In the fight for elite AI talent, the salary is the easy part.<\/p>\n
At Cursor, the $60 billion company behind a suite of popular coding tools recently acquired by SpaceX, hiring a candidate is a bit like trying to win over someone who's completely out of your league.<\/p>\n
"Closing is a team sport," Matt Ward, Cursor's head of talent, said on a recent episode of the "People by WTF" podcast. For some high-profile candidates, he said, "there are often daily standups around that candidate about what we're doing to get them to yes."<\/p>\n
The company has also created private Slack channels dedicated to individual recruits, giving employees a place to coordinate outreach, dinners, meetings, and other parts of the courtship.<\/p>\n
In the AI universe, where many millions of dollars in salary and perks are often not enough to recruit a top candidate, wins can come down to making a candidate feel wanted.<\/p>\n
Ward said that after learning that one sought-after candidate had attended a performing-arts high school and trained as a classical violinist, the company tracked down a specialty music store in New York and bought him an unusual stringed instrument, which Ward described as a kind of Turkish guitar.<\/p>\n
The gift itself wasn't especially expensive. "It's the thoughtfulness and the touch and the uniqueness of it," Ward said.<\/p>\n
Take a smarter break in your day – and see how far you get.<\/p>\n
The company's CEO, Michael Truell, said on A16z's podcast last year that Cursor used "crazy recruiting stunts" to score its first 10 hires, including "flying across the world to the person after they say no."<\/p>\n
Ward said Cursor's recruiting process has become more systematized as the company has grown.<\/p>\n
Rather than treating recruiting as a numbers game \u2014 message a hundred people, interview whoever responds, and gradually narrow the pool \u2014 Ward said he prefers to identify the relatively small number of people who could truly excel at a job and then pursue them deliberately.<\/p>\n
"There are 50 people in the world who can do this," he said, describing the mindset. "Let's go find those 50 people."<\/p>\n
Cursor's approach reflects the new realities of the AI boom: For those at the top of the market, offering more money may not be enough.<\/p>\n
The same coveted engineers can have multiple enormous offers, prestigious jobs, valuable equity, and access to cutting-edge work. Winning them over can come down to whether they connect with a company's mission and people \u2014 and whether they feel understood.<\/p>\n
The race has changed the way major companies across Silicon Valley think about hiring, with some of the most aggressive recruiting efforts coming directly from the top.<\/p>\n