How to Sell a Candidate

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Every person is such an individual. You can't apply a framework to closing a candidate because every person has a different set of needs and desires. And so as a recruiter, as a hiring manager, as a CEO, how are you digging in with that candidate to really understand what it is that they're looking for? That starts with the very first conversation. What matters to them? What drives them? You have to start asking those questions and then reiterating that throughout the process.

Our guest today is Nadia Singer, Chief People Officer at Figma.

Nadia joined Figma in 2020 and has seen explosive growth in her own career alongside the collaborative design platform’s. Before Figma, Singer was a talent expert who has hired hundreds of talented folks at places like Quora, Facebook and Google.

In our conversation today, we dive deep into what makes someone a terrific talent evaluator. Nadia opens up her own recruiter playbook and shares:

Her personal recruiting trick, which is to study how a candidate reaches an answer, rather than what they say
Tactics interviewers can use to avoid pattern matching and other biases
The biggest mistakes she made in her early days as a recruiter
Ways that Figma tweaked its approach to culture so it could scale alongside the company

You can follow Nadia on Twitter at @nadsinger. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.