Juliana de Moor

Two SE offers accepted this month! Senior SE in NYC: first interview to offer in 13 days. THIRTEEN. SE in SF: first interview to offer in 22 days. NYC and SF are two of the harder markets to close SE searches in right now. Both moved fast for the same reason: candidates responded quickly, clients decided quickly. Shout out to our candidates, clients & team. Pastry + coffee to celebrate 🤷♀️

The difference between a good SE and a great SE usually comes down to one thing: They tie everything back to value. A good SE can run a standard demo and answer questions. But the SEs who really stand out spend less time showing how much they know and more time understanding what the customer actually cares about. When I debrief with hiring managers after demo rounds, this is the most common reason a strong candidate doesn’t get the offer. And it usually starts well before the demo. If a prospect says they need better reporting, a great SE won’t just add the reporting dashboard to their demo checklist. They’ll want to know what’s wrong with the current reporting, who it affects, and why fixing it matters to the business. So when they finally show that dashboard, it’s built around the VP who spends six hours a week pulling numbers by hand. That’s also why value isn’t one-size-fits-all. Even on the same call, different people want different answers. The technical buyer wants to know how it works. The business leader wants to know what changes for them. The strongest SEs can speak to both without losing either. And it’s why feature dumping is such a missed opportunity. You can show someone 25 impressive features, but if only three address the problems they came to solve, you’ve spent most of the demo on the wrong things. For the SE leaders here, what’s one thing you notice during a demo that immediately tells you, “This person really knows what they’re doing”?

I didn't talk for ten days. No phone. No writing. No communication of any kind. Just silence, and my own mind, for ten days straight. It was a Vipassana meditation retreat in Indonesia. You wake up at 4am, meditate for ten hours a day, eat twice, sleep, and then get up and do it all over again. It was one of the hardest things I've done, and also one of the most life changing. After the 10 days, I had a level of focus I didn't know was possible. Work felt different. Even reading emails and having conversations felt different, and it’s all because my brain had been so overstimulated for so long that I'd forgotten what it was like to think clearly. What surprised me most was who else was there. A lot of them were managers and executives whose bosses had actually encouraged them to go, because people came back sharper, calmer and more productive. I'm not saying everyone needs to do a Vipassana retreat. But I do think we underestimate how much noise we carry around, and we keep adding to it with more tools, more content and more things to do. Ten days of nothing did more for my focus than any productivity hack I've tried.

One of the worst things a recruiter can do is introduce a hiring manager to a candidate they could never actually hire. Imagine you're hiring a Solutions Engineer, and I introduce you to someone who checks all the boxes. You love everything about them, but there's one problem: they're expecting $220K, and your budget is $160K. You make an offer anyway, hoping they'll be excited enough about the opportunity to compromise. They decline, and now every candidate I introduce to you gets compared to someone who was never within your budget. This is one of the reasons I spend so much time understanding what candidates actually want before introducing them to clients. I want to know their salary expectations, career goals, preferred working environment, and whether they'd seriously consider the opportunity if an offer came through. I also want to understand where the hiring manager has flexibility and where they don't, because there's very little value in creating excitement around a candidate when the expectations on both sides don’t align. The problem is that the other candidates aren't going to put their job searches on hold while the hiring manager figures this out. They're interviewing with other companies, and some will inevitably receive offers. I've always felt that a good recruiter should help hiring managers understand what's realistically available within their budget, rather than set expectations they can't meet.

Our last 21 hires went from submission to signed offer in a median of 20 days. The goal now is to make that even faster, and AI is a big part of how we're doing it. It isn't removing the human touch. We still run every screen ourselves and talk to every candidate and hiring manager directly. What it's changed is how fast we learn. Every piece of hiring manager feedback, whether it comes through Slack, email or a sync call, goes into a living scorecard for that role. If a hiring manager tells us a candidate's technical depth wasn't there, the scorecard updates, and the next candidate gets asked the question that would have caught it. So we're asking better questions every week and spotting fit (and misfit) before a candidate ever reaches the hiring manager's calendar. The number we care about most is sub-to-start: how many candidates a client has to interview to make one hire. Every candidate we take out of that number is hours back on a hiring manager's week. That's the whole goal: save our clients as much time as possible. How is your team using AI in hiring right now?

You don't see many people in jobs longer than a year and a half anymore. Especially on the startup side. And to be fair there can be good reasons for that. A candidate might have three roles in three years and on paper, that looks like they’re job-hopping. But when you actually talk to them, you find out: - The first company had an acquisition - The second was supposed to sell but didn't, and they had layoffs - The third ran into financial trouble None of that means the person isn't looking for something stable. In fact, a lot of the candidates I talk to are actively seeking stability but they're just coming out of situations that were beyond their control. For AEs, there’s another layer to this, especially when they’ve been selling something with a longer sales cycle. Someone might leave before they’ve had enough time for the deals they were working to actually close, which can make their performance a little harder to judge from a resume alone. That’s where you have to look beyond tenure and ask better questions: What pipeline did they build? How were they performing against the expectations for that stage of their ramp? What deals were they working? And, most importantly, why did they leave? I think hiring managers sometimes look at a resume and make a quick judgment about a candidate’s tenure without understanding the full story. And candidates…if you've moved around, you need to be ready to explain why in a way that makes sense. Because the context ALWAYS matters.

He had less than 60 days to find a job. If he didn’t, he’d have to pack up his family and leave the US. This was right after Covid, and I had just started my career in recruiting. Finding a job was difficult for almost everyone at the time and for candidates on visas, the pressure was on another level. I was working at a large agency with plenty of openings, so I started reaching out to account managers across the company, trying to find a client who might be open to sponsorship. A lot of the initial answers were no. And I remember pushing back with a simple question: “Have you actually asked them?” A lot of the time, we were assuming the answer would be no because of how difficult the market was, without actually putting the question to the client. Sponsorship added another layer of complexity to an already difficult hiring process, so it was easy to assume a client probably wouldn’t go for it. But this candidate didn’t have the luxury of us assuming. So I kept asking account managers to go back to their clients and actually have the conversation. Eventually, we found an opportunity. He went through several rounds of interviews and got the job. I still remember how grateful he was. He had built a life in the US with his family, and this job meant they could keep that life. Years later, that experience is still the clearest answer I have for why I love this work.