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The capacity sweet spot
A recruiter with half the usual workload has too little to push against, and one buried far past capacity is simply overwhelmed. The sweet spot is a middle ground at the edge of an adrenaline rush, busy enough to feel the pressure while still staying afloat. The right water level on a recruiting team sits where everyone is still breathing.
The first recruiting hire
That makes the first recruiting hire at a startup a question of two traits. The first is curiosity and a business focus, enough to understand how each hire will change the slope of the company. The second is a high motor: someone who understands the grind and the pace of an early team and loves working at the edge of overwhelmed. That has nothing to do with being younger.
Founders ready to hire a first recruiter are usually already behind on hiring, so the person who arrives is walking into a backlog the moment they start. Someone who thrives on that pace is built for exactly that situation.
Why does moderate pressure improve performance?
Psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson described the pattern in 1908 after experiments on how electric shock strength affected learning in mice. Performance rose with arousal up to a point and then fell. The relationship is now drawn as an inverted U and is known as the Yerkes-Dodson law. How high the peak sits depends on the difficulty of the task, with simple tasks tolerating more arousal than complex ones.
How does heavy workload multiply waiting time?
Queueing theory shows that delays grow slowly at moderate utilization and then explode as a system approaches full capacity. John Kingman's 1961 approximation for waiting time includes a term that rises steeply as utilization nears 100 percent. Any worker with no slack has no room to absorb a surprise, so every new request waits behind the previous one. Hospitals, call centers, and web servers all follow the same curve.
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
