Got asked last week how hiring really differs between San Francisco, Australia & New Zealand. One question got me going more than the rest, because my answer to it is basically my whole thesis at Kairos: what's the actual hard part, finding people or landing them?
I think it's finding them. And here's the thing.
The average job ad in Australia now pulls around 184 applications (that's SEEK's April 2025 number, up from roughly 41 the year before). Founders look at that and feel reassured - look at all this interest, we're gonna be fine!
But volume isn't reach. And frankly, if your applications are sitting that high, your ad probably isn't doing its job of weeding people out in the first place. Most of the workforce isn't even looking at any given time - they're employed, heads down, doing good work somewhere else.
So the person who'd actually change your trajectory - the one who builds out your sales engine, or ships a tech product with a real moat around it - is almost never sitting in that stack of 184. They didn't apply.
That doesn't make the ad pointless, to be clear. We pour real work into ours. We use Job Ad to build video in, and we obsess over whether the thing is actually selling the why - why this company, why now, what you'd get to own here that you wouldn't get anywhere else. Because someone out there is genuinely searching for their next move and might land on that exact ad, and I'm not about to lose that person because we couldn't be bothered making it good.
But an ad is inbound. However good it is, it only ever reaches people who are already looking, and the person you actually want usually isn't.
Which is why we don't stop at the ad. We actively headhunt, we work our network, we built the Aussie Founders Club Slack & we're building a proper talent network off the back of it, so that when the right person is nowhere near your job ad, we can still get to them.
Your own network does some of this, & a warm intro beats cold outreach every single time. But it only takes you so far. It's finite, it skews towards people who already look a bit like you, and the specific person you need for this specific role is very often someone you don't know and nobody you know knows either.
Here's what genuinely worries me. When a founder throws up a job ad with no applicant tracking system and no real process behind it, their entire talent pool becomes whoever happens to apply. And sometimes that's fine! Some roles you can absolutely fill that way.
But most of the hires I'm talking to founders about aren't those roles. They're the person who builds out the sales engine, or the one who ships the product with a real moat around it. Trajectory hires. The ones you feel two years later in what actually got built. You can't leave those to chance & hope the right person stumbles onto your ad on a Tuesday night.
San Francisco gets this in its bones. Hiring runs constantly over there, founders keep a running list of people they'd poach one day, they have coffee with them long before there's a role, and their investors run genuine talent networks. We've got a version of that at the top end here, but the middle of the market still posts an ad, leans on the same handful of contacts & calls it a search.
You don't necessarily need a recruiter for any of this, plenty of founders run a brilliant process themselves. But if you are using one, check what they actually do. Do they invest in the ad or just repost yours? Do they headhunt or do they wait? Do they run a real process or forward you a stack of CVs? Because the person who'd change everything for you is never going to raise their hand. Someone has to go and find them.
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