Jon Volk

For the last couple months, the team at Unusual Ventures has been quietly experimenting with a new type of talent offering for startups. Today, after witnessing its outsized impact, we’re excited to pull back the curtain on Unusual Talent — a program designed to recruit the very best candidates to our companies, with end-to-end support from initial touchpoint to signed offer letter. And with that, I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Unusual as Director of Talent, giving founders the leverage they’ve been missing to build amazing teams without losing focus on their many other priorities.

I’ve seen firsthand how agonizing it can be for even large, well-known startups to succeed at recruiting top talent. I joined AppDynamics in 2013 when it was just 200 people, and helped them grow to 2,000 — eventually leading all engineering recruiting. During that time, our VC partners helped us in this plight by sending lists of incredible candidates, but we didn’t have the resources we needed to reach out, vet, and provide an excellent experience to the folks they recommended. Meanwhile, many of these candidates were getting buffeted by emails and calls from recruiters like me with limited context and follow through. When I joined Unusual, they gave me a blank canvas to design something new — reasoning from first principles about what founders truly need — so that we could sidestep the problems I experienced when I was in their shoes.

Given these ingredients, here’s what startups can expect from Unusual Talent:

On-site support. We’ll come to you, immerse ourselves in your culture, and help execute on a hiring plan that will target the right candidates and companies. Effective job descriptions. We help you put your best foot forward, evaluating every word of your JD to make sure it’s inclusive and effective at attracting not just everyone, but candidates who are precisely suited for your company. Compensation audits. Ensuring finely-tuned offers based on thorough market and competitive research. Making sure you’ve future-proofed equity stakes and salary bands so you don’t run into trouble as you grow and fundraise. Elite sourcing. We’ll amplify open roles on LinkedIn and other platforms where we know we’ll find the right type of talent — and follow up with contextualized pipelines of candidates we’ll tackle on your behalf. Experience design. We’ll initially provide and then teach you to continue a white-glove process that gives candidates a superb impression all the way through. Even if they don’t get the offer, candidates leave with a positive experience and become ambassadors for the company. Interview process. We’ll recommend orders of operation when it comes to phone screens, coding tests, and onsite interviews. Drilling down to the questions you can ask to get a sense of technical aptitude and cultural alignment. Closing the deal. I’ve personally signed on hundreds of candidates with different concerns, priorities and questions. Closing is all about pre-closing, so we work with candidates and “close” them every step of the way — from the beginning of the process to the very end.We carefully chose the above services after observing and asking dozens of founders what would help them the most. Throughout these conversations, we heard time and again that that entrepreneurs are advised to spend 50% of their time on hiring, while somehow keeping their product and existing team on the rails. Unsurprisingly, this can seem like an impossible task if you don’t have anyone in your corner lightening the load. This is what we aim to do. Notably, we’ve seen how often the logistics of hiring — the minute details of candidate experience — are the deciding factors for candidates in high demand. Not to mention how small this industry is and how frequently people talk about their best and worst recruiting experiences . For CEOs strapped for time, cash and seasoned experience hiring, this is where it’s easy to fumble and lose top talent to the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple. It’s in these details where I and my team will excel, and where we’ll start building your company’s brand as a desirable and prestigious employer.

When the time is right, and our startups have gained the traction and funding they need to go out on their own, we aim to hand the keys over to a well-oiled machine . By that time, they can expect to have chosen an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) they feel good about, and to have nailed a story and process that closes the talent they want. We’re also keen to help teams hire that first recruiter(s) who’ll keep the winning streak alive.

I think it’s clear from the plan above why I’ve been so thrilled to join the exceptional team at Unusual. They just think differently. With the combined strengths of Partner John Vrionis (who’s seen dozens of seed-stage startups fail and succeed), and Jyoti Bansal (who experienced these challenges firsthand as an entrepreneur), they know where founders can use the most help to get them to Series A and beyond. Add me into the equation, and I bring over a decade of learning from the most discerning and demanding hiring managers in the world at Google, Amazon, and a startup that grew to a $3.7 billion exit.

I’m excited for this opportunity to build something pathbreaking. But if you ask me what really fuels me and my commitment to go above and beyond for these companies — it’s the memory of a phone call. The first candidate I ever placed in my career was a woman who’d been out of work for two years during the recession. I helped her land a role at Charles Schwab in Columbus, Ohio, and I’ll never forget her voice when I gave her the news. It was the sound of relief and security that great things were ahead. Now at Unusual, I’m looking forward to making far more of these calls — to both founders and the remarkable talent we help them hire.

Learn more about Unusual Talent here . And if you have any thoughts, feedback, or would like to work with us, drop us a line at info@unusual.com .

Jon Volk

San Francisco, California, United States 9K followers 500+ connections

About

Experience

Unusual Ventures

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Education

University of Arizona

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