A Founder Asked Me for the Secret Sauce. I Told Him the Truth.

October 2026

By Will at Built Different

"Come on, Will. What's the actual trick?"

A founder came to me recently with a new role he wanted to fill. He didn't want to use a recruiter for this one - he wanted to run the outreach himself. Fair enough. So I helped him. Looked over his job description, gave him some pointers, tightened it up.

Then we jumped on a call, and near the end he asked the question every founder eventually asks.

"What's the secret sauce? What do you recruiters actually do that we don't?"

I get why he asked. There's a widespread belief that recruiters have some hidden tool, some database, some trick that makes good candidates magically appear. That we're gatekeeping a method.

So let me tell you what I told him. 🎯

There is no secret sauce.

No magic tool. No hidden list. No clever hack that fills the role while you sleep. What there is - and this is the part nobody wants to hear - is hard yards. Running through a lot of profiles. Doing the boring, patient work of finding the one person in a hundred who actually fits. The sheep with five legs.

The value isn't a secret. It's knowing what to do, and then actually doing it properly. Most people know they should exercise and eat well too. Knowing was never the hard part.

So here's everything I gave him. No gatekeeping. If you want to run your own outreach, this is how to do it well.

🔍 Part one: finding the right people

Most founders do outreach the same way, and it's the wrong way.

They go to LinkedIn, type in the job title, and message whoever comes up. Then they wonder why the responses are thin and the quality is thinner.

Here's the problem. Your best candidates aren't optimising their profiles to be found by recruiters. The person you actually want is heads-down doing great work, not stuffing their headline with keywords so they rank in searches. If you only fish where everyone else fishes - the obvious titles, the people who show up first - you're competing for the most-contacted, most-visible, and often least-interesting slice of the market.

You have to think differently.

Search on keywords, not just job titles. Titles are wildly inconsistent - one company's "Software Engineer" is another's "Member of Technical Staff" is another's "Product Engineer." Search titles alone and you miss brilliant people who happen to be labelled differently. Search on what they actually do. The tools they use. The problems they've solved.

Go beyond the obvious keywords too. Everyone searches the same first-guess terms. Get specific. Get lateral. Think about adjacent skills, niche tools, the language someone would only use if they'd genuinely done the thing you need.

Start tight, then loosen deliberately. This is the one most people get backwards. Begin with the perfect fit - exactly what your ideal hire looks like, every box ticked. See who comes back. Then expand outward one step at a time, giving leniency only on the things you can actually afford to compromise on. That way you build a real picture of the market and you always know where each candidate sits relative to perfect. Start broad and try to narrow down, and you drown. Start narrow and widen with intent.

The point is to be creative. The founders who find great people are the ones who stop running the same generic search as everyone else.

✍️ Part two: writing outreach they'll actually answer

Finding them is half of it. Getting a reply is the other half - and this is where most outreach dies on arrival.

The strong people you want get messaged constantly. Generic, copy-pasted, clearly-sent-to-fifty-people messages. Yours has to be the one that doesn't feel like that.

Make it personal - and prove it in the first line. Read their profile properly, then open with a specific, genuine reason you're reaching out to them. Not "I came across your profile" - everyone writes that. Something that could only have been written to this person. One sharp line at the top that shows you actually looked. That single sentence does more than the rest of the message combined.

Give them a story, not a job spec. People don't reply to a list of requirements. They reply to something that sounds exciting. Tell them about the business - what it's doing, why it matters, what's genuinely interesting about the moment it's at. Give them a reason to lean in before you ask anything of them. You're not filling a vacancy, you're offering them a story they might want to be part of.

Then sell the impact - clearly. Once you've got their attention, this is where a few sharp bullet points earn their place. Sell what's actually sellable:

💰 Salary, if it's genuinely good - put it on there

📈 Equity and real ownership

🚀 The chance to be the first commercial hire, or the first engineering hire

🔑 Responsibility, autonomy, the scope to own something that matters

The key: only sell what's real, and lead with what will actually move this person. Some are chasing ownership. Some want the money. Some want the technical challenge or the mission. If you've read them properly, you'll know which levers to pull. Being the first hire in a function is genuinely attractive to the right person - people want that responsibility. So say it.

Everything in the message should be working towards one thing: getting them to respond.

📞 Part three: selling to them once they pick up

So they replied. You've got them on a call. This is where most founders reach for the pitch - who they are, what the company does, why the role is great.

Wrong instinct. Put the pitch away.

The best thing you can do on that first call is shut up and understand the person. Not your role. Not your company. Them. What actually motivates them. Why they're looking in the first place. What they want the next chapter of their career to look like.

And here's the technique that changes everything: ask why, then ask why again.

Someone says they want more responsibility. Most founders hear that and immediately jump in - "great, you'll have loads of responsibility here." Don't. Ask why. Why is responsibility important to you? What does it give you that you're not getting now? Keep going. Dig into the deep, dark of what this person actually is and what they really, really want.

Because "I want more responsibility" can mean five completely different things. It might mean they feel undervalued. It might mean they're bored. It might mean they want to prove something to themselves. It might mean they watched someone less capable get promoted over them. Until you understand which one it is, you don't actually know what you're selling to.

Once you truly understand the person, selling stops being a pitch. It becomes a conversation about the things they care about. You're not persuading them anymore - you're showing them how what you have connects to what they already want. That's a fundamentally different interaction, and it's the one that closes.

This is the single biggest shift I can offer a founder on the phone. Stop selling your role. Start understanding their world. The role sells itself once you know which parts of it matter to the person in front of you.

🧠 The part underneath all of it

Here's what I also explained to that founder, and it's the thing that actually separates people who are good at this from people who aren't.

You need to understand how the market works. What roles are being scoped out there. What companies are really asking for versus what they write down. How to read between the lines of a job spec and decode what's genuinely wanted underneath the wishlist. Where a candidate sits in all of that.

That's not a trick either. It's context - built up from doing this every single day, across dozens of searches, on both sides of the table. It's the difference between sending messages and running a search.

And that, honestly, is the real answer to the "secret sauce" question. It was never a secret. It's pattern recognition, patience, and the willingness to do the unglamorous work properly. You can absolutely do it yourself. Plenty of founders do.

You just have to know that the magic is the effort. 🐑

✅ The October playbook: 3 things to do this month

1. Rewrite your last outreach message.

Pull up the last message you sent a candidate. Read the first line. Could it have gone to anyone, or only to that specific person? If it's generic, rewrite it - one real, specific reason you're contacting them, right at the top. Make that your template from now on.

2. Redo your search, starting tight.

Take your current open role and build the "perfect fit" search - every box ticked, no compromises. See who comes back. Then expand one deliberate step at a time, only loosening on things you can genuinely live without. Notice how much clearer your shortlist gets when you know where everyone sits relative to perfect.

3. Write down what's actually sellable about your role.

Not the requirements - the pull. Salary if it's strong, equity, ownership, first-hire status, the mission, the technical challenge. List everything genuinely attractive, then rank it by what would move the specific person you're chasing. That ranked list is your outreach ammunition.

4. On your next candidate call, ask "why" three times before you pitch anything.

Whatever they tell you they want - more responsibility, a new challenge, a change of scene - don't respond by selling. Ask why. Then why again. Get to what's actually underneath it before you say a single word about your role. You'll close more by understanding than you ever will by pitching.

👀 What I'm seeing from my desk

The founders who do their own outreach well are rare… but they exist. The ones who succeed aren't more talented than the rest. They just refuse to send lazy messages and refuse to run lazy searches. Every time I see a founder land a great hire solo, it's because they treated outreach like it mattered, not like an afterthought squeezed between meetings.

Generic outreach is getting less effective, not more. Strong candidates are more fatigued by copy-paste messages than they've ever been. The bar for a message that earns a reply keeps rising. Personal, specific and genuinely exciting is now the minimum, not the edge.

The best candidates are almost never the easiest to find. I'll say it again because it's the thing founders most need to hear: the person optimising their profile to be found is rarely the person you most want. The five-legged sheep takes digging. That's not a flaw in the process - it is the process.

Because great teams are Built Different

Running your own search and stuck? Or decided you'd rather hand it over? DM me - always happy to think it through with you.