2 November 2026 For employers by Natalia & Claude, from Singapore

How does Google hire the smartest people, and how can I do the same without their budget?

This is my view of Google’s hiring strategy, as a headhunter who recruits researchers. In October I visited the Google campus in Singapore, and everything you have heard is true: they do have free food, a music studio, a gym. There is a whole wall of LEGO where you can pick a brick and add something. I added mine.

What shocked me was that everything I saw around me was built for one reason only: to hire and keep the smartest people on the planet.

Think of it as a playground. Smart kids want to build the biggest spaceship with the best LEGO bricks, playing with their friends. That’s what Google did. They did the simplest thing in the world, but they did it well.

You don’t have Google’s budget. You do have a spaceship, toys and smart people. You just don’t sell them. Here is the checklist I would run before you write to anyone.

1. The spaceship: what are you building?

First, talk about your spaceship. What is so exciting that you are building? What are you bringing to the world? It could be the product, it could be the mission. For a university it might be a new school or a research programme. For a startup, the product that doesn’t exist yet. For a lab, the question you are trying to answer.

Say what you are building in one sentence. A smart person from another field should understand it the first time they read it.
Say why it is important. Who is better off when this works? If the answer is only “our company”, keep digging.
Say why it is exciting. Name the hard part. Smart people want the problem nobody has solved yet.
Say what is special about your organization. Your team, your product, your place in the field. What can you do that the others can’t?
Show your passion. If you are bored writing it, they will be bored reading it.

Write one lineWe are building ___, and it matters because ___. The hard part is ___.

2. The toys: what will they get to play with, and where?

Second is the toys. Tell them about the toys they are going to play with. It could be GPUs, your lab, your environment. Think about it: what is so special about the things they are going to play with, and the environment they are going to be in? It doesn’t have to be a campus, and it doesn’t have to be a physical place at all.

List the tools. GPUs, instruments, lab equipment, software, whatever they would touch in the first month.
Find what nobody else has. Data nobody else has, a facility, a partner, real users to test on. This is your best toy, so say it first.
Describe the environment. Freedom to publish, a small team, fast decisions, time to go deep. Whatever is true for you, and special.
Be specific. “World-class facilities” says nothing. Name the thing, and say what they can do with it.

Write one lineHere you will work with ___, and nobody else has it. From your first month you can ___.

3. Smart people: who will they play with?

Three: the smart people you already have in your team. Show their faces and their LinkedIn profiles when you are hiring. Talk about them, because smart people attract other smart people.

Pick two or three people. The ones a candidate in your field would be glad to work next to. Ask them first.
Name them, and link them. A face, a LinkedIn profile, a Google Scholar page. A real name beats “our talented team” every time.
Say what each one has done. One paper, one product, one result that a peer would respect.
Pick people they will actually work with. The person next to them matters more than a famous name they will never meet.

Write one lineYou would work with ___, who ___, and with ___, who ___.

Now say it when you hire

This is what you should communicate when you are hiring. What people typically do, and why they fail to hire the best: they don’t know their strengths, and they don’t communicate them.

What people typically sendWe are XYZ, and we are looking for an engineer or a researcher. Please see the job description attached.

What to sendWe are building ___, because ___. You would work with ___ that nobody else has, next to ___ and ___. Is this worth 20 minutes?

Your first message. The three go in the first lines, before the job title and before the requirements.
Your job post and your careers page. Same three, same words.
Everyone who talks to the candidate. The recruiter, the hiring manager, the panel. Give them the three lines, so the candidate hears one story.

And it keeps working after they join. First of all, you can keep smart people this way, but you can also attract them: the reason they came is the reason they stay.

The one-minute test

Open the last message you sent to a candidate. Can you find the spaceship, the toys and the smart people in the first lines? Smart people don’t know why they should join you until you tell them. If you don’t know why smart people should join you, how would they know?

Do it with your AI in ten minutes

Paste this into ChatGPT or Claude. It will ask you the questions, and you will have your first message at the end.

How does Google hire the smartest people, and how can I do the same without their budget? Help me write my outreach using this checklist. Ask me one question at a time: 1. The spaceship: what are we building, why is it important, why is it exciting? 2. The toys: what great tools will they play with, and where? What do we have that nobody else has? 3. Smart people: who are the smartest people already on my team, and what has each of them done? Then write a first message to a [job title] with all three in the first lines. Do not invent any facts. If you don't know something, ask me.

Keep the playbook coming. I post what we learn as we build an AI-native way of hiring. Follow Natalia on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or LinkedIn for more on AI in hiring and recruiting.

Axe Talent is the first AI-native agency recruiting researchers for universities and industry with its own AI tools. Hiring research talent? Write to natalia@axetalent.com or book twenty minutes on Natalia’s Calendar.