Hiring is both very important and very difficult. It’s important because, especially at startups, the quality of your team determines your success. It’s difficult because everyone realizes this—and so typically whenever you are trying to recruit a top candidate, you are also competing with dozens of other persuasive employers.
What if you could figure out who was open to a new opportunity before anyone else? That’d make your life a lot easier—there would be way less competition.
But this would be hard and inefficient; most people, especially talented people, are busy and not going to respond to your cold Linkedin messages (no matter how well written you may they think they are).
Well, over the past few months, we stumbled into a solution to this problem. The type of solution that’s been a win for both employers and candidates.
First, some quick context: my name is Ben Lang. When I left Notion (after spending ~5 years there leading community), I started Next Play - a community of now 65,000+ talented people (operators, former founders, salespeople, engineers, Chief of Staffs, etc.).
People in the Next Play community come to us every week as they try to figure out what’s next—they are either passively or actively open to being connected to interesting opportunities (oftentimes they are confidentially looking (i.e. you would not be able to figure this out from just seeing their Linkedin profile)).
This is where you come in. You can work with us to share your—hopefully interesting—opportunity (like a job posting) with the network. It’ll then be seen by tens of thousands of people, many of which are potential candidates (or even users of your product). We also give some companies access to our hand-crafted database of candidates, which we add to weekly with new people.
Here are some example candidates (names and many details redacted) who recently joined the community:
Background at OpenAI, previous 2x sales leader.
An AI PhD and YC founder currently building SF AI Consultants. He has 9 years of experience in LLM-powered software and Multi-Agent Systems.
$80m in new business closed at Google. Worked with X/Twitter, Sphere/MSG, Loom, Mercury Bank and more. Managed a team generating $30m ARR net new.
Software Engineer II at Affinity.co, living in San Francisco.
An account manager with experience at Monday.com and Salesforce is exploring next moves.
Head of marketing who works at a series A no-code tool (raised 25M a year ago) is exploring joining a new company, Series B+, based in Bay Area.
An associate from ICONIQ Capital based in NY is exploring joining a startup next.
An engineering manager at Amplitude is exploring joining a new Series A/B/C company.
A senior PM at Uber who was formerly founder is exploring joining a new company.
Ex GitHub, Sprig. Sales Development and top of funnel. Looking for opportunities to use AI agent to automate, and to deliver results of a full CSM/SalesDev team.
You get the point.
We’re adding hundreds of new people to the platform every week — and on the lookout for interesting companies with interesting roles who want to get connected. You can use the platform to search for the perfect candidates (even those who are searching anonymously).
You can join next play recruiting here.
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People seem to really like it:
“Within 2 weeks of signing up for next play, we connected with a great software engineer and hired him the next week!”- Ethan Yu, co-founder, Motion
“Within a month of being featured on next play, we hired an exceptionally talented person who reached out to us directly!”- Jishai Evers, co-founder, Archetype Labs
“The level of talent on NextPlay is insane 🤯This is such a cool and special thing you are building.”- Dani Grant, founder, Jam
"NextPlay is the best time/money ROI on the market in the recruiting space!" - Anonymous founder