The Pre-Need Talent Pipeline
Build relationships with great people long before you have a role open, with no agenda.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
Ipsen's central recurring theme is that the best hiring happens before you need to hire. Founders should always keep a pulse on the market, meet great people with 'no agenda,' and harvest those relationships over months so that when a need arises they already know who is exceptional. This is the long game that separates founders who are great at hiring.
Origin
Lauren Ipsen; illustrated with a 7-month advising-to-hire courtship she ran for a VP of Engineering at Daversa Partners.
Core principles
- 01Regardless of whether you're hiring, always keep a pulse on the market
- 02The 'no agenda' framing flatters people and lowers their defensive walls
- 03Relationships built outside a formal, transactional interview build a different level of rapport and trust
- 04Play the long game — people are not a commodity
How to run it
- 1
Map who is thriving
Continuously track which companies are thriving and which individuals are building great things and are well-known commodities in their organizations, even when no role is open.
Pro tip Ask investors, board members, and trusted people 'who are the best product leaders you know?' — there is always someone who can point you to another three or four.
- 2
Reach out with genuinely no agenda
Tell benchmark people 'I'm not trying to hire you tomorrow, I just want to know great people and pick your brain.' Executives find this fulfilling and different from their day-to-day monotony, so they engage.
Pro tip People 'want to pour their knowledge especially into companies that they believe in' — lead with curiosity, not a pitch.
Watch out The moment someone senses they're being poached, the walls go up — keep it authentically open-ended.
- 3
Ingrain them before the need
Bring the best people in as advisors or get them involved with the product before you have the specific hiring need. Ask how they would structure the org and who they'd recommend.
Pro tip Find non-creepy excuses to stay top of mind — show up to an event you know they're attending, reference a talk they gave.
- 4
Harvest the relationship into a hire when timing aligns
Keep warm contact over months. When their own life brings them to a moment of looking, you are already the trusted person positioned to move.
Pro tip Keep calendar notes on personal timing signals (e.g., a vesting date) so your outreach lands when they're actually receptive.
Watch out Don't let it feel transactional at the conversion moment — the rapport is what makes the move feel natural.
In the wild
At Daversa, the VP of Engineering candidate they ultimately landed was 'a seven month game of course ship' — bringing him in to advise, asking how he'd structure the org, and asking him to recommend talent, rather than running a formal interview process.
→ The collaborative, non-transactional approach built rapport and trust that let them land an incredible hire.
Lenny describes Airbnb tech talks where each existing engineer was assigned a target recruit, given their profile and photo, and tasked with ensuring the target had a great time and staying top of mind.
→ Ipsen confirms 'it works' — a deliberate stay-top-of-mind tactic that landed engineers over time.
Common mistakes
Only starting to build a network once the role is urgent
Blindly reaching out on LinkedIn under a time crunch means calling unknown entities and asking for back-channel references from people who may not even feel comfortable sharing the truth — a far weaker position than tapping trusted relationships you already built.
Treating people as a commodity
When you have a quota and a mortgage it's tempting to think only about numbers, but transactional treatment makes people lose trust, and once trust is lost it's impossible to get back.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and hiring managers who know they'll need senior hires within 6-18 months and want to be selective, not scrambling
Not ideal for
An emergency backfill that must close this week with no pre-existing network to draw on
From the transcript
“regardless of whether or not you're hiring you should always be keeping a pulse on the market that is the most important thing”
“using them from advising capacity or getting them ingrained in some type of involvement in the product prior to actually having that specific need”
“by simply saying No Agenda I'm not trying to hire you tomorrow I just want to know great people”
“the VP of engineering candidate that we ultimately landed it was a seven month game of course ship”
“you have to play the long game because people aren't just a commodity”
From the episode
Lessons from one of the world’s top executive recruiters
Lauren Ipsen (Daversa Partners, General Catalyst)