November 19, 2024

Loom broke 3 big hiring 'best practices' and called it a talent strategy. And it worked spectacularly well.

John Kim

Co-founder @ Paraform

In this blog

Loom’s 3 three counter-intuitive talent principles

Two weeks of runway left. That's where Loom's story gets interesting.

When you're that close to death, you have 2 options: pivot fast or walk away. For founders confident about async video, this meant pivoting from a product feedback platform (called Opentest) to a simple app and Chome extension for recording videos.

They launched on Product Hunt and it took off — suddenly, Loom went from near-shutdown to having a bunch of features in the backlog, needing to hire the right talent to build them. ASAP.

So they approached hiring with the same dedication they brought to everything else. And this led to rapid growth. The results speak for themselves: Loom was acquired by Atlassian for $975M last year. I find the most interesting thing about their exit to be how they built the team that got them there.

The 200 video tactic

Loom once made over 200 individual videos to hire a single Design Manager.

Your first reaction might be: "That's insane." And you'd be right – making 200 videos, one by one, would be considered a huge time sink for most teams. But Loom isn’t most teams.

I’m not saying you need to make hundreds of videos to hire effectively. Rather, Loom was able to scale up and hit growth milestones so quickly because they understood that hiring deserves to be treated with the same obsessive attention as product development.

Loom’s 3 three counter-intuitive talent principles

1. Specialized early, generalized later

The conventional wisdom is to hire generalists early and specialists as you scale. Loom did the opposite.

After their Product Hunt launch, they laser-focused on hiring specialized video engineers instead of generalist SWEs. Why? Because they understood their core technical challenge was building the right features with unmatched video quality.

Co-founder Vinay Hiremath shares:

“The exhaustiveness of our early interview practices allowed us to find some seriously great talent, many times overlooked with non-traditional backgrounds. Many of these people are still at Loom today.”

But here's the plot twist: as they scaled, they shifted to hiring junior generalists, particularly in product. As CPO Janie Lee put it on Harry Stebbings’ 20VC podcast, earlier-career generalists are a huge force multiplier and large arbitrage opportunity.

What you can implement

• Don't optimize for hiring efficiency before you've optimized for hiring effectiveness.
• Calibrate talent strategy to current needs – consider working with recruiters who can leverage their specialized talent networks on your behalf.

2. Radical transparency as a filtering mechanism

Most companies are looking for specific answers from candidates, but won’t say what. Loom chooses to tell candidates exactly what they were looking for in final interviews.

This seems counter-intuitive. Wouldn't this just let candidates game the system?

But that's missing the point. At the final interview stage, you’re not testing whether someone is qualified, or if they can figure out what you want. You're testing if they can actually deliver it, and if they’re the best possible fit. It’s also your last chance to convince a top-tier candidate that you should be the their first choice.

From their blog: “[We] wanted to be completely transparent in advance, about what exactly we were looking to gauge in our final-round interviews — giving candidates a better chance to both prepare presentations and guide conversations in productive ways.”

What you can implement

• Create an intake call video for recruiters or candidates to watch, detailing your specific requirements and expectations for a role. Does it clearly show what kind of person would excel in this role?
• Ensure all interviewers are aligned on what to assess during each stage of the process.

3. Adopt async in unconventional ways

Loom has a 93% candidate satisfaction rate. They achieved that number due to how they use async.

Most companies use async to screen out candidates early ("Record a video telling us why you want to work here!"), seeing it as a poor substitute for real-time interaction. But Loom understood async isn't just about efficiency – it's about creating better human connections.

Loom flipped expectations, using videos to give MORE personal attention, not less. They leveraged it to showcase the product and team, not just assess candidates. And they made it a two-way street: candidates got to see the real personality of their potential teammates.

When someone is digging around your company blog or Instagram, they know the videos they’re seeing are created for the sole purpose of recruiting. But if I get a Loom directly from a potential teammate, I’m more likely to pay attention. Different team members will even share “just for fun” videos about their interests and passions, to give candidates an immediate look at who they’d be working with.

Async, done right, can actually create stronger connections than traditional synchronous processes because it gives both sides the space to be more thoughtful and authentic.

What you can implement

• If feedback or answers to candidate questions sound too stiff or formal via email, use a quick Loom instead.
• If you’re a B2B SaaS company: why aren’t you showcasing your product during the interview process? Don’t make candidates wait until onboarding to get a sense of how you work and who you are.

Here's what makes Loom's approach fascinating: it breaks almost every "best practice" in modern hiring.

• They spent more time on individual candidates (conventional wisdom: optimize for throughput)
• They revealed their evaluation criteria (conventional wisdom: don’t share your rubric)
• They hired specialists early (conventional wisdom: start with generalists)

And yet, it worked spectacularly well.

I’m not saying everyone needs to make 200 videos to recruit for each role. A better takeaway is that you should be willing to break conventional hiring wisdom if it serves your specific context.

Loom's approach worked because it aligned perfectly with their product (async video communication) and their market position (needing to move fast with high quality in video). Simply trying to hire faster won’t help you win in the long run. Not unless you’re able to implement a hiring strategy to consistently identify and attract the specific kind of talent you need at each stage of growth.