How Rim Tesfai of StackedSP uses Paraform to match high-quality candidates to high-impact roles
Rim Tesfai didn’t set out to be a recruiter.
She started out in sales at multiple venture-backed tech companies like Uber and Vision Critical, building out their go-to-market and sales functions. Rim was part of the five-person team that launched UberEats in Toronto, ultimately passing their playbook off to the United States.
So it’s safe to say Rim knows a thing or two about startups.
From operator to talent partner
She was recruited by Ilan Saks, founder of StackedSP, a high-performance tech recruiting firm. After scaling UberEats, this was an opportunity for Rim to get back to working with early-stage startups. But this time, she would be building relationships with founders and helping them grow their businesses by hiring incredible talent.
StackedSP prides itself on working with elite talent and visionary founders determined to revolutionize industries. Their mission goes above traditional recruitment — they focus on placing top-tier talent in critical roles at industry-leading startups.
Now, Rim is a Principal, Search and Partner Success at StackedSP, focusing on technical leadership searches ss well as placing talent in engineering, design, and product roles. Having been a member of scrappy teams herself, she knows what good startup talent looks like.
The problem: StackedSP had too many great candidates.
StackedSP prides itself on building a diverse network of startup talent with “champion DNA.” Their candidates “are masters of their craft with elite-level drive and skill sets”, and many of them are looking to join the top 1% of companies that truly change the way we live and work.“
The problem is,” says Rim, “We spend tons of time and effort building relationships with great engineers, engineers who were early at top tech startups, or who have the potential to change the trajectory of an earlier-stage company. However, matching a candidate to a startup is no easy task. You need to really know the individual and the startup.”
“Having access to more openings at groundbreaking VC-funded startups increases the chance of finding the perfect outcomes for our candidates and partners.”
By partnering with Paraform, StackedSP’s investment into building trust with great talent pays off more efficiently, generating more placements for candidates and hires for startups.
The solution: Paraform opened up many more high-quality opportunities for candidates.
Paraform's features – and the amount of startups hiring on the platform – provided Rim new opportunities to match high-quality candidates with high-impact roles.
Rim and StackedSP know their candidates very well and are therefore drawn to the detailed information about each role on Paraform. The added context facilitates more effective introductions.
Because Paraform prompts hiring managers to share as much detail as possible about what they’re looking for in a candidate for a given role – from ideal companies they’ve worked at to specific attributes their team is looking to add or avoid – it helps recruiters have a better idea of which candidates fit the bill.
While recruiters try to get this kind of information on an intake call, founders and hiring managers can often be uncertain about what they’re actually looking for. So not only is Paraform’s intake process efficient, but she often gets more information out of founders because they’ve taken the time to consider what they truly need.
Now, after putting so much time and effort into creating a high-quality candidate pipeline, Paraform has become a failsafe way for Rim to find roles for her candidates.
“The bar for companies is really high on Paraform, which is something we’ve been attracted to because we also set a high bar for our candidates and partners.”
Rim also loves Paraform’s curated list feature, which allows her to do a filtered search for roles in Paraform and create a candidate-friendly list that doesn’t show any confidential information. She can then share these lists with candidates, who choose the roles they’re most interested in.
The result: Rim filled a high-priority role with a candidate she’d spent time building a deep relationship with.
The week she started on Paraform, Rim was looking to place an engineering candidate she’d been working with for a while. She pitched an MLOps Engineer role at Cleanlab, an AI-powered data curation platform, that seemed like a perfectly fit for her candidate's aspirations and skills.
Rim's intuition proved spot-on. Her candidate's immediate interest in Cleanlab’s mission and the role led to a swift introduction to the hiring manager, and ultimately a successful placement.
Rim filled a critical position, Cleanlab secured top talent, and the candidate landed their ideal job. This win demonstrates the power Paraform’s model: a curated candidate pipeline meets a marketplace of exciting tech roles, benefiting everyone involved.
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