H2 2025 Newsletter

Welcome to the second installment of our biannual TalentEdge newsletter. We are often asked by clients and candidates what we are seeing in the market. This is an attempt to share what we observe, specifically what has changed over the last six months.

Our worldview is admittedly very narrow and as a result, most of these observations will be subjective without broader data to support sweeping market trends. Context on who we are to help frame these observations:

• TalentEdge is a small team of recruiters, each with more than 10 years of recruiting experience across tech

• Our clients range from seed through series F

• We are typically domain agnostic but [unsurprisingly] almost all of our current clients are enterprise AI

• Our expertise lies within engineering, product, design and leadership

In everything we do, we can lean too far towards complete transparency and these observations are no different.

“The most powerful motivator is the opportunity to do important work with people you respect.”

— Eric Schmidt

As the market has rebalanced over the last few months and hiring has become more difficult, what works and what does not work has become more clear - on both sides of the talent equation.

Companies and candidates think the market is ‘their’ market and they are both right.

There is more talent available than ever -

• Hiring average talent has never been easier

• Hiring exceptional talent has never been harder

The same goes for the other side of the equation -

• For exceptional talent, the market has never been better

• For average talent, the market has never been harder

The result is what we think of as a hiring matrix, where outcomes are increasingly binary.

Company Matrix

In today’s environment, every company has the chance to change the world or at the very least, change an industry. That optimism is healthy, but it often leads founders to overestimate how their company is perceived by candidates.

As of Jan 31, there have been 47 funding rounds of $100M or more, compared to 32 in the same time frame in 2025 and 15 in 2024. Funding size alone is not a proxy for quality as it can create dilution risk or lead to down rounds, but it does matter as candidate marketing.

While funding alone will not close world-class talent, ARR velocity can. The number of companies reaching $100M ARR in under three years continues to grow, and while the data is imperfect, this is the competitive landscape elite candidates are benchmarking against.

Startups need to check 2/3 boxes to hire elite talent

• Reasonable working culture

  • This can come in many forms

  • If there is an outsized chance of an 8 figure exit for employees, a 996 schedule can work

  • If the upside is more modest, expectations must scale accordingly

• Great compensation

  • Companies need to hire based on value creation rather than compensation data

  • Backward looking market data is increasingly unreliable

  • Compensation tools lag reality and rarely provide guidance for top 1% talent

    • Founders understand the value a top 1% employee can create but have a very hard time ‘overpaying’ when the data tells them what the market bears for top 10% talent

• Massive upside

  • Candidates are more informed than ever and understand they are investing their most finite resource: time

  • Upside can be financial, technical, reputational, or network-driven, but it must be clear, believable, and defensible

Candidate Matrix

The same bifurcation applies on the candidate side. It is an unfortunate reality that for 99% of the market, this is a very difficult job market. For the top 1%, this is the best job market of the last four years. Capital continues to pour into elite companies, and those companies cannot hire fast enough.

This is not a return to 2021, when companies were issuing seven-figure offers indiscriminately to anyone adjacent to emerging tech. That era was unsustainable, and the market corrected hard.

This market, while fast-paced with huge valuations, has real enterprises building real businesses with real revenue. They need world-class talent and it is a very difficult market if a candidate is anything less.

Startup candidates need to check 3/4 boxes to be competitive in this landscape

• Tier 1 skills

  • Education, company pedigree, demonstrated excellence matter

    • Bootcamps and entry-level pipelines have largely been displaced by AI

• Communication skills

  • Pure technical excellence is no longer sufficient

  • Top candidates can explain their thought processes and contribute to product, customer, and business decisions

• Willingness to grind

  • Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard - when talent does work hard, the gap becomes enormous

• Reasonable compensation

  • This looks different for different calibers of candidates, but flexibility matters

  • High expectations aren’t the issue - misalignment is

Outcomes

It’s hard to hire! There is a narrow window of overlap between world-class companies and world-class candidates, and that’s exactly where we operate. Unlike 2023 and 2024, we can clearly see where thoughtful intervention actually changes outcomes.

We’re excited about what the rest of the year holds and look forward to helping our clients compete at the very top of the talent market. If you have questions, want to pressure test a hiring plan, or need a partner in an increasingly competitive environment, we’d love to talk.

• TE Team / info@talentedgestaffing.com