By Akhil Bhadran - July 27, 2025
Startup hiring wasn’t supposed to be this painful.
I joined Nik early. FoundersAreHiring wasn’t a product yet - it was a rough sketch he’d drawn between shipping sprints and founder chaos. We were a tiny team, doing what early-stage startups do best: building, shipping, and stretching ourselves thin. My focus? Systems, backend, product.
Hiring? Not really in my job description.
But when we started growing, it suddenly became all-consuming.
I found myself knee-deep in resumes and “top talent” intros. I was talking to developers who sounded great on paper… but didn’t actually want to build. Or couldn’t. Or didn’t care.
The same issues kept showing up:
Impressive LinkedIn profiles, zero real signal
Candidates who looked great - but didn’t align
Wasted hours on interviews that never should’ve happened
And that’s when it hit me: Nik was right. Startup hiring is broken. Bloated job boards. Recruiters adding friction. Signals lost in noise. The tools weren’t built for speed or clarity - they were built for scale. And scale is the enemy when you're hiring for fit.
We weren’t looking for “the best resume.” We were looking for builders who care. People who’d jump into the fire with us. And those people were getting buried.
Nik had already started experimenting with what would become FoundersAreHiring. When he asked if I wanted in, it was an easy yes.
We didn’t want to build just another startup job board. We wanted to fix the hiring experience - for founders and for startup-ready candidates alike.
Because we’re both.
Recruiters weren’t speeding us up - they were slowing us down. So we stripped them out. On FAH, founders and candidates connect directly. No middlemen. No games.
It’s hiring the way it should be: Real conversations, faster decisions.
Instead of flooding inboxes with junk, we send curated job drops weekly. Each one is crafted to connect high-signal candidates with startups that actually match.
Less noise. More fit. Better outcomes.
Most platforms treat culture fit like a buzzword. We treat it like the foundation. We go beyond titles and talk about what really matters:
The tech stack
The pace
How decisions get made
What kind of team you're walking into
Because finding the right role isn’t about “Senior” vs “Staff.” It’s about alignment, energy, and mission.
Copy-paste resumes? Low-effort apps? We’ve been there.
FAH filters out the noise before it hits your inbox. Smart filtering tools surface candidates who actually care, so you spend less time sorting - and more time hiring.
Axira AI is our voice-first screening agent that captures founder-relevant traits like curiosity, ownership, and clarity. Candidates answer 3-5 async voice questions in under 10 minutes, no scheduling required. You get authentic signals and a concise summary to decide who to talk to next. It’s founder-aligned, not a gatekeeper, and keeps conversations private by default.
I’ve sat on both sides of the table.
As a developer looking for a mission-driven startup
And as a founder trying to hire people who give a damn
FoundersAreHiring is the tool we wish existed when we were scaling. So we built it - for us, and for you.
If you’re a founder trying to hire builders, or a builder hunting for a high-agency, high-trust team, you should try FAH.
We’re live. We’re improving every week. And we’d love your feedback.
👉 Explore the startup job board 👉 Try FoundersAreHiring
Let’s fix startup hiring - for real this time.