Meet great hires for months before you have a job for them

Cristina Cordova, who joined Stripe to work on partnerships, first heard about the company at a Palo Alto barbecue when she got talking to Patrick Collison, Stripe's chief executive. She was working at a startup called Pulse, in an office right next door to the house where he was coding through the night. They got coffee, she kept meeting people from the company, and nine months later she formally interviewed. She said she guessed she was being assessed during that time, though she did not realize it at the time.

At Stripe, she learned, that slow courtship had a name: long recruiting. The idea, as Cordova put it, was to pick out people you think are great even if you have no role for them today, or even if they are "not interested in working for you yet."

The method takes patience. Put those names on a list, and give the list to a founder or another member of the leadership team to own. That person meets with the people on it regularly and spends time with them. The goal, as Cordova put it, is that "when they are ready to make a move, you are the first person that they reach out to." In her case, that meant coffees and conversations spread over nine months before she decided to interview.

Cordova said she was loyal to Pulse at the time, so she treated the early meetings casually. She met with Billy, Stripe's first chief operating officer, who pitched what partnerships could become, and then she met with four or five engineers in a day of interviews. She said there is probably some assessment happening on both sides in every interaction.

If you want to try it, start your own list this week. Write down a few people you would hire if you had the opening, and put a recurring coffee on the calendar.