How to Recruit a Founding Team: Alex Contreras on Talent Acquisition for Early-Stage Startups

A Mother of Success Interview

Interview by: Xiao He
Featuring: Alex Contreras, Stealthmode Recruiting

“When you’re building a founding team, you want the best of the best. It’s like a house. The foundation has to be the strongest, or the house will collapse in an earthquake.”

Recruiting for an early-stage startup is fundamentally different from hiring at an established company. The company may have no recognizable brand, no recruiting infrastructure, and sometimes barely even a website. Meanwhile, the people founders most want to hire are often happily employed, and receiving recruiter messages every day.

Alex Contreras has spent years figuring out how to bridge that gap.

His path into recruiting was unconventional: he started in Facebook’s mailroom, supported the offices of senior executives, moved over to WhatsApp after its acquisition, and eventually found his way onto WhatsApp’s recruiting team. In 2018, he built Stealthmode Recruiting, which partners with early-stage startups and embeds directly into their hiring operations.

We talked about why recruiting passive candidates requires selling the mission before the job, why founders shouldn’t lead with a “996” work culture, how Stealthmode Recruiting operates as an extension of a startup’s internal team, how Alex spots suspicious LinkedIn profiles, what “Open to Work” can signal, and why the candidate experience matters long before an offer is made.

From Facebook’s Mailroom to WhatsApp Recruiting

Xiao He: Alex, I’d love to learn more about your story! I know you started at WhatsApp, and then you’ve been running your recruiting firm for more than eight years. Could you tell me about that journey?

Alex Contreras: It’s a very unique story, because I actually started my career in the mailroom at Facebook.

This was around 2012. Facebook wasn’t exactly small anymore. It had just IPO’d around that time, but one of my responsibilities was supporting the executive team.

On the mailroom side, I handled things for the C-level executives. I worked with a lot of executive assistants and their team. Back then, I think they called it the “M Team”, the management team.

I did that for a few years, and then Facebook acquired WhatsApp. I moved over to assist the WhatsApp team on the facilities and mailroom side.

That’s where I met WhatsApp’s recruiting team and its first recruiter, Brian. Brian and some of the other people there took me under their wing and helped me get into recruiting.

I started at the bottom as a recruiting coordinator. That’s really how my recruiting career began, and I built from there.

Eventually I graduated from WhatsApp, and in 2018 we started what became Stealthmode Recruiting. We began partnering with early-stage companies, generally from seed through Series D.

And it hasn’t been easy. Recruiting for early-stage companies is really difficult.

How Do You Convince Someone to Leave Big Tech and Join a Startup?

Alex: The challenge is that a lot of these companies barely exist in the eyes of candidates. They don’t have a brand yet. Some are literally still in stealth. They might have a splash page, and that’s it.

That’s actually where our name comes from. A lot of the companies we’ve supported, and continue to support, are in stealth.

And now, with this huge AI push, attracting talent is even more difficult.

How do you convince somebody to leave Anthropics, Ramps, Stripes, Metas, or Googles of the world and join a startup that has only been around for six or ten weeks?

That’s really hard.

You have to pitch. You have to get people excited. And you have to figure out what motivates them.

Are they motivated by building zero to one? Do they want to own a project from A through Z? Do they want to wear numerous hats?

Not everyone is built to work at a startup. It takes a unique skill set.

Founding experience can be really important, especially for engineering hires, because when you join an early-stage company, you don’t have all the resources that Meta or Google has.

You have to be scrappy. You have to figure things out on the fly, adapt, pivot, break things, move quickly, and keep doing whatever needs to be done to get the job done.

Sometimes working at an early-stage company isn’t your typical nine-to-five or eight-to-five. It might be eight-to-six—or more.

The challenge is figuring out how to pitch that to passive candidates, because most of the candidates we reach out to aren’t actively interviewing.

That’s exactly why it’s so difficult to get them interested.

We’re sending a cold outreach saying, essentially, “Hey, leave Meta and join us.”

How do you do that?

Don’t Lead With “996.” Lead With the Mission.

Alex: A founding engineer might end up working 60, 70, maybe even 80 hours some weeks. There might be weekends involved.

How do you tell someone that? How do you tell someone this might feel like a “996” environment?

That’s especially difficult if you’re recruiting established or seasoned engineers who have families and other obligations.

We’ve advised founders in the past: you can’t lead with “996.”

You just can’t pitch that right off the bat.

You have to get candidates excited first, about the mission, about what they’re going to build, about the impact they could have, about how they might help change the world.

Then maybe you introduce the culture more naturally.

You might say, “We’re incredibly passionate about what we do. Sometimes the team comes in on a Saturday, and then we all go to brunch or lunch together.”

The candidate starts understanding the environment. It’s not necessarily presented as a requirement. They see that the team genuinely cares about what they’re building.

That’s how you start getting people bought in.

Xiao: I really like that, because sometimes I see companies proudly put “996” directly in the job description. And my reaction is: are you good with time management? Do you care about employee well-being?

As a founder myself, I’m very comfortable working long hours. But that’s different from requiring other people to do it.

I completely agree that you should first get people excited about the mission and the actual work.

If I’m passionate about something, I want to put more time into it because I’m having fun, learning a lot, gaining valuable experience, and getting a sense of achievement from it.

I don’t want the long hours themselves to be the point.

Alex: Exactly. Otherwise, you’re going to scare people away.

If Your Startup Has No Brand, How Do You Attract Great People?

Xiao: You mentioned that early-stage startups often don’t have a brand yet. They almost don’t exist from a candidate’s perspective.

What advice would you give founders who want to attract better talent? Is it about having a better online presence, a better website, press releases, or something else?

Alex: I think it’s a combination of all of those things.

But when we start a search, we also have to be mindful about opening the funnel and casting a wide net initially. Then we tailor the search little by little as we learn.

You have to remember that many of these candidates are passive.

In fact, some of them intentionally put very little information on their résumés or LinkedIn profiles because they don’t want people like me reaching out to them.

They get bombarded.

Recruiters are reaching out every single day. If you have the right keywords or skills on your profile, suddenly every recruiter looking for those things is messaging you.

So yes, branding is important.

Blog posts are important. Funding announcements are very important, because candidates want to understand that the company has capital and credible backing.

If they see that you’re backed by respected investors or top-tier VCs, that brand association can matter.

But once we’ve narrowed down the search and become calibrated on the role, we also have to be flexible about how we pitch the opportunity.

A Passive Candidate Doesn’t Want to Start With an Interview

Alex: Maybe the first conversation is a coffee chat. Maybe it’s lunch. Maybe it’s just an introduction.

You cannot immediately say, “Boom—we’re going to interview you.”

That person isn’t looking for a job!

They still don’t even know who you are.

If you immediately throw them into an interview process, it’s not going to sit well.

They need to get excited first. They need to learn about you, what you’ve done before, who the team is, and what you’re building.

Then they might become interested in entering the interview process.

You have to create that excitement from the beginning.

Do an initial coffee chat. Meet in person. If the role is remote or meeting in person doesn’t work, have a virtual coffee chat.

But don’t make the very first conversation feel like a formal interview. You’ll scare passive candidates away.

Xiao: Listening to you, I was thinking about my own experiences. Sometimes someone has invited me to what they called a “virtual coffee chat,” so I joined expecting something very casual.

Then suddenly they had a long list of behavioral questions.

I remember thinking, “Oh, wow. This is very different from what I expected.”

It definitely wasn’t a pleasant candidate experience.

Alex: Exactly.

Becoming the Startup’s Talent Partner, Not Just an Outside Recruiter

Xiao: One thing I like about Stealthmode Recruiting—at least from my personal experience working with one of your recruiters—is that you don’t feel like a traditional recruiter.

I’ve dealt with recruiters who are compensated based on placements, and sometimes they can become very aggressive. They push candidates hard, and once they have your information in their system, they might start sending you a lot of companies even when you aren’t interested because they want to push you into interviews.

On the other side, you have internal HR teams at larger companies. Some are excellent, but some candidate experiences can actually make you question the company itself: Who are the people working there?

Stealthmode Recruiting seems to sit somewhere in between.

If I understand correctly, your recruiters can actually embed into a company, get a company email address, and operate almost like part of the internal team.

That seems like a very unique niche.

Alex: Correct. Our goal is to become the talent partner for these companies.

We want to build the recruiting process from the ground up, and that’s something we take pride in.

A lot of the companies we work with are barely getting started. They may not even have an ATS, an applicant tracking system in place.

We’ll implement that for them as part of the engagement. Maybe it’s Ashby, Lever, or whatever system makes sense. We get it up and running and help push jobs through the careers page.

We essentially act as their contract recruiting team.

I assign a point-of-contact recruiter to the client. That person gets a company email address and acts like an internal team member.

I think that’s the best way to do it.

The last thing we want is to keep reaching out to candidates from some unrelated agency domain and immediately have the candidate think, “Okay, you’re just an agency.”

Sometimes the Stealthmode name itself creates curiosity at the top of the funnel. People say, “Oh, that’s pretty cool. What is this?”

But the important thing is building that partnership with the startup from the ground up.

Recruiting Is More Than Sending Résumés

Alex: Sourcing is our bread and butter. We pride ourselves on creating a high-quality top of funnel.

But we also handle all the coordination.

Eventually, companies start receiving inbound applicants from job boards. And a lot of that is noise.

We’ve even come across fake profiles, especially for remote positions.

We filter through all of that so the founders and hiring teams don’t have to worry about it.

They essentially outsource recruiting to us, and it’s on me and my team to make sure there’s a strong top of funnel and a constant flow of candidates.

Xiao: How do you distinguish whether someone is fake or real? I hear people talking about fake candidates so much nowadays.

The Yellow Flags Alex Looks for on LinkedIn

Alex: There are a few yellow flags you can spot by looking at someone’s LinkedIn profile.

For example, if they have the public “Open to Work” banner, I might look a little deeper.

Does the profile look AI-generated?

Maybe the person supposedly went to a top computer science school—Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT—then worked as a founding engineer at a startup, then at another very strong company, then another startup.

And now they’re publicly “Open to Work.” That might make me look more closely.

You’re telling me you went to MIT for computer science or mathematics, were a founding engineer at a startup, then went to Ramp, then another startup—and now you’re publicly looking for work?

And maybe the account only joined LinkedIn within the last year.

You can see when someone joined LinkedIn. Maybe they also have no endorsements or other history.

Those things start giving you clues.

They’re not necessarily proof. They’re yellow flags that tell us to dig deeper.

Should Senior Candidates Use LinkedIn’s “Open to Work” Banner?

Xiao: The “Open to Work” part is really interesting because I have friends who might be very senior at Google or other great companies. They secretly want to leave, but they’re afraid of putting the public “Open to Work” banner on their profiles.

What about the private “Open to recruiters” option?

Alex: That’s better.

I personally don’t recommend the public green banner. But “Open to recruiters” is different because only recruiters can see it.

Don’t Shop Candidates Around

Alex: And that connects to something you mentioned earlier about recruiters pitching you to numerous clients from the beginning.

We don’t do that.

If we source a candidate for one client, that candidate stays in that client’s pipeline.

The only time we introduce another opportunity is if the candidate tells us, “Hey, I’m not interested in this one.”

At that point, we can say, “Okay, totally fair. By the way, we also work with this company. Would you be interested in something else?”

The last thing I want is for my team to start pitting candidates or companies against each other.

Some of these startups are backed by the same VCs. And I assume founders talk.

I don’t want to damage our reputation by shopping candidates around.

If we sourced somebody for a specific client, they stay in that client’s pipeline until they say, “I don’t want this.”

Then it’s fair game. They said no. We respect that.

And then we can say, “By the way, we have this, this, and this. Would you be interested?”

A Different Cost Model for Early-Stage Companies

Alex: Another thing I want to highlight is cost, because eventually it always comes down to that. What does this cost, and what does the service look like?

We understand early-stage companies don't have deep pockets.

Our structure is a little different. We don't take the traditional percentage of a candidate's salary.

We work on a flat monthly retainer plus a flat placement fee. Both scale with the stage of the company and the roles we're working on. Seed stage looks different than Series C or D.

For that retainer, we essentially run recruiting for them end to end. That means coordination, getting their ATS set up and running, sourcing, which is really our bread and butter, and closing candidates when they need us to step in on that too.

When a placement happens and that person was sourced directly by us, that triggers the placement fee on top of the retainer.

But when you look at that over a longer engagement, the economics can look very different from a traditional agency.

I recently did a cost analysis for a client after we wrapped a project where we'd essentially built out their entire engineering team.

Xiao: Oh wow.

Alex: They're an early stage company, pre Series A.

Over about a year, we placed their head of engineering and several engineers under that person.

When we ran the numbers, our total billing for the year, retainer and bonuses included, came in well under half of what a traditional agency model would have cost them.

Owning the Process From ATS to Offer Negotiation

Alex: So we can be a fraction of the cost, but we’re also embedded.

We implemented the ATS. We handled inbound. We reviewed applicants. We screened candidates.

We didn’t just source candidates and flip résumés over to the client.

With a traditional agency, coordination might still be up to the internal team.

We handle that.

We try to own the process from beginning to end.

We’ll even get heavily involved in negotiating offers when needed.

And explaining equity is especially important.

We’ve used internal calculators that allow us to illustrate what a small piece of equity could be worth in different scenarios.

What could it look like in a $1 billion, $5 billion, or $10 billion exit?

Of course, these are projections. We can’t guarantee anything.

But for candidates who are new to startups, seeing the numbers helps them understand why people take the risk of joining an early-stage company.

Suddenly the equity makes more sense.

They might say, “Okay, I’m willing to come down a little on base salary in exchange for more.”

Building a Founding Team Is Like Building the Foundation of a House

Xiao: I’m curious about something else, Alex.

You successfully reached out to my partner first. Of course, I think my partner is an amazing engineer!

How did you find him so accurately? More broadly, how do you find strong candidates?

Alex: We have a reputation to uphold.

From our experience over the years—even going back to the WhatsApp days—one thing I learned, and something I implement with our team now, is that when you’re building a founding team, you want the best of the best.

It’s like a house.

The foundation has to be the strongest, or that house will collapse in an earthquake.

So on paper, we’re looking for signals.

We might look at strong computer science programs—Carnegie Mellon, Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, and other excellent universities. We look at computer science, mathematics, electrical engineering, physics.

We look for people who aren’t constantly job-hopping.

We look at experience at strong companies.

If you scale those signals across a search, you’re going to come across some really good talent that’s worth an introductory call or virtual coffee chat.

But you cannot jeopardize quality.

I tell my team that all the time: do not jeopardize quality.

Great Candidates Don’t Always Fit the Obvious Template

Alex: Of course, there are exceptions. There are always exceptions.

Maybe an engineer didn’t go to Stanford but went to some other school. It’s not Stanford, but it has a really strong computer science program.

Then we might do a little more digging.

Do they have a GitHub repository?

Do they contribute to open source?

How active are they?

Do they have a personal website?

What have they actually built?

Have they built something zero to one?

Maybe they know somebody we know, and we can backchannel.

There are so many ways to identify the right person on paper.

Of course, we can’t technically assess an engineer the way another engineer can. We’re not engineers.

But when it’s time for a founder to interview someone, I want to be able to say:

“You need to speak to this person. They built this, this, and this. Here’s their GitHub profile. This person is worth 30 minutes of your time.”

And you’ll take something away from that conversation, good or bad.

Sometimes interviewing a great candidate even teaches the founder something about the role itself.

Maybe you thought you needed someone who leaned more toward frontend, but after speaking with a candidate about a particular project, you realize you actually need somebody stronger on the backend.

That conversation can help calibrate the search.

So we’re not pushy in the way some recruiters can be—but if we source a candidate and genuinely believe, “You need to talk to this person; they’re worth 30 minutes,” we will push the founder to take that meeting.

Recruiting Only Works When Founders Treat Hiring as a Priority

Alex: We meet with founders weekly to go through the pipeline and make sure everything is flowing.

The founder holds us accountable and we hold the founder accountable.

It’s a partnership.

If hiring isn’t a priority, there’s no reason to hire us.

Founders have to be responsive. They need to answer Slack messages. They need to show up.

You cannot flake on a passive candidate.

If you miss that meeting, it can be very difficult to reengage them. You’ve already made a bad impression, and now it reflects on you as the founder and on the company.

The last thing we want is somebody going on Glassdoor and writing a terrible post about the company because of a bad interview experience.

That kind of thing can happen, and it’s difficult to recover from.

Xiao: Absolutely. That creates a bad reputation too.

Alex: Candidate experience is very important to us.

We want to hold candidates’ hands through the process because we’re representing the client, even though technically we aren’t an internal employee of that company.

A Bad Hire Costs More Than Recruiting the Right Person

Xiao: There are so many great lessons here.

A lot of founders come from engineering, like me, or maybe they have product management experience.

They don’t necessarily know HR, recruiting logistics, pipelines, screening, or all of these best practices.

And they may not know how to find the best talent.

If you don’t target the right people, suddenly your calendar is completely booked with candidates who aren’t a fit.

That wastes everybody’s time.

Alex: Exactly.

And it can cost you more money in the long run.

Maybe you hire the wrong person, then have to let them go and restart the entire process.

Now you’re behind on deadlines or releases.

If your company has milestones it needs to hit throughout the year, a bad hire can delay those because you don’t have the manpower—or the right people—to get the work done.

Six to Eight Weeks to an Offer—If the Process Stays Intact

Alex: One thing I tell founders before we partner is that I’m never going to guarantee that I’ll make a hire for them.

I wouldn’t make that promise.

But I will tell them this:

If nothing breaks in the interview process, if you don’t suddenly add a bunch of interview steps we never agreed to, if you don’t completely change the search criteria or the candidate profile halfway through, we can potentially get to the offer stage within six to eight weeks after kickoff.

Getting somebody to accept the offer is a different challenge.

There are so many things working against an early-stage startup.

You’re a seed-stage, Series A, or Series B company. You don’t necessarily have deep pockets.

That’s why you have to get candidates excited from the beginning.

And you have to keep them excited through the middle and the end.

Everyone Has to Sell the Mission

Alex: It can’t just be the founder.

Maybe the candidate meets another cofounder. Maybe they have a virtual coffee chat with another founding team member.

Everybody has to sell the company.

Everybody has to communicate the mission and explain what this person could come in and build.

That needs to happen throughout the entire process, not only at the beginning.

And it’s not just on us as the recruiting partner.

If the people building the company can’t convince somebody to join them, how could an external recruiting partner do it?

It’s their company.

Xiao: I agree.

Everyone has to believe in the mission and be on board so that they can genuinely sell the story and the mission to candidates.

That’s very well said.

Thank you so much, Alex. This was a wonderful conversation.

Key Takeaways for Founders

Alex’s recruiting philosophy comes back to a few principles: recruiting passive talent is fundamentally an exercise in building trust; the mission needs to come before the demands of the job; candidate experience is part of the company’s reputation; and hiring only works when the founder treats it as a genuine priority.

For early-stage startups in particular, recruiting isn’t simply about finding résumés that match a job description. It means creating a story strong enough to convince someone who already has a good job to take a risk.

Or, in Alex’s memorable framing: if you want someone to leave an established company and join your startup, you’d better give them a compelling reason to believe in what you’re building.

“Everyone has to sell the company, the mission, and what they’ll be doing throughout the process, not just in the beginning.”

— Alex Contreras, Stealthmode Recruiting