Hiring is broken because no one is paid to fix it.
Hiring is the most important thing a company does. It’s also the most broken — and not for the reasons people reach for. It isn’t a tooling problem or an effort problem. It’s an incentive problem.
Look at who gets paid, and when. Recruiters are paid to place someone, the day they start — not to get it right. Whether the hire is the best in the market or gone in three months, the fee is the same. So the industry runs on speed and volume: fill the seat, take the cut, move on.
The platforms are no better. Job boards make money from postings and applications, so they’re built to maximise both — more listings, more noise, more tools to sell you for cutting through it. They profit from the problem, not the fix. The new wave of AI has only poured fuel on it, flooding every inbox on both sides.
So the one thing that actually matters — the right person, in the right seat, still there and doing great work a year later — is the one thing nobody in the market is paid to deliver. The incentives point everywhere except the outcome.
We built InCommon to carry the incentive that’s missing. We only win when the hire is right and stays — so that’s what we’re built to get right, from first principles: working out who you actually need, reaching the people who aren’t looking, telling honestly whether someone’s good, and keeping them once they’re in. It’s a hard problem, and we haven’t finished it. But it’s the one worth solving.
The way we build.
Four parts, one system.
A good match isn’t luck. It takes a deep pool to draw from, an engine that can actually search it, and the judgement to make the call that matters. Any one alone is weak; the four together are what make a hire you can count on.
Talent pool
A proprietary pool of people we’ve found, met, and kept warm — built over years through our own channels and a deep referral network, and refreshed every day. Most of them aren’t on job boards and will never see your posting. It’s the asset everything else draws on.
AI engine
The engine does what no human could at scale: reading a role for what it actually needs, searching the pool, and surfacing the handful of people genuinely worth your time. Not keyword-matching — real signal, so the shortlist stays short and every name on it earns its place.
Human judgement
AI can find and rank. It can’t tell you whether someone is actually good, or whether they’ll thrive in how you work. That call is ours — senior people who’ve done this for years, with their name on every shortlist. The engine narrows; judgement decides.
It compounds
Every role we fill and every hire that works teaches the system something — sharpening the pool, the matching, and our read on what great looks like for teams like yours. The longer we work together, the better it gets.
Teams we’ve built.
From early-stage startups to PE-backed companies, across engineering and well beyond it.
Come talk to us.
If this is how you’d want your team built, tell us what you’re working on. You’ll be talking to the people who’d actually do it.