How does a startup hire someone who has invented a programming language and can run a department, when TechCrunch-featured competitors want the same person? Nomic Labs, the team behind the HardHat developer tools, brought us exactly that brief. Worldwide, the description fits a few dozen people, and every one of them is employed.
The hire came from Meta in the United States. The case study tells how a small Web3 company won a candidate of that calibre against louder names and deeper pockets, starting with a first message about the technical problem Nomic was solving. We use the same method to move a professor from academia into an industry R&D lab: map the field where the work is published, verify the record, and make the approach personal.
For teams hiring in the same market, we have also written about how to hire AI researchers and about tech headhunters in Singapore. A research team with a role that reads like this one can write to natalia@axetalent.com.