Talent Tuesday: Is the Role You’re Hiring For a ‘Push’ or ‘Pull’ Role
The Secret to Understanding How to Close Every Search With Confidence
The Climate Talent Playbook
Helping Climate Founders Build & Retain Teams that Win — and Solve Climate Change
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In Today’s Issue:
Is the Role You’re Hiring For a ‘Push’ or ‘Pull’ Role
Jobs We’re Working On
Word on the Street: Nuclear, Bankruptcies, Optimism
Is the Role You’re Hiring For a ‘Push’ or ‘Pull’ Role
TLDR: Identify what type of search you’re working on, and learn to use both the push and pull motions in your favor throughout the search process.
Sometimes hiring is about pushing. Sometimes it’s about pulling.
Both actions require effort, but they are fundamentally different in nature.
What do I mean?
Pushing refers to pushing back on the applicant/candidate.
Pulling is all about trying to draw them in. You’re pulling on their interest strings.
Regardless of the search type, both motions are required.
However, some jobs are weighted heavily one way or the other.
Well-known founder/company
For example, if you’re a very popular CleanTech startup. You just got a lot of press. You’ve developed a strong reputation after years of hard work and wins. You’re probably going to get over a thousand applicants for any role. That means you’ll spend most of your time ‘pushing’ candidates away.
Not just pushing them away for the sake of it. But pushing back on them, asking them, ‘Why are you a fit for us?’
Any internal recruiter in the past couple of years knows exactly what I’m talking about. It’s like using a bottle cap as an umbrella in a monsoon.
Unknown founder/company
On the other hand, you might be a first-time founder who just raised your pre-seed round, trying to find a head of engineering. You don’t have a track record. Probably pretty young. Your dad isn’t Bill Gates. And no one has heard of you.
Getting even 50 applicants would feel like a win to you.
These are the ‘pull’ searches. You’re going to spend most of your time pulling at the interest strings of the candidates.
It’s a series of winning their interest. The first LinkedIn message. The follow-up with more enticing details. The first conversation is where you’re being assessed. The way the process flows. The investors you boast. The compensation you can offer.
It feels like a never-ending cycle of selling who you are, what you’re up to, and why you’re worthy.
It can be really exhausting.
Humility is honey—Arrogance is rotten eggs
Depending on the search type you’re working on, you need to adjust your mentality drastically.
Unfortunately, I’ve come across a lot of founders who think they are the best thing since sliced bread—the cat’s meow.
Truthfully, you’re usually nobody. Only a handful of first-time, young founders are going to be a talent magnet off the bat. You need to accept this and work around it. But whatever you do…do NOT be arrogant.
If anything, one of the biggest assets you have is your youth. Young founders need mentorship. Old heads with long careers need young founders to mentor.
Often, towards the end of their career, people want to work with someone they can teach and help out. First-time founders are a prime target.
But nothing makes that target more smelly than arrogance.
Humility on the other hand is sweet like honey. It brings all the old-head honey bees to you.
To recap so far:
If you or your company are well-known, you’ll have to push away a lot
If you or your company are unknown, you’ll be pulling…a lot
All roles have push and pull
Now, as I mentioned, every search, regardless of which of these two buckets you fall into has both push and pull.
The rule of thumb is, whichever direction your motion is initially, towards the end of the process, it will flip.
If you’re a first-time founder, after all that pulling—as scary as it is—you need to turn it around and push back. You need to make sure they want to work with you. You need to understand the reason. By this point, you’ll have bared your soul, so they will have all the possible reasons to be interested.
If you never turn the push motion on at the end, you won’t have the depth of confidence that you need in all early hires.
On the flip side, when you’re a well-known hotshot, you need to recognize that towards the end, after all that pushing away, you’ll have to turn the charm on. If you don’t need to employ the pull motion at all when you’re a big fish, you’re probably getting an underqualified person for the job.
You see, the best candidates are always going to be attractive. They will have options in almost all cases. Even if you’re a company they really want to work for, they will almost never act desperate. They will usually preserve some optionality. This is where the pull motion comes in.
Don’t make this mistake
It’s worth pointing out that there are searches, even for the big-brand companies, that are going to flip this script. Some critical roles require mostly pull. The majority of hiring managers won’t notice this at the outset because there are still hundreds of applications coming in. The difference is, when those applicants are not high-quality, you still need to switch gears. You need to start pulling.
Be sure to make this switch early. If you don’t, you risk ostracizing the top talent in the market… with your arrogance.
Another side note
Throughout the hiring process funnel, whenever you notice there is a massive loss of interest from the candidates (after initial interest) you should investigate it more closely. It’s possible you’re adding extra friction. You could be coming off as arrogant. You might be really far off from what the market average is.
Just use this as a hint. The same way you’d notice if the users of your product drop off at a certain milestone.
Action Item: As part of every hiring process you run going forward, spend time to identify if this is a push or a pull role primarily.
PS: If you’re an early-stage founder and you want someone to do all that pulling work for you, reach out to us today. We specialize in attracting talent to the underdogs and the undiscovered. And we do it for a price you can afford, even with only a pre-seed round under your belt (we charge 12-15% others charge 20-30%).
Sponsored by ErthTech Talent: 70+ Placements since 2020. Affordable and Accurate CleanTech Headhunting
Jobs We’re Working On 💼
In case you missed it, we announced a new partnership with OptiGrid. A joint venture that is resurrecting the FreeWire Technologies IP and rapidly solving EV Charging for Fleets with the manufacturing power of Orange EV—the leading manufacturer of class 8 trucks in the US.
Their tech pairs battery storage with EV Chargers to get solutions deployed in weeks, not months. Leading to massive time and cost savings when compared to the traditional route.
As they build up their initial team, we’re proud to help them on this journey. They are hiring for.
VP of Commercial — To create & execute the GTM strategy and build their GTM team
Marketing Manager — To help them have their Henry Ford moment
Product Manager — Job posting coming soon
Sales Manager — Job posting coming soon
Accounts Manager — Job posting coming soon
Note: all of these roles require someone to be based in Kansas City — relocation assistance is provided.
Aside from OptiGrid, we’ve got a few other open roles.
Director of Manufacturing - Helix Earth Technologies | Houston, TX
VP of Finance & Ops – EV Charging SaaS Startup | Austin, TX
We recently closed the PowerGEM and Gravity sales searches. However, it may not be long before they are hiring again. Keep an eye out / reach out to us today if you’re interested.
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Don’t see a role for you? Submit your resume here.
Word on the Street
Going nuclear: No, I’m not about to talk about Iran. I’ll stay out of politics. I’m talking about how much nuclear energy is heating up recently. We saw Fervo Energy land $206m, Amazon is buying nuclear, Proxima Fusion raised €130m, and defunct Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp emerged as Standard Nuclear.
While it’s old, I also just heard the Columbia Energy Exchanges podcast with a Japanese energy official discussing their plan to restart a bunch of their nuclear facilities.
Seems like now is a good time to get into nuclear energy. This is especially interesting because if it gains enough traction without pushback in the near future, we could see a century-long nuclear golden age.Powin’ing down: Unfortunately, Powin just filed for bankruptcy. We speculated on this recently. This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of Powin, but they need to rebalance their finances. They are in massive debt and need to figure out a way out of this. They were a leader in the battery energy storage space. I actually recently spoke with Danny Lu on the CleanTechies Podcast. I don’t know if I should be embarrassed or what.
Optimists Unite: Despite the likely passing of the Big Beautiful Breakdown of renewable energy tax credits, there is a LOT of optimism in the air. So many really great founders are closing rounds and hiring. It feels like we have shaken off the uncertainty of the first few months of Trump and are running headlong to a greener future, with or without the government.
I really mean this. There are some core things going really well in clean tech and nothing can stop them.
Okay folks. That’s all from us. See you next week.
P.S. Bookmark this post for your next search.
~Silas
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