Tales from the AI hiring frenzy

This is an excerpt from the sources written by Alex Heath, a newsletter about artificial intelligence and technology industry, which was only transferred to traffic subscribers once a week.

An advertisement board did not say “Listen Laborators”. Nothing said about employment. It consisted of a simple white background with “https: //” and one line of the combined numbers hanging over Nub Hill, San Francisco.

Last month, Alfred Wahlforss, CEO of startup, posted on X that everyone who broke the code and completed a challenge later will win a trip to Berlin and get a list of guests to get a sucking nightclub.

Wahllforss later told me that one of the most exciting works to recruit technology in modern memory has succeeded. Within a few days, the advertising board got millions of views online, attracted media coverage, collected 10,000 email records, and led to nearly 60 interviews with potential candidates.

In the recent conversations I had with Wahllforss and other startups of startups, it is clear that, even for well -funded companies, attracting higher technical talents is more challenging than ever. “We spend a lot of money so that we do not announce the company, but only to announce to us for engineers,” according to Wahllforss, whose company raised $ 27 million from Sequoia. “It was very difficult to use good people. I have a high school -leaking friend, and he can work in Openai and make $ 2 million a year.”

Wahlforss told me about a modern candidate that loved biking. His founder appeared at the candidate’s house with a high -end carbon road bail. The gesture helped pay the candidate to reduce other offers. Often, he said it is impossible to compete with the largest names in AI and Big Tech. “You spend hours with people who end up your refusal and go to Antarbur. It is very painful.”

You don’t have to look far to hear similar stories of rejection. Usten Hughes, CEO of UNIFY, an Amnesty International sales platform that raised more than 50 million dollars, has a desirable candidate painting. But Openai shows three times the compensation that UNIFY can provide. The filter took the money and kept the plate.

Jesse Chang, CEO of Decagon, feels the same pressure despite the operation of a 1.5 billion dollar startups. He told me when I asked about the difficulty of employment: “It is one of the things I think of a day.” Decgon pulled the classic cranes to attract candidates, such as hosting a luxurious dinner with its investor, Access, and offering Courtside tickets to Warrors. Zhang said he went to South Bay recently and met a candidate family.

However, the most reliable tactic he mentioned was not at all delight: “All the great tenants whom we made in the first 100 people were all just people I knew.” Hughes said that his team in UNINIRE is emerging their LinkedIn networks to the Google shared paper and creating an index match to find the best candidates with the most employee communications.

So who are all these companies that are chasing? Through my conversations, an ongoing model appeared: “AI Product Engineer” can quickly use the latest artificial intelligence tools without “charging” and can also do the mission of the product manager. “The intersection of being very technically and also the product axis is very small,” according to wa letters. The swimming pool, which consists of a few thousand people at most, is estimated at most, and each has “ten offers” at any specific moment.

While Openai and Anthropic are still seen as one of the most desirable places to work in these types of people, the abstinence that I have heard over and over from the founders is that large AI laboratories have become quickly unable to distinguish from the rest of the large technology. While Wahlforss frame it, the start -up edge tells a recruiter that could be “like a mini -founder” and “Building products from Top to Perfume”.

First degree investors and well -known brands help in margins, but another consensus is that the maximum glowing table does not matter now because many startups finance them well. Zhang believes that recruitment madness will not last forever. He said that there are many startups of artificial intelligence, and at some point, the bubble will explode. The problem is that no one knows when.