candidates you're actually meeting and the evolving needs of the business — the Airbnb Plus model: don't just write the doc and stop, go build the rooms, change the pillows, change the entrance, change the scent, and learn.
Watch out This is the leg almost nobody does, and it's the one that lets you hire outstanding people the requisition process would have filtered out.
- 5
Craft the role so the person actually succeeds
Close by designing the role around what makes this specific person effective, rather than checking a box in the recruiting software as a filled headcount. The success metric is a person who works out, is happy, and is effective — not an offer accepted.
In the wild
At Alchemy, Shah pushed to hire for 'growth operations', which is not a standard function alongside growth product and growth marketing, particularly in web3. The founders were unsure — it isn't even a real thing, and the candidates were unconventional.
→ The product mindset applied to hiring: rather than fitting candidates to an existing category, the role itself was treated as something you mould around the people and the business needs. Shah cites it as an active example of the framework.
Shah contrasts what Airbnb actually did with the write-a-doc-and-stop approach. For Airbnb Plus, the team didn't just produce a working-backwards document — they went and physically built rooms and homes, then iterated: changed the pillows, changed the entrance, changed the scent you notice when you walk in, coached hosts and learned from it.
→ The analogy he draws for hiring: a role, like a product, gets better through iteration against reality, not through one-shot specification.
Common mistakes
Treating the job description as final
The JD is written, posted, and then nobody thinks about it again until someone is hired and it's taken down. Product people iterate everything except the one spec that determines who joins their team.
Selling features instead of listening
The same mistake Shah made at do.com — pitching what you can do rather than discovering the one or two things the person actually cares about. In hiring it produces accepted offers by candidates who leave, because the motivation was never matched.
Optimising for the box, not the outcome
Filling headcount in the recruiting software is not the goal. Shah is as concerned with the post-hire step — do they work out, are they happy, are they effective — as with closing them, because a hire that doesn't work out is a negative-value hire.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and hiring managers at scrappy or early-stage companies without a world-class recruiting org, competing for talent against much larger, better-known employers.
Not ideal for
High-volume hiring into standardised roles where a stable, comparable requisition and structured process is the point, and role-moulding would break calibration and fairness.
From the transcript
“i like to think of it in very similar motions to a business where i think there is a marketing aspect to it there's a…”
“and what's really funny about that is that product is very iterative but somehow we just write a job description and then it's fake it's…”
“i found to be really effective at getting people excited understanding who they are and what they need and then crafting a role that actually…”
“but if people reframe it as like the people you are going to work with every day or the”
“and i think similarly in this context do they want to work if they're an engineer do they want to work in a world-class engineering…”
From the episode
Building a meaningful career
Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)