Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The biggest offer resets in six months
Selling throughout the process
Cursor's approach is to avoid selling at the close. Selling happens throughout the process: the recruiter learns early what could motivate a person to move, and the whole experience is built to hit those motivations, so the offer arrives as the culmination of the process rather than its start.
Intrinsic over extrinsic
The team leans on the intrinsic reasons, such as the role, the team, and the people, over the extrinsic ones, even when competing offers arrive with enormous numbers. That means the Cursor number is not always the highest, and some candidates choose elsewhere even when it is. People often begin a job search with one set of priorities and discover others along the way.
Fit saves everyone work
A candidate who lands at the wrong company means the recruiter redoes the search in six months, so working out the fit early saves everyone the work. Companies generally know they are not a candidate's intrinsic top choice, which makes the goal winning heads and hearts instead of buying them.
Why does a big raise stop feeling big?
Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell introduced the idea of the hedonic treadmill in 1971. People adapt to improved circumstances, and the new level soon becomes the reference point for judging everything. A 1978 study by Brickman and colleagues compared lottery winners with a control group and found that winners were not much happier than the others in daily life. Pay follows the same pattern of adaptation.
How can money crowd out interest in work?
In a 1971 experiment, psychologist Edward Deci had two groups solve a block puzzle, and he paid only one group. When the paid group was later left alone with the puzzle, it spent less time playing with it than the unpaid group did. Deci and Richard Ryan went on to build self-determination theory on this idea, holding that autonomy, competence, and relatedness sustain motivation. External rewards can weaken motivation that was already internal.
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