How to find your first employees as a founder
Last updated 10 November 2026
You write to someone who would join a small company early, and you say why now. HeyLead drafts the note from your brief: what you are building in one plain line, why their work fits an early team, and what joining early means, without promises. Nothing is sent until you press Launch.
Who is making the first hires
A founder hiring the first few people, without a recruiter and without an employer brand to point at. The reader has shipped at an early company before, or their posts say they want to. You are not filling a requisition on a careers site. You are asking one person to join something small.
This is different from hiring a specialist into a team that already exists. There, the note is about the work and the stack. Here, the note is about the stage: what exists today, and what they would own.
What the first-hire note says
One plain line on what you are building. No vision paragraph. Why they fit an early team, taken from work they have already done, not from a hope about culture. What joining early means in practice: the scope they would own, the size of the group, the fact that the role will change. No promise about what equity will be worth.
Say why now. A headline that shows they are looking, a post they just published, or a comment they joined on a thread in your industry is a reason this week is the week to write.
- What you are building, in one plain line
- Why they fit an early team, from their own work
- What joining early means here, without promises
What you do not attach
A guess about what their equity will be worth is a promise you cannot keep in a first message. A long company history asks them to become an investor in the story before they know the job. A deck on the first note is a meeting they did not agree to.
- Promises about what equity will be worth
- A long company history
- A deck attached to the first message
The brief for a first hire
You are hiring, so the message set is not the selling one.
Campaigns with this goal (Hire people) work with a custom brief: say what you ask of the person.
The sentence should name who the first hire is and what they would own. You type it in Claude, Cursor or the dashboard. HeyLead drafts the campaign. You press Launch when you have read it.
HeyLead is an AI agent for LinkedIn outreach: it finds the right people, writes to them in the voice of your own LinkedIn posts, follows up, and handles replies. It runs from Claude Code, Cursor, any MCP client or a web dashboard.
Find our first product designer: someone who has shipped at an early company and wants to own the whole product.Signals for a first hire
A headline that says they are looking for a new role. A post they publish while you are already talking to people like them. Someone who fits and joins the comments on a thread in your industry. Use those. Do not open with a keyword list of skills.
The invitation is still warmed up with a profile view, a follow and a comment. Replies come back classified against the facts in the brief. If your facts cannot answer, the reply is held for you. "Not now" is a check-in in 30 days, not another pitch.
Opening messages, follow-ups and answers to replies go out without review unless you switch review on; then they wait for your approval. Invitations are not held. In review mode, invitations go out without a note.
Questions people ask
Who is a first-hire note for?
A founder without a recruiter or an employer brand, writing to someone who would join a small company early.
What do I say about equity?
Nothing about what it will be worth. Say what they would own, and leave the promise out.
What brief do I type?
One sentence naming the first hire and what they would own. Hire people works with a custom brief.
HeyLead sends from your own LinkedIn account at a human pace: at most 20 invitations a day and 100 a week on a free LinkedIn account (more on Premium or Sales Navigator: a newly connected paid account starts at 20 a day and doubles each week up to its limit), Monday to Friday 08:00 to 22:00 in your time zone, minutes apart. It backs off when LinkedIn pushes back and resumes on its own. You can pause any campaign at any time.
HeyLead is not affiliated with LinkedIn. It reaches LinkedIn through Unipile, which is also not affiliated. LinkedIn's own rules are in the Terms.
Set up HeyLead using https://heylead.dev/llms.txt