Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Seeds ripen at different rates
Hiring from a list of the 50 best people in the world means the work starts long before anyone is ready. Some respond in weeks, others in months, and a few have taken a year or more. The recruiting team plants seeds with all of them, knowing they ripen at different rates.
Keeping the conversation going
The first goal is only a response or a next conversation, never an interview. When someone says the timing is wrong and suggests late fall, the reply is to invite them for a coffee to see the office or to meet a teammate who is fascinated by their work. If they truly cannot join until late fall, they still talk with the team weekly. Waiting until late fall to reach out leaves a risk that they have lost interest or that someone else has grabbed them.
Winning the first reply
Getting a first reply takes preparation. Some excellent people are on no platform at all, so the team spends time up front learning what might engage them and who can make a warm introduction. Nearly as much effort goes into finding that introducer as into the message itself, because once someone has ignored one note, ignoring the second and third gets easier.
Why does repeated contact build familiarity?
Psychologist Robert Zajonc published his work on the mere exposure effect in 1968. In his experiments, people rated unfamiliar symbols and nonsense words more favorably after seeing them repeatedly, even when they did not remember seeing them. Repeated low-pressure contact makes a person or idea feel known. That feeling of familiarity is often read by the mind as safety.
Why does a second ignored message get easier?
Habituation is the decline of a response when a stimulus repeats with no consequence. It appears across species, from sea snails to humans, and was documented by neuroscientists studying simple reflexes in the 1960s and 1970s. A message that was ignored once has already been classified as safe to skip, and the next copy gets the same treatment. Web designers call the version of this effect for page elements banner blindness.
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
