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Below the Surface is a show about what the world's best companies are doing right now to build high-performing teams. Each episode, Joelle Emerson (co-founder and CEO of Paradigm) talks with a leader who's rethinking people, talent, and culture. Conversations consider how AI is reshaping work, what hiring should look like as organizations evolve, and how to create the conditions for performance. If your work touches people, talent, or culture, this one's for you.
I'm Joelle Emerson. This is Below the Surface. Adam Ward is the head of talent at Cursor, the coding agent that went from 0 to $1,000,000,000 in ARR faster than any software company in history. Before Cursor, Adam helped scale Facebook through its IPO, ran global recruiting at Pinterest from 200 to over 2,000 people, and built his own firm, Growth by Design Talent or GDB, into the talent advisory firm behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Notion, and Figma until Cursor acquired his team in late twenty twenty five. If you wanna know what hiring looks like at the absolute frontier of AI right now, Adam Ward is the person you wanna talk to.
Joelle Emerson:Here's Adam. Adam Ward, thank you for being here.
Adam Ward:So glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Joelle Emerson:So, Cursor, so you all are at about 700 people this year, have grown extremely quickly.
Adam Ward:Yeah.
Joelle Emerson:You are doing over 3,000,000,000 in revenue. You recently struck a pretty unprecedented deal with SpaceX where they are either going to acquire you for $60,000,000,000 or have a $10,000,000,000 partnership. All things that are almost unprecedented in the history of software ever. So I just wanna start with, like, what are the vibes at Cursor right now? Like, how what does it feel like to go to work there every day?
Joelle Emerson:What what's the dynamic inside the company?
Adam Ward:Yeah. I mean and, I'd say it's been a wild year plus so far. I think probably unbridled enthusiasm, I think would probably be the phrase I'd Seems
Joelle Emerson:pretty good.
Adam Ward:Just like a ton of excitement and opportunity in front of us. As you know, in this space, like so much happens in a given day or week, but just so much opportunity in front of us. And honestly, like a lot of amazing tailwinds with our business, but also just so much left to do and so much left to build. And the opportunities ahead of us, I think, are just, like, really exciting.
Joelle Emerson:You've worked with many category defining companies. You spent a lot of time at Facebook, a lot of time at Pinterest. We'll talk about that. Is there anything that feels different? You know?
Joelle Emerson:And those you were in those companies in periods of rapid growth, Facebook through IPO, Pinterest, you know, 10 x employee headcount. What feels different about this moment of building this company? Is is there anything that's, like, just super different from anything you've ever experienced?
Adam Ward:Yeah. I mean, I feel like, unfortunately, I'm old enough to see a lot of these, you know, tech advances and revolutions from like web one point o to two point o to mobile to crypto, all these things. And so I just feel like each moment's different. And when you're in that moment, you're like, this is the edge of what is happening. Like, there's no Can't get any better.
Adam Ward:Can't get any better. It can't go any faster. But I do think that the pace of this industry is just beyond words at times. And I thought, what we're doing at Facebook in those early days, I think we went from a thousand to 10,003 and a years when I was there, I'm like, there's no way something can move faster. There's no way.
Adam Ward:But I feel like the speed of which you can move now is just crazy. And I think like that's one thing that feels very different. I do think it's like, when you think about all of the commodities out there, whether it's data centers and GPUs, talent, things like that, really the commodity that matters most is the only fixed one, which is time. And it does feel like in this industry, it is a race against time in your competition to build your model, to create your moats, whatever you have to do. And I don't remember feeling that as much of a time crunch in the previous sectors or previous chapters of tech.
Adam Ward:And a lot of that is aided by the exact thing we're working on, which is AI. So you can move that fast and you can build that quickly, and that just feels very different this time around.
Joelle Emerson:I feel like you just talked started talking about talent. This is the area that you spend all of your time in. One of the things that sort of stands out to me is that, you know, as the cost of building stuff comes down
Adam Ward:Mhmm.
Joelle Emerson:Talent becomes a bigger and bigger moat for every company. Yeah. Because it's all about judgment. Do you have the right people in the room, and are you creating the conditions for them to build the best possible things? Yeah.
Joelle Emerson:Your job is to bring those people into Cursor. And when we were talking before before the show, you told me that you think that a lot of companies today are doing hiring backwards. Mhmm. I would love to just start by hearing more about your hiring philosophy. What is the right way to be doing hiring today?
Joelle Emerson:What are the companies that are doing it backwards getting wrong?
Adam Ward:Yeah. Yeah. And I I, you know, I was in inside companies for a long time, you know, Facebook and Pinterest and Qualcomm and others. And when you're in it, it's really hard to step back and see the broader pattern that's happening here. And so with the with the GBD experience, you know, I think we worked with 500 companies over five years.
Adam Ward:And so we got to see a lot. And we got to see what we think the future of recruiting could look like. And we started to develop this thesis around it. And really, Cursor is the first company that we felt like could really execute on that thesis. But how I roughly see recruiting teams still being built, we might be in the most advanced technological age of civilization, but we are still building recruiting teams and recruiting motions in the same way that Microsoft did in the early nineties.
Adam Ward:And not much has changed. Like, some technology has changed, but I think the general approach has changed, which is roughly this, like, funnel of doom hiring. And when I think about funnel of doom hiring Does that
Joelle Emerson:sound ideal?
Adam Ward:It does sound great. I I mean, I literally have talked about the funnel of doom to my own, own discredit. I've talked about that since my very first job out of college. And so it's not my term, but my very first company college Trilogy, we talked about this a lot, the funnel doom recruiting is essentially you think about candidates come from three sources. They apply, they are referred, or you source them.
Adam Ward:Most hires in companies that are in really high growth are referrals or sourced. Eventually though, most of your hires will become like more balanced between the three. When I think about Source Candidates, how we most companies do this is like, we might reach out to a 100 candidates and 20 might reply as interested. By definition, those are not the top 20%. Those are the 20% who you happen to catch on a bad day, who maybe are looking but haven't told you, but those I guarantee you those are not top 20%.
Adam Ward:So you stop with you start with this band of candidates. And then the way we recruit is that we essentially assess out and hire the remainder. So when I say that aloud, you're like, yeah, that is how we recruit. So you
Joelle Emerson:didn't fail. What
Adam Ward:take you? That makes zero sense. You're hiring the best of a pretty good lot. And so over time, you have a pretty good company. If you do things perfectly, you have an above average company talent wise.
Adam Ward:And that just seems like a very inefficient way to recruit. And so how we thought about this, we're like, I think there's a different way to do this, which is, can we take lessons that we learned from having done leadership recruiting, executive recruiting? Could we do that at scale? And so roughly that looks like really good scoping. You marry that scoping with market mapping and market intelligence and signals that give you confidence at the top of the process that these people are some of the best.
Adam Ward:And then you use your assessment process to validate that hypothesis. And so if you think about an exact search, this is how it works. You scope the role. You're like, who are the top 1% CFOs, CROs, CMOs? And then you, like, relentlessly pursue that talent.
Adam Ward:And we think we can do that at scale. We think that's a better outcome. It's no less effort. Arguably, it's more effort, but we think it's a better outcome to getting to a really talent dense organization over time.
Joelle Emerson:So you basically take an executive recruiting approach to every role you hire for?
Adam Ward:We we try we take that, like, philosophy to it. There are, like, clearly some, like, high volume roles where maybe that's not necessary, but in general, we're trying to take that approach to every role that we hire for.
Joelle Emerson:And you've hired about 500 people or so this year at Cursor?
Adam Ward:Yeah.
Joelle Emerson:So you're busy.
Adam Ward:We're busy. We're busy. And a lot of that sometimes that really strong signal comes from someone who's worked side by side with someone. Like, hey, I worked for three or four or five years with this person and they I in my mind, they're top 1% and we trust that person. Like, that is like think about how fast a person drops through your funnel of doom when you have a lot of trust in the person who referred them and that they're really good.
Adam Ward:And then you use your assessment process to really clear validate, hey, are they also good for our company? So they were good at that last company. Great. So we're not gonna just take your word for it straight up. We're still gonna assess you, but now we're starting at a place believing that you're good.
Adam Ward:That's a different mindset than like, hey. I need to remove the bozos and hire the good one. Hire this needle in the haystack.
Joelle Emerson:So I wanna talk more about the hiring process. But starting going back to the top of the funnel, you start with a hypothesis or a thesis. We are gonna go find the best person out there for this particular role. And you said you look at market signals. What are you actually like, what is your team actually doing when they're sitting down at their computer to find who is the best person for this open design role
Adam Ward:that we have? Yeah. And some of us like not sitting at the computer. We have two people on our team who spend fifty to sixty hours a week just mining referrals from our current employees.
Joelle Emerson:So what does mining mean there? Going and actually talking to the employee, figuring out under what circumstances did you work with this person? What are they doing?
Adam Ward:Yeah. So one, like and I think this is where companies, like, generally fall short. They might get the list of names, but there isn't this follow-up and follow-up and follow-up. And I imagine you could build an AI agent that could farm someone's network and help service referrals and they could rate them and all those things. But really where we found the differences is the ability to stay on top of that person and make sure they sent the follow-up note, ask them for more names, get more context and keep working that in a way.
Adam Ward:So nothing replaces you and I sitting down in a room going through your network and asking very detailed questions, getting detailed notes, and starting to triangulate around, oh, this at this time, this team at this company at this time was really strong. That gives a signal, not just for some people that they refer, but who else was on that team? And how do we get more additional signal to get confident that those are also people we should go after? So it's like the ability to dig and dig and dig that I think takes a lot of human energy and human effort that I think differentiates our approach to that and why that's so important to us.
Joelle Emerson:I find it fascinating that at a company that is thinking a lot about how to automate a lot of human work, you are taking the most human approach to recruiting that I've heard of ever.
Adam Ward:Yeah. I mean, I think if you had you know, if any founders listening to this or anyone's in a company, they talk to the founder and they say, what's the most important thing in your company? Most founders or CEOs will say talent is like number one or number two, hopefully. If that's the case, then why would you not put as much resourcing as needed to be elite at it? If that is the differentiator, you just said that if this, if that is the differentiator, then you should think about what is like the most amount of effort that we need to give.
Adam Ward:One interesting thing that we did at GBD is we did this like large study on talent density. And so companies that are perceived to have talent density, what is the thing that really made them stick out and made them be able to create this talent density at this this window of time? And we really found three things. So we found it was consistency, rigor, and effort. And so consistency meaning, hey, there is we roughly have a same caliber of expectations of anyone who comes in our company.
Adam Ward:There's no backdoor talent wise or quality wise in our company. We're rigorous about how we assess. We're thorough. We're confident in that. It's tied to what success looks like in this company.
Adam Ward:But where most companies fall down, which is roughly is that effort, and that is like the thing is at all of our fingertips. We can all give effort. But where most companies fall down is like they stop giving the amount of effort that they did early on, and they turn recruiting over to the recruiting function. And when that happens, when recruiting becomes recruiting's job, it's almost like irrecoverable. You don't come back from that because recruiting is not recruiting's job, we can come back to that.
Adam Ward:And so we found that when we kind of did this analysis, giving that a level of effort, willing to put in that amount of effort to relentlessly pursue that top talent really could differentiates Cursor from other companies we've worked with.
Joelle Emerson:And is that effort just the effort? I mean, you said recruiting is not recruiting's job. Whose job is it? Who's putting in all this effort?
Adam Ward:Yeah. Yeah. Like, no one should care more about a hire than a hiring manager. Right? They alone feel the pain of a bad hire and the joy of a great hire.
Adam Ward:But over time, what you see companies do is almost like turn that process over to recruiting and they put the accountability solely on recruiting. And so when we think about our job at at Cursor, it's really to create confidence. Our job is a confidence building effort for hiring managers and teams that they have confidence in making a a good decision. And so you mentioned So
Joelle Emerson:you're helping them get the data to feel confident to move forward, you're not doing the job for them.
Adam Ward:Yeah. Yeah. And so when recruiting owns the hiring decision, then I think they can high own the hiring goal. But I haven't met a company yet where recruiters are making the hiring decision. Hiring managers are.
Adam Ward:Right? So our job is to help give them the the bring them the the candidates and give them the information, give them the data to make a really strong decision. Because at the end of the day, hiring is still a mitigate a risk that you're trying to mitigate. Mhmm. Still calculated risk.
Adam Ward:And but I think what AI can allow us to do is have a lot more data and a lot more confidence to make that right decision.
Joelle Emerson:Some of the best CEOs that I've ever worked with or heard talk about their philosophy for hiring and founders are remain deeply involved in their hiring process Yep. Even at scale. I heard Brian Chesky on a recent podcast saying, you know, for certain leadership roles, if the company could get a candidate without him being involved, it wasn't a good enough candidate. Yeah. Yeah.
Joelle Emerson:Like, you actually need that involvement.
Adam Ward:Absolutely.
Joelle Emerson:You've worked with at GBD, you've worked with some of the best companies in the world at the forefront of AI, at all the labs, Stripe, Notion. Did you see that kind of involvement in across these companies from executive teams? Is that something that or hiring managers, is that something that differentiated companies that hire really well from companies that just do a lot of hiring? Or is that something that you've seen a lot?
Adam Ward:Yeah. And I we did see it. I I think what we saw over time is that that most of their effort focused on hiring leaders and doing that amount of effort onto, like, their their team or very seasoned hires. And I think what was unique about Cursor was one, we value ICs extremely highly, but also willingness to put in the effort for all hires where needed to go get them. And so what we saw was unique about with Cursor and the founders was a willingness to do whatever it takes to get a candidate here to the company.
Adam Ward:And that still exists. We have a lot of stories where they will jump on a plane and go meet a candidate or drive all day to Monterey to get a ten minute coffee or a serendipitous interaction or engagement with them. And so we're back to your question of what are recruiters doing versus are hiring managers or leaders? Recruiters are almost like the program managers of that, right? They are thinking strategically, what is the best way to get to one of those top 10 on our list?
Adam Ward:And how most recruiters think about, what are the next 10 people I should reach out to that could respond at a 20% response rate to get into the process? Like, no. No. No. What are we doing today to work that list of 10 of how we're gonna get to them?
Adam Ward:And so then you're positioning your leaders and your hiring managers or other people who might have influence on how to get that person into a conversation. The goal isn't to get them to interview. The goal is get them into a conversation, into a coffee, into a dinner.
Joelle Emerson:Very much like a sales process.
Adam Ward:Very much like a sales process. Very much like an exec recruiting process where you're trying to get someone who's really good, who is probably very happy where they are, who is being retained, is heads down. How do you get them to pick their head up and consider this opportunity?
Joelle Emerson:So talk more about the process. You are not filtering people out. You are validating a thesis. What does the hiring process look like? I have heard Michael Troll talk about a two day on-site really working collaboratively with people.
Joelle Emerson:That's a trend in a number of organizations right now. I would love to hear how are you validating this thesis that someone might be the best fit for a given role at Cursor.
Adam Ward:Yeah. And we've known for a long time that work samples and work trials are the highest correlated predictor of success. Yet we're still doing coin toss interviews Yeah. Broadly.
Joelle Emerson:Yeah. Right? I feel like you and I had our first conversation on that problem twelve years ago, ten years ago when you were at Pinterest. And we were talking about how do we produce more consistent effective outcomes? How do we find more ways to get a real sense of how someone works?
Joelle Emerson:So, yeah, tell me
Adam Ward:Yeah. How you
Joelle Emerson:guys doing.
Adam Ward:Literally your phrase I just stole twelve years ago. Oh, I do that a lot. So I like yeah. I co op people's terms. But I think you taught me that.
Adam Ward:But the research hasn't changed over decades around that. And so we believe in that also, if we can get a realistic preview of what it's like to work with them. Vice versa, they are as well. So for a lot of our technical roles and product design, they are doing one day, but most often two day on-site interviews with us where we get to spend time with them over meals. They get to work on a project of their choosing along their area of thing.
Adam Ward:They get to present that back. And I feel like we just get a ton of signal from them, but they also get a ton of signal on us just And as so at the end of that, it's pretty clear, okay, we're doing this. Right? You know, it's pretty clear. People also know like, hey, that went great or that didn't go great.
Adam Ward:But they also have a lot of conviction whether Cursor is a place for them. So there's a lot of value, I think, for both sides of it. But that's the amount of that is effort. So imagine the amount of effort it takes to do a two day two day on-site Yeah. From the recruiting team who's there helping, but the people who are having meals with them, people are spending time.
Adam Ward:That's an immense amount of effort, and most companies are not willing to put in the effort.
Joelle Emerson:Well, how would you I mean, it's effort. It's time. That's, you know, resources. How would you pitch a company? Obviously, the pitch can be talent is really important.
Joelle Emerson:It deserves this effort. Is the pitch also sort of like the costs you're just front loading the costs because you're gonna have lower attrition, higher performance. Like, you just have to make this bet upfront that investing this effort now is gonna save you, you know, a huge amount of pain down the road, or what what would be your best pitch for a company to totally reorient itself around investing this level of upfront effort in recruiting for nearly every role?
Adam Ward:Yeah. Would say in the funnel of doom hiring approach, you're putting a ton of effort in.
Joelle Emerson:Yeah.
Adam Ward:Right? You're putting in more candidates.
Joelle Emerson:Right.
Adam Ward:You're putting in more time to qualify people out. So it's actually if you do the math, back down the amount is not that much different.
Joelle Emerson:Even the recruiting process side to side. Even without justifications about lower attrition and performance, you're saying side by side, a funnel of Doom recruiting process versus yours, it's actually not that much more time. It's just a reengineer Yeah.
Adam Ward:If we're putting all the friction upfront, if we're trying to qualify candidates upfront through signals and references and all these things that have confidence, you're putting fewer candidates in.
Joelle Emerson:Right.
Adam Ward:Because there are just fewer candidates that are at that echelon Right. That you're looking for. So you're not spending you're not trying to find the one out of a 100. You're trying to find the one out of 10.
Joelle Emerson:Right.
Adam Ward:So you have there's less candidates going through the process, and so there's less interviewing time. And guess what? Like, if you talk to anyone that's an interviewer, the most frustrating thing is talking to a candidate who's not great, where they used to feel like you've wasted their time. So you actually get this higher level of engagement from the organization because they're generally talking to high quality people that they're energized about and wanna work with. And so you kinda get this flywheel effect of engagement and effort to willing to do.
Adam Ward:I do think net net, it is more time and it is more costly, but I would say a higher performing team way offsets. And what your team can ship and build, being a higher more density offsets the lower cost of a funnel doom approach.
Joelle Emerson:That makes sense. I think one thing that you have been well known for for many, many years is being a closer. Like, you are excellent at not just finding great people, but getting great people to choose the organization that you are working at over the many other offers that they have. And now you're doing this at Cursor where the other offers that they have are maybe every other frontier AI lab. Yeah.
Joelle Emerson:So how do you tell the story of why someone should choose Cursor right now over other sort of generational opportunities they're being presented with?
Adam Ward:Yeah. I think the really interesting about Canvas I've learned over time is some of the best recruiters are very curious and ask very good questions upfront and remember that, and then pull that through the entire case. So closing doesn't start at the end. Closing starts at day one. And so if I ask you, Joel, like, hey, like, you were to make a move from a company that you love, a job you love, what would it take?
Adam Ward:What would need to be true? And you're gonna tell me two to three motivators that I'm gonna be sure are part of every step of your process. And so when it comes down to the end, you're like, wow. This just feels like it was meant to be. But yes, this was actually strategic orchestration to make sure you felt those things.
Adam Ward:They were also, by the way, they could not be you had to be real with yourself. Like, hey, actually, things aren't here, so this may not be you have be willing to cut bait and not try to close someone against what they're actually truly motivated by or inspired by.
Joelle Emerson:It has to actually align.
Adam Ward:It has to actually align. But when it does and you can help bring that to life through your company and the people they meet, closing is just a synopsis at the end. Yeah. It's just a summary of all their conversations and experiences where it feels natural versus, oh, now we're gonna turn it on. And I feel like most companies kind of turn on the love, turn on the clothes at And the like that doesn't feel authentic to the candidate.
Adam Ward:And doesn't feel like they were maybe like fully aligned with what was intrinsically or even extrasingly motivating them when in but canons will share that with you upfront before we even talk about job or things get really serious. And if you can collect that and then sprinkle that throughout, then that can be a successful closing approach.
Joelle Emerson:That makes sense. On the topic of closing, I have read that Cursor pays people a lot of money. So what is your comp philosophy? I've read, you know, engineers at Cursor, median comp has been reported to be between 800,000 and 1,000,000. And I know that that's true at some of the other kind of frontier labs.
Joelle Emerson:What is the comp philosophy? How do you all decide how you wanna compensate? How do you make decisions in the process itself on where someone's gonna land? Yeah. Talk us through how you're thinking about that.
Adam Ward:Yeah. Yeah. That sounds high, but by me, I think we are competitive with the companies. I think top talent does demand sometimes a premium over other talent. And if you tying back to our approach, if we have confidence that we are identifying, pursuing and activating and hiring top talent that we confidence of signals, then that talent is gonna be more expensive than the median.
Adam Ward:So our conf velocity is roughly to mitigate comp as a reason they come or don't come. And so you wanna take that off the table so that you can actually focus on the things that matter around the role, the product, the mission, the people that you wanna work with.
Joelle Emerson:Which means that it has to be just on par with any
Adam Ward:To other be competitive. Yeah. No. You don't have to match it. You don't have don't always, but you need to mitigate it.
Adam Ward:And for some people, and each person will have a different so back to the previous conversation on motivations, some people might be, hey. If I ask you to stack rank those, like, hey, conversation needs to like, I need to be like in the ballpark of this thing, but here's the top three things. Then you're trying to mitigate that as a reason that they don't come, but you know it's number four. So you maybe don't have to exceed or beat or anything like that, but you wanna just take it off the table as a reason they that they would not be in the process or that they would come solely for that compensation package.
Joelle Emerson:What happens when someone comes solely for comp? They're just too easy to move away somewhere else
Adam Ward:Yeah. Comp off ads. Right now in our industry, you can always go more. You can always get more. You can always be a free agent.
Adam Ward:And there's a lot of buyers out there. And so I think compensation is an extrinsic motivator. It's not sticky. So when times get tough, when things feel ambiguous or rough, like you are the compensation isn't gonna be the reason that you fight through that. You're gonna fight through it because you care about the person beside you.
Adam Ward:You care about the impact you're having with you with users or customers. You care about the product and space that you're in, that is sticky. The compensation is not sticky. And so we've all probably gotten a raise in our lives. You know how it feels good for, that first paycheck.
Adam Ward:You're like, great. There's 812 more dollars, but, like, that becomes just the new bar. Right. You know? And like, so you know that the dividend on compensation is very short and Yeah.
Adam Ward:Very short lived. And so if we can mitigate that and focus on the other things, that's generally a better recipe for us.
Joelle Emerson:When we were talking earlier before this show, you were telling me about some of the hiring process. And in my mind, I was like, man, this must all take such a long time. But then you told me a story of a recent hire
Adam Ward:Yeah.
Joelle Emerson:To show me the pace at which you all are closing people. Can you just talk us through you you gave me a really interesting example to talk us through how how quickly this can move at Mercer.
Adam Ward:And when you're a smaller company, you have very few advantages, but speed can be one. Speed of decision making and ability to move quickly can be one of them. And when we were with GBD, we often felt it very frustrating for some clients who were like squandering away one of the few advantages they had compared to like larger companies who had more users or more money and all these things. And so we are inspired by Cursor's willingness to move fast. And I think not only is it a competitive advantage that way, it's an amazing signal to candidates.
Adam Ward:And so if you think over the test of time, when you think about candidate experience or affinity or talent brand, that a company cares about me as a candidate has always been the number one thing that is highly correlated to candidate happiness and candidate satisfaction. And so it shows that it's a it's a signal back to the candidate you really care about them and you care about talent. And so just even last week, we had a candidate that we came across in Sydney, Australia. Someone on our team had in our engineering team had worked with and said it was really good. A recruiter that was on a Sunday morning, Pacific time.
Adam Ward:A recruiter got on the phone on Sunday afternoon and talked with the candidate, which would be Monday morning there. Was also impressed by this candidate, scheduled them at the end of that call for the next two conversations for them on Monday US time. Had those two conversations with a hiring manager and another person on the team. They were also very excited. That hiring manager connected them on the phone back to the recruiter who helped them book a flight for the next day from Sydney to San Francisco.
Adam Ward:That was Wednesday. So landed Thursday here in San Francisco. Got an interview during Thursday, all day Thursday, part into Friday. And today Friday walks out with an offer and accepted the offer on Saturday. So a six day loop of meeting the candidate and getting them through the process.
Joelle Emerson:An engineering role.
Adam Ward:Yeah, machine learning. So arguably one of our highest priority roles. We are willing to move quickly. So think about all the things that happen. Recruiter had to be willing to take a call on Sunday.
Adam Ward:They had to be willing to remove. Interviewers had to make room on their schedules. Sure their Monday, Tuesday was already filled. A coordinator had to help organize travel. Remember, this is all a huge time difference.
Adam Ward:And then we had to be able to make a decision really quickly, put together a competitive offer so people had to approve those offers, get into the candidate, and that speed boxes out the competition. Because so how it starts is engineering companies like, hey, a friend of mine who's really good is starting to pick their head up. We're on
Joelle Emerson:that.
Adam Ward:Six
Joelle Emerson:days
Adam Ward:later, they're working in person. And they're not talking to any other company. They don't have time to talk to another company. But also they it feels like the right fit for them because like, wow. That company really cares.
Adam Ward:They are able to move quickly and really cares about me. Like, they gave me a white glove experience, and we try to do that for every candidate when we can.
Joelle Emerson:Wow. I mean, this seems so different from how most companies approach hiring. But I'm curious. So you helped scale Facebook from, like, a thousand to 10,000 employees through IPO. You started at Pinterest around 200 employees scaled through 2,000.
Joelle Emerson:So 10 x employee headcount growth. Very different hiring processes, probably more the traditional, like, funnel of doom, not for bad intent. Just that's how companies work. Yep. What are things that you learned, though, through those processes that you still use today?
Joelle Emerson:What are, like, best practices, if there are any, that are tried and true and that are real and that you're still using?
Adam Ward:Yeah. I mean, think some best practices are still structured hiring. It's still great. People having focus areas and having a clear sense of what a good and bad answer looks like and having that rubric behind it. Rubric, mean, feels a little stodgy these days.
Adam Ward:But having conviction on what you're looking You for
Joelle Emerson:know I love a good rubric.
Adam Ward:I do too. I'm I'm a I'm a rubric guy. Yeah. But I think having a real conviction on what you're looking for in an interview and coming out of that. So I think still those things matter.
Adam Ward:I think a hiring manager being one of the earliest, if not first conversation, still matters. So I think all this understanding scoping, I think has become more important. We kinda knew it back then, but really scoping a role well, I think still matters. But I think the other stuff has changed a lot. I think about how we activate talent or how we think about moving quickly or how we think about making decisions, I think has really escalated speed wise.
Joelle Emerson:Are you guys using AI in your hiring processes? And there's so many AI for recruiting products out there. What is real? What is hype? How are you actually using AI in the process?
Adam Ward:I mean, I think we use it more internally than we do for candidates. And so I think we have, like, an ATS, and we have, like, a a sourcing tool that uses AI AI, but we really have found the most success of building our own tools off of our ATS. And so a lot of those tools are really focused on speed and quality are the two things we measure in our recruiting organization. And so for quality, we look at quality of interviewers or we look at quality of recruiter screens. How does a recruiter screen, the rating and assessment they might give correlate downstream to the rest of the team to make sure we're keeping the quality bar high and consistent, for example.
Adam Ward:That's an AI tool that does that. We have a tool that helps find out who works with what person when in our company. We have a warm handoff. Who could make an intro to this person because it's in their broader network type of thing? Those are all things that would take weeks of engineering time that our recruiting ops team can do on a weekend.
Adam Ward:It's insane that you can build like these own tools for you that you continue to like enrich with your own data. And so we've had a lot of success of building our own tools around the speed and quality side, less so on off the shelf AI, things that we haven't really found a ton of success in those. And I think that's because success for a recruiting tech product means that you take on more customers. And really, when you think about a SaaS business, you have to take on enterprise customers at some point because they're bigger numbers. And so there's a regression to the mean around features that you can have into the product.
Adam Ward:And so over time, you see this normal arc for a Korean type product of fast start, plateau, and then kind of a tail off. And so we're not really interested in riding that arc.
Joelle Emerson:We're just gonna build whatever you We're
Adam Ward:build our own type of tools, and and we continue to enrich it with our own data and our own feedback.
Joelle Emerson:And we talked before about hiring junior engineers. You said you're not you're hiring junior engineers, but only if they meet the bar of the bar that you have, which might be the same bar as
Adam Ward:Yeah.
Joelle Emerson:An experienced engineer. Can you talk more about that?
Adam Ward:Yeah. I mean, there's an argument to make that, you know, engineers coming out now are more AI native and comfortable and able to adapt agents to build product versus maybe someone who's been in the industry ten or fifteen years. And so when we think about making hires, don't have a early in career program. We will, we do hire engineers that are early in career, but they just happen to be some of the best what they do and are able to leverage AI.
Joelle Emerson:You're not hiring them as early career people that you're gonna grow. You're hiring them because they just are AI native, and they're as good as Yeah.
Adam Ward:They're excellent. And I think what's the what senior I'm not senior here, I shouldn't be afraid. What senior here brings is a whole lot of years of experience of what works and doesn't work and brings systems design and brings a sense of savviness and often product sense that takes just miles for an early career person to accumulate. But they can be complimentary too. And so when we think about assessing, we think about where someone might spike in strength and someone who's coming out of university now or a couple years of experience is a lot more familiar and comfortable and agile with AI, but maybe needs to be blended with someone who's seen a lot of things and seen a lot of product road maps and be able to design really good systems too.
Joelle Emerson:So here's what I don't get. If most companies are just not hiring as many junior engineers, like you're hiring them, but not for the purpose of mentoring and growth, something that you did quite a lot in your prior to Yeah. At Facebook and at Pinterest.
Adam Ward:A lot of years in University of Korea.
Joelle Emerson:A lot of years on that. Where do the senior engineers of the future come from? I just don't this is not just an engineering problem. I Yeah. This is true in every domain.
Joelle Emerson:If, you know, if we don't need associates in law firms because AI can do it, where do the partners come from? I just don't get the philosophy in how companies are thinking about where the future pipeline of talent comes from. How do you think about that?
Adam Ward:Yeah. Well, I think the the construct that we think about in a current world is that they start within a company on a single career track and are moving up that single career track.
Joelle Emerson:Yeah.
Adam Ward:So right now, let's just choose engineering. The current methodology might be, I might hire a software new grad or a recent grad or early career, and they might move up the ladder from engineer to senior engineer to manage, delete, me. I think what you will see in this case is where actually technical talent might actually start in more forward deployed roles or sales engineering where they're actually getting to both build a skill set around influence and communication and curiosity, which is gonna be so important in this next generation of employee, while they're still like seeing tapped into the technical side. But then you can imagine a pivot over later in their career to come into like a more mid career role in engineering, for example. So I think you'll see this more in
Joelle Emerson:Less linear.
Adam Ward:I'm an optimist, so I'll start with that. Yes. You think you could see more fluidity across job families than these, like, more fixed tracks that we've seen in the past.
Joelle Emerson:How are you thinking of so Cursor is, you know, making every engineer good engineers, 10 x, a 100 x maybe more productive. How would you advise other software companies that aren't, you know, frontier AI companies to be thinking about engineering headcount in the year ahead? Should do companies just need far fewer engineers if they are using Cursor?
Adam Ward:Maybe. But I think we're I think you're gonna see this arc of over rotation and then nestling back into the This is like test of time in tech. Like, choose crypto Yeah. Crypto winner. And then we're like, okay.
Adam Ward:Crypto is gonna be the only currency in the world. And then they're like, oh my gosh, that was a sham. And now guess what? It has a place. Right.
Adam Ward:It's not it's not the only
Joelle Emerson:It's not the future of the world.
Adam Ward:It's not the only currency, but it's a viable. It is a current you know? And so I think you'll see that in AI too when it comes to kind of like this adoption and how we think about using engineering. What we are seeing already is what is really important is really good design. And so you're thinking about an agent who might be building software on your behalf, you have to really design the right set of instructions to give to them.
Adam Ward:That systems design thinking, I think there's gonna be a lot more emphasis on that. Then think there's gonna be a lot more, you're gonna be a lot more program managing multiple agents at the same time. So how do you think about prioritization, the right set of tasks? How do these things fit together? And then finally, what about debugging?
Adam Ward:I think it's gonna be more important than it's ever been important. When they
Joelle Emerson:And it's become more code.
Adam Ward:Yeah, quality control. When that comes back, what is good and what is not? And so what you see right now is token maximizing and companies incentivizing the wrong behavior. Who can spend the most tokens? That's insane.
Adam Ward:That makes zero sense to me. I think what you see will see a lot more incentives rather like, are you using the right tool and right model for the right task? And what being really explicit of like, here's what we want human hands and eyes on, and here's what we're willing to send out to agents. But I think those those skills that the debugging and system design are gonna be really important to make sure you get the right outcome of product. Otherwise, you get a whole and I think companies are seeing this already.
Adam Ward:They're getting seeing a whole lot of stuff built, but it's actually not quite quality, it doesn't fit together. Because everyone's sending off these agents to do things, no one's actually thinking about how does this fit into our product when we pull them all together.
Joelle Emerson:Yeah. How do you so you've closed a candidate. It's the right candidate. It's the right fit. It's been six days.
Joelle Emerson:They love you. They have joined Cursor. What does onboarding at Cursor look like, and how do you make sure that you are getting people all of the context they need early to start performing at their best as quickly as possible.
Adam Ward:Yeah. Yeah. I think context is best done on the job. Honestly, I think I don't think our onboarding is anything innovative necessarily other than making sure they get the the the tools, the relationships and overview they need. But really from day one, they are on the job doing work.
Adam Ward:And so a core part of our operating principles is agency. Agency is roughly defined as in my mind as resourced autonomy. So a lot of companies talk about autonomy, but very few companies are actually willing to remove the roadblocks to autonomy or resource it from behind to allow that to happen. And so we try to live that with our team. So on day one, they're in doing the work and we trust them to do that.
Adam Ward:Remember, we've put a lot of effort and friction into that hiring. So while six days feels like a short period of time, it was an intense six days to get a lot of confidence that this person's great. So if we believe they're great and we started at a place that we think they're great and we validated that thesis, why would you then throttle them back? Like let them go. And so I think beyond the basics of onboarding, we get them in there and kind of do it on the job.
Joelle Emerson:Yeah. I think that is a little bit different from how
Adam Ward:How a lot of companies scalable will that be? I don't know. But it's worked for us in this first steep ramp.
Joelle Emerson:I have a few rapid fire questions
Adam Ward:I love it.
Joelle Emerson:For you. What is a piece of conventional recruiting wisdom that is just wrong now in 2026?
Adam Ward:I mean, I may I'll go back to something I mentioned before. Like, recruiting doesn't own the hiring goal. I think that's a piece of wisdom that generally, there's this phrase in the recruiting world, which is single throat to choke, which is very aggressive. But ahead of recruiting, the leaders wanna know who's the person I hold responsible for the hiring goal and the plans. No.
Adam Ward:You shouldn't be looking outside the room. You should be looking in the room. Right. Right? And so I think that's a piece of wisdom that I think recruiting, owning the hiring goal is probably wrong and misguided.
Joelle Emerson:What's the most overrated interview signal?
Adam Ward:I think the most overrated signal is probably the, like, lunch interview or the, how do I say, like the maybe the the culture interview.
Joelle Emerson:The social interview.
Adam Ward:I think it's roughly Kabuki theater. I think it's rough generally unstructured. And you have like one irrational unit in human assessing another irrational unit and trying to connect. I just think it's highly staged and pretty low signal. And so I think it's something that has gone through a change over time of this culture and values interview.
Adam Ward:And I think it generally was like again, I think about the pendulum swing where we didn't do it at all. And then we went overly stylized approach to it. I think probably the right fit is somewhere in the middle.
Joelle Emerson:What's the most underrated interview signal?
Adam Ward:I think the most underrated interview signal is the initial hiring manager screen. We put it up front, and then we kinda forget about it. And so
Joelle Emerson:They pass that, they cut that bar.
Adam Ward:What's so interesting about interviewing is that we put more weightage as the interview goes. Totally. And so really, you should put the weed out questions and the weed out interviews and the toughest things up front, and you should. And if you do that, then you should put the appropriate signal behind that. But we kinda forget about it.
Adam Ward:Yes. And then we're like, the last interview, however they do, it dictates the outcome. Totally. You That's do pretty wild, right? Yes.
Adam Ward:When you think about it, that's what we You know? And, like, sometimes it makes sense because maybe it's like, oh, the founder needs to check off on something. But usually, it's like the very last conversation or like like and we kind of I don't think we get the weightage right most of the time.
Joelle Emerson:Interesting. Yeah. I kind of think about the hiring manager interview as once they pass that, they pass that, and I'm mentally moving on to the next Yeah.
Adam Ward:Yeah. I think we throw that out, and then, yeah, we learn it all again later on.
Joelle Emerson:Yeah. So don't so don't do that. Yeah. What's an interview question you would ban from any company you ever are leading talent at?
Adam Ward:Well, I mean, one category of question that I would ban would be any kind of like brain teaser.
Joelle Emerson:Why?
Adam Ward:I don't think it is I don't think it gives you the job specific signal that you're looking for. I think we think that it gives us this, like, sense of intellectual horsepower. But often, I don't think those are very validated type of questions, and I don't think it's scored in a very validated way. If you are really wanting to measure intellect and intelligence, I think so. Think it's misguided approach generally.
Adam Ward:So, like, that's like a category that I don't love.
Joelle Emerson:Finish this sentence. The companies that hire the most effectively over the next five years will be the ones that
Adam Ward:Companies that hire the most effectively over the next five years? Oh my god. Five years. Okay. Can we just find months?
Joelle Emerson:The companies that hire the most effectively over
Adam Ward:the next five days. Five years? Like, where would we be in five years? Okay. I think the companies that are gonna be most effective over the next five years are those that are willing to focus on the efficacy of their hiring process, not the efficiency of their hiring process.
Adam Ward:And I think there's a lot of conversation right now around how are we leveraging AI to make recruiting efficient.
Joelle Emerson:Totally. And cutting headcount and figuring out how we can Yeah. Spend less to hire people.
Adam Ward:Yeah. And if we say that at top of the show, we said, hey, talent is one of the most important things. Why are we focusing on efficiency? We should be focusing on efficacy. And I think companies that get that right and are willing to put in the time, the resources, the effort to do that and measure that, I think will be the ones that come out on top.
Joelle Emerson:I love that. What a great place to end. Adam Ward, I learn so much from you every time we get to talk. Thank you so much.
Adam Ward:It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Joelle Emerson:That was Adam Ward, head of talent at Cursor. I loved that conversation and have some immediate takeaways that I'm gonna apply in our hiring process. This is Below the Surface where we talk to the most innovative leaders defining the future of people, talent, and culture. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and we'll see you on the next episode.