. SEEDTABLE

November 29th | #52

This week in Europe: Great Talent is like Flying First Class

A few weeks ago, Paris-based Welcome to The Jungle raised €20 million (on top of an €8 million raise last year) to “make recruitment easier” by proposing a wide variety of high-quality content to help companies showcase their culture and young professionals find work.

Smart? Sure. Unique? Hell, no.

Welcome to The Jungle is just one of many, many (many) startups that raised money to take on the $157 billion that the talent recruitment space is worth.

Some companies in the recruitment space

I guess that $157 billion is an attractive enough incentive.

Today’s edition is going to look at the talent and recruitment industry, analyze why there is a craze for “talent” and why all this is stupid.

How and why you should identify Great Talent

The best way to figure out if someone is great at their job is if after working with them, you can’t go back to working with a “normal {role}” anymore.

You should know a few people like that. That engineer who can figure out a way to implement a complex feature in a few days, that designer who can take a shitty wireframe and turn it into a beautiful, high-converting landing page or that marketer who can grow whatever you put in front of them.

Just like it’s impossible to go back to sitting next to Joe on a middle seat in row 47 after flying First Class, you’ve been spoiled by great people.

Great companies are exclusively built by these great people. Can we agree on that? So the logical consequence is that the only way to build a great company is hiring lots and lots of great people.

The cool (and the shitty) thing about hiring is that hiring is a loop.

(Sidenote: I feel like a stupid-er version of Ben Thompson and aggregators, but yeah. Loops again.)

Talent loops at the company level

When discussing tech ecosystems, I believe that Gresham’s Law applied to Talent Markets makes it so that you are either growing (and attracting talent) or decaying (and pushing talent out).

Talent follows talent of a similar caliber, and when Good Talent is concentrated on a single geo area, money and opportunities gravitate towards that point as well.

Because a company is just like a city, but at a smaller scale,