The best referral question to find top talent is not 'who is the best [role] you know?' but a highly specific question tied to the skills you defined, which lets people triangulate around the same names.
Adam explains that asking 'who is the best product engineer you know?' is the worst question; instead you should ask for someone most collaborative with designers or who translates frameworks into products, so that people can conjure up specific names and you triangulate to a short target list. ✦ AI generated
Adam Ward · Lenny's Podcast · 2026-08-09 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 34:47
I think the mistake though, and that's not that's an obvious point, but the mistake that most companies make is they'll say, 'Hey Lenny, who's the best uh product engineer you know?' That is the worst question you can ask. The better question to ask is, 'Hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you worked with, who stands out to you as the person who's most collaborative with designers? Or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen?' You got to have to put these very specific characteristics or skills or needs for your team, and then that's way easier for you to conjure up people that way than like this broad question of who's the best person.
verbatim transcript · starts at 34:47
34:27days, weeks, months, and sometimes years. >> When you reach out to someone and mention working at Cursor, now it's part of SpaceX. It's like, oh, this is interesting and cool. And you know, it's like, you never know, maybe it'll work out someday. A lot of companies, and you've worked with other companies that are not as interesting of a brand and as successful. Is there any advice for
34:45folks to get someone over the line to even talk that works? And you know, I imagine it's all very particular and you want to be just any advice there. >> Yeah, I think it's really spending a lot of time up front to get a sense of what could be uh engaging for them. So, who might that be and what might that topic be? And so, there's very There are There are
35:05a number of um excellent people in the world who aren't on any platform. There's no information about them. But most you can get a couple nuggets. We spend a lot of time here thinking about who can create a warm intro to that person. Almost as much effort goes into that than it does the actual messaging and the right because if you get the right person, that accelerates
35:29it. Right? And once someone's ignored one thing, it's much easier for them to ignore the second and third. But if you get the first one right, you like condense that that that activation timeline and effort. >> I've heard that you often say caring is free. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that cuz it feels like that connects throughout this entire process. >> Yeah, I I think there's like all kind of
35:53tactics out there that are of varying degrees of cost. But out caring other companies that like when I've built recruiting teams, that's something that we've always talked about. Like, we can care more about that candidate than anyone else. That That's in us. That's within us. We can do that. And I think it hit like um over the history of time, when you look at candidate satisfaction scores, the number one thing that's
36:15always there is the company generally wanted me. They generally like like they made it feel like I belonged there. And so, the more that we can care for our candidates and demonstrate that, I think it's an unfair advantage and it's in all of us. And so it that is like an effort and that is a extra step type of thing. It's the extra uh intentionality that you take that I