13 years at Google leading some of the company's most elite recruiting teams should be the resume that earns a comfortable lap of the Big Tech circuit. Jeff Moore left it all for Toast. The reasons say more about what Big Tech gets wrong about recruiting than anything else.
Jeff Moore (VP of Talent at Toast, formerly 13 years at Google running elite recruiting teams) joined Nolan Church on 10x Recruiting (more episodes on the 10x Recruiting hub) to break down why the Big Tech recruiting playbook stops working below a certain headcount, why "just take the call" is still the most underrated advice in the business, and how Toast scaled its recruiting org from 20 to 80 people without breaking what worked.
This recap covers the structural moves Jeff made at Toast that Big Tech-trained recruiters often miss, the executive-recruiting discipline he carries from Google, why recruiting will always be more art than science, and the way he actually evaluates recruiter performance.
What Big Tech gets wrong about recruiting
The Big Tech recruiting playbook is built for two things that growth-stage companies do not have: massive existing brand pull and ATS systems engineered for tens of thousands of reqs a year. Apply that playbook at a 2,000-person growth company and most of it collapses.
Jeff watched the pattern play out across multiple Big Tech transplants over his Google years. Senior recruiters who excelled in environments where the inbound flow alone could fill any req would arrive at growth-stage companies and freeze. The systems they relied on were not there. The brand pull was a fraction of what it had been. The hiring managers were less calibrated. The cost of a single mis-hire was much higher in absolute terms.
The first job at Toast was to throw out the Google playbook and rebuild from the ground up. Smaller teams, tighter loops, more direct hiring-manager engagement, more emphasis on the candidate-experience moments that compound. The mindset shift is harder than the operational shift: stop optimizing for the systems Big Tech gave you and start optimizing for the systems your stage actually needs.
- Brand pull fills the top of funnel - inbound alone closes most reqs
- ATS and systems built for tens of thousands of reqs per year
- Hiring managers calibrated by years of structured process
- Mis-hires absorbed at scale - high headcount, smaller relative cost
- Outbound and relationships replace brand - every conversation is optionality
- Lean loops, direct HM engagement built from scratch each time
- Calibration built hand-to-hand on each search, not inherited
- Mis-hires carry outsized cost - the leadership bench choice sets the next 24 months
"Just take the call" is still the best advice
The most quoted piece of advice in Jeff's career fits on a post-it.
Just take the call.”
The frame: every conversation is optionality. The candidate who is not right for the current search might be perfect for the next req, or they might know the perfect candidate, or they might be in the running for a leadership role in 18 months that you do not even have on the org chart yet. The cost of a 20-minute call is trivial; the compounded value of being one degree of separation from the right person at the right moment is enormous.
The advice cuts the other way too. The recruiter who says yes to every coffee chat with every junior recruiter in their network is the recruiter whose network actually compounds. The recruiter who triages too aggressively spends years climbing the relationship ladder from scratch every time the market shifts.
Scaling a recruiting team from 20 to 80, fast
Toast's recruiting org went from 20 to 80 people on Jeff's watch. The default playbook would have been to hire 60 individual contributors directly, brief them on the process, and turn them loose. Jeff inverted that.
The first move was to identify 5-7 founding leads with the right shape: a mix of Big Tech recruiting experience, agency-grit backgrounds, and at least one previous growth-stage scale-up scar. Founding-leadership quality dictates the next 24 months of hiring quality. Those 5-7 leads each owned a vertical or a job family, and they each got the autonomy to hire the next layer down on their own.
The multiplier worked because the founding leads had been recruited specifically for the ability to scale a team. They knew what good looked like; they knew how to coach; they knew how to fire fast when the bar was not being held. The leadership bench got built before the IC layer expanded, not after. By month 18, the team had grown 4x and the quality of hire metric was up, not down.
Executive recruiting strategy that actually works
Executive recruiting at growth stage is a different discipline from line recruiting, and most internal teams treat it like a slightly bigger version of the same thing. Jeff's reframe: executive recruiting is its own playbook, and the teams that win at it import the discipline from search firms rather than reinventing it.
The mechanics: multi-touch outreach over weeks, not single InMails. Tailored messages that reference the specific candidate's recent work, not template tokens. Strategic choice of who sends the first touch (often a board member, a peer executive, or the CEO, never the recruiter alone). A close mechanic that brings the candidate's whole life into the conversation, not just the role.
The recruiter's job in this version is to orchestrate, not to monopolize. Set up the executive sender's message, brief the candidate on the loop, manage the close logistics, run the comp negotiation. The senior candidate respects the executive who reached out; the recruiter earns the close. For more on what makes senior interviewing work, see good-interviewer-bad-interviewer.
Recruiting will always be art, not just science
The recruiting industry has spent the last decade chasing science. Funnel metrics, conversion benchmarks, time-to-fill targets, scorecard analytics. All of that matters. None of it captures the part of the job that actually wins searches.
Recruiting will always be an art, not a science.”
The art is pattern recognition over thousands of conversations: knowing in 90 seconds whether the candidate is going to thrive or stall at this specific company, this specific team, this specific moment. The art is judgment about which candidate signal is real and which is rehearsed. The art is follow-through on the close, the kind that converts a verbal yes into a signed offer the same week.
Jeff's lens on evaluating recruiter performance reflects this. Metrics matter (offer rate, time-to-fill, candidate quality post-90-days) but they cannot be the whole picture. The best recruiter on your team is the one your hiring managers fight to get assigned to their searches. That signal does not show up in any dashboard, and it is the one that actually predicts which recruiters will compound their value across years.
Where AI gives recruiting teams use
The art-vs-science framing does not mean AI is irrelevant; it means AI works best when it removes the science work that was crowding out the art. AI handles the parts of the job that scale poorly with human attention, freeing the recruiter to focus on the parts that scale beautifully with judgment.
Metaview Notetaker captures every interview verbatim so the recruiter can spend the call paying attention to the candidate, not taking notes. Application Review handles the inbound volume so the senior recruiter hours go to the candidates who need real conversation. AI Sourcing ranks profiles against the intake-doc criteria so the recruiter spends their outbound at-bats on the right candidates. Reports tracks whether the hires you made are still performing 12 to 18 months in, which is the only quality-of-hire metric that actually matters. For the AI-augmented-recruiter angle on this shift, see claude-for-recruiters.
Numbers from the 2026 AI & Hiring Alignment Report, based on surveying 505 recruiting leaders and hiring managers across North America and EMEA. The 58% trust figure is the one that maps to Jeff's art-vs-science thesis: when only 58% of HMs fully trust the evaluations they receive, the gap is almost always relationship and judgment - not process.
Tip: The art-vs-science question is a sequencing question. Let AI capture the science (notes, scoring, pipeline signal) so the recruiter arrives at the human moments with full attention - not reconstructing the conversation from memory while also trying to run the close.
The operating shift
Three concrete moves from Jeff's Toast playbook for any growth-stage TA leader:
One: throw out the Big Tech playbook before you reach for it. The systems, the brand pull, the inbound flow that worked at Google or Meta will not be there. Rebuild the operating model around the constraints your stage actually has. Tighter loops, more direct hiring-manager engagement, more emphasis on candidate experience that compounds.
Two: just take the call. Every call. The senior candidate who is not right for the current req is the senior leader you want to hear from in 18 months. The junior recruiter asking for advice is the future head of TA at a company you want to partner with. The 20-minute cost is trivial; the compounding network value is enormous.
Three: hire the founding leadership bench before you scale the IC layer. Five to seven founding leads with the right shape will give you a 4x scale-up that holds quality. Sixty new ICs hired into a leadership vacuum will give you a 4x scale-up that destroys it.
The growth-stage TA teams that internalize these three moves will out-hire the ones still running the Big Tech playbook on a Series C budget. That is the operating shift.
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Frequently asked questions
What does Big Tech get wrong about recruiting at growth-stage companies?
The Big Tech playbook assumes massive existing brand pull, ATS systems engineered for tens of thousands of reqs, and inbound flows that can fill any role on their own. Growth-stage companies have none of that. Senior recruiters who excelled at Google or Meta often freeze when they land at a 2,000-person company because the systems they relied on are not there. The fix is to rebuild the operating model around the constraints your stage actually has.
Why is "just take the call" considered such valuable advice?
Because every conversation is optionality. The candidate who is not right for today's search might be perfect for next quarter's, or might know the perfect candidate, or might be a senior leader you want to hire in 18 months. The cost of a 20-minute call is trivial; the compounded value of being one degree of separation from the right person at the right moment is enormous. The same principle applies to junior recruiters asking for time.
How did Toast scale its recruiting team from 20 to 80 without dropping quality?
By hiring the founding leadership bench first, then the IC layer. Jeff brought in 5-7 founding leads with the right mix of Big Tech experience, agency grit, and growth-stage scale-up scars. Each lead owned a vertical and hired their own team. The leadership bench was built before the IC layer expanded, and the quality-of-hire metric actually went up over the 4x scale-up window.
What separates executive recruiting from line recruiting?
Executive recruiting is multi-touch outreach over weeks, tailored messaging that references the candidate's specific work, strategic sender selection (board members, peer executives, or CEOs sending the first touch instead of the recruiter), and close mechanics that bring the candidate's whole life into the conversation. The recruiter orchestrates the process; they do not monopolize the touchpoints. Most internal teams treat exec searches like bigger line searches; that is why most exec searches at growth-stage companies underperform.
How do you evaluate recruiter performance beyond the dashboard metrics?
Funnel metrics matter (offer rate, time-to-fill, 90-day quality of hire) but they cannot be the whole picture. The strongest signal is which recruiters your hiring managers fight to get assigned. That demand signal predicts compounding value better than any single metric and captures the pattern-recognition, judgment, and follow-through that the dashboard misses.
