ranting about recruitment whilst building a frictionless hiring marketplace @hirepavago
Boise, ID
Joined June 2026
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indeed, i will end you!!!!!
Two years of building.
Today is Day 1 of our relentless march to fix hiring for everyone.
Hiring sucks. Businesses hate it. Job seekers hate it.
Everyone has accepted it as the cost of finding people.
The reason is friction.
-Friction to post.
-Friction to review resumes.
-Friction to schedule.
-Friction to share.
-Friction to contract and onboard.
It’s friction.
So we built a marketplace designed to remove friction.
Made by recruiters, for businesses that don’t have time to recruit.
Search a role. Match with the right people in seconds. Watch intro videos. Book interviews for tomorrow. All in under 15 minutes.
That’s Scout OS.
A searchable marketplace for busy owners and hiring managers who need great people in minutes.
Browse 400k candidates with a free profile.
Want to interview? $99/mo. Cancel anytime, or when the hire is done.
You only pay the success fee after the contract is signed: $1,999.
To celebrate our launch, half off for the first 30 days — $999.
You get 60 days of hire protection free. Payroll, assessments, and the rest are in the product.
After 60 days, $149/mo. Cancel anytime.
200+ businesses are already hiring on it.
If you complete a hire in the next 30 days, the success fee is half off— $999.
Try it. When it works, send it to a friend. You get 10% back on every hire they make for the first year.
Tim Tofill retweeted
Found a new outbound signal. Here's the email:
Hey {{first_name}}, saw you breathed just now.
In my experience, breathing founders end up needing to hire. Which usually means recruiters, job boards, and weeks of interviewing people who ghost you.
Pavago skips all of that. You search vetted remote talent, watch their video interviews, and book the ones you like straight in the app. You could be interviewing someone today.
Normally this is where I'd ask for 15 mins. But there's no call, no demo, and you never have to talk to me. It's fully self serve
It's pavago(dot)co
%signature%
Tim Tofill retweeted
Your recruiter probably doesn't understand the role you're hiring for.
I know because I've been on the other end of their pitch.
A while back, a recruiter reached out about a founding growth role at a YC-backed startup.
On paper, it sounded like my kind of role. Then I got on a call with the founder, and it turned out what he actually wanted was someone to chase enterprise clients and run events.
I've never run an event in my life. I'm a digital growth guy, I live in the tracking and the data. We both figured out pretty quickly I wasn't his person, which meant the recruiter had just wasted his time and mine.
And that wasn't a one-off. A fair number of recruiters have reached out to me over the last year and a half for growth and GTM roles. A few were genuinely sharp, but if I'm honest, I'd say about 8 in 10 didn't really know what growth or GTM involves.
Which always left me wondering: if you don't understand the role, how are you deciding who's worth putting in front of the founder?
Think about how it usually goes. You know exactly who you want. You explain it to a recruiter, who turns it into their own version, then pitches a third version to people like me.
Every handoff loses a bit of context, so the first few rounds of candidates miss. That's three or four weeks of your time gone, and you still can't tell if the recruiter even got the brief.
It's a game of telephone, and you're paying for it.
That's a big part of what we're fixing with @HirePavago. You type in exactly who you need, or just paste your JD, and in under a minute you're looking at matched people who are actively looking for work. Nobody in the middle translating.
And eventually, you'll probably be able to just talk to the app, brain dump everything in your head, and let it do the matching.
Because nobody understands the role better than the person hiring for it. Hiring should start there.
Tim Tofill retweeted
i've spent $500k on linkedin ads, mostly on scrappy budgets. b2b, saas, recruiting and marketing agencies, consulting, law firms.
this is one of my favorite plays for leads and demos.
the play in short: run thought leadership ads to your icp for 30 to 40 days, then retarget everyone who engaged with message ads.
the thought leadership ads are about mind space. you might get some leads direct from those, but you'll probs "lose money up front." you get it back once the message ads kick in. that's the main sauce.
here are the steps.
step 1: build the list
i usually go for companies first, then use linkedin's native filters to segment out the kind of people i want.
scrape a list of your icp companies: linkedin company page url, company name, location. upload it and wait ~2 days for it to populate. then filter by roles and seniority. cheapest, best way i know to target.
the goal is to find the best companies you think are a fit for your service, plus any other cohort you want to test.
step 2: clean the list
clean it like you would in any lead tool. what i exclude always depends on the goal and the type of people i'm targeting. there's more i'll exclude, but these three are mandatory for me:
1. expats
2. job seekers and people open to education (if i'm targeting ceos/founders)
3. job functions and company sizes that don't fit
step 3: size it
everyone has an opinion on audience size. mine is roughly 30k to 60k, max under 120k. i've also had campaigns work at 250k+ on native filters without a list. again, test what works for you.
i'd recommend starting with a 60k audience of your top preferred companies.
then do the maths with your budget. you want frequency (how many times each person sees you) and penetration (how much of your list you actually reach).
if you have $2k a month and a 200k list, the maths just don't add up. you won't get the frequency or the penetration you want. you might get some leads, but you're setting yourself up to fail, because b2b is about staying in mind.
some people on your list won't be active either, so keep an eye on that. not too narrow, not too broad.
step 4: set up the campaign
1. objective: brand awareness vs engagement. ba usually reaches more people, but for me engagement has led to better quality. test it, but i'd start with engagement.
2. manual bid. i usually start 20% under the recommended. linkedin loves asking for a lot of money.
3. max delivery off
4. audience expansion off
5. linkedin audience network off
6. utms on everything. linkedin isn't great at attribution, so this is how you know which content is working. make sure your website is capturing them with cookies and hidden fields.
Tim Tofill retweeted
Having daily new user experience:
>Find us,
>sign up,
>search talent,
>invite to interview,
>interview confirmed
All less than 2 hours.
There is nowhere you go from 0 - Scheduled Interview in under 2 hours from when you landed on the website for the first time.
Pavago.co
This season, Indeed’s logo is on Max Verstappen’s car.
They earned it, honestly. Indeed is one of the best network effects ever built. Job seekers go there because that’s where the jobs are, and employers post there because that’s where the job seekers are. It’s become the default. Whatever hiring platform you use or build, the second you’re in a rush to fill a seat, Indeed’s the first name in your head.
But that network effect cuts both ways.
Because everyone posts there, everyone applies there. Candidates fire off applications by the dozen because most of them never hear back. So you post one role and get a mountain of CVs, and the person you actually want is somewhere in there, buried under everyone else.
And the fix you get sold is paying to be seen. Boost the post, more people see it, and the pile gets bigger.
Paying to be seen isn’t the problem. Paying to be seen by more of the wrong people is. Indeed’s business is built on your job getting seen, not on you making a good hire. Somewhere on that car is a little bit of everyone’s boosted job post.
Scout OS works the other way round. You don’t post and wait, you go and pick. Real, vetted people who are active and ready to hire, matched to your role, with intro videos you watch before you book anything. Browsing’s free, and the big fee only lands when you actually hire someone. One client went from first search to signed contract in three days.
Indeed’s great at getting your job seen. We’d rather get you hired.
Tim Tofill retweeted
Most small businesses will never hire an A player in the US until they’re past $5M in revenue.
The A Player on the team is the Founder.
The best people cost the most, and they go to the companies that can pay it. If you’re running a 20-person business, you’re competing with companies 10x your size for the same people. You lose. So you hire a B player and hope.
A B player does the job. An A player makes the job bigger than you hired them for. One A player can change how fast a business grows. Most founders never find out, because they’ve never been able to afford one.
Take marketing.
The median US marketing manager makes about $167K a year. That’s the median. The really good ones cost more.
Here’s what that money buys.
Your B player tells you the ads stopped working. Your A player already paused them, tested two new angles, and found the one that’s working.
Your B player waits for you to set the week’s priorities. Your A player sends you the plan Monday morning and asks what you’d change.
A players like that exist in Pakistan, Mexico, Argentina and South Africa. Most of the good ones already work with US companies. They aren’t cheap, and they know exactly what they’re worth.
A senior A player marketer there runs $3 - 5K a month. That’s $36 - 60K a year, roughly a fifth to a third of the US median.
You still have to win them. They pick the company that pays fair, treats them like part of the team, and pays them more when they deliver. Be that company.
When they grow your revenue, raise their pay. Pay them like A players and they’ll stay.
Same goes for ops, finance, sales and customer success. Marketing is just the easiest one to measure.
Tim Tofill retweeted
I was bored, so I typed "GTM" into our search.
This profile came up.
Valentin. GTM operator based in Montenegro. 4 years in remote B2B sales and GTM, mostly for US companies.
His track record:
-BDR at a cybersecurity startup. Built the BD function from zero and beat a $1.5M pipeline target 60 days early.
-SDR at a B2B lead gen company. Promoted to growth product manager and grew user acquisition 15%.
-SDR at a US lead gen agency. Promoted to account rep, then to GTM recruiter.
-Recruiter for a Texas roofing company. Built a funnel bringing in 30+ candidates a day at under $250 per hire.
-Now he's an account manager running 10 B2B lead gen accounts on Clay and Smartlead.
Cool story he tells in his video:
He took over a client who'd seen no results in almost 5 months and wanted out. He asked for 2 weeks and rebuilt the ICP and GTM strategy. By week 5, meetings booked were up 135%.
Before all of this, he went from waiter to hotel owner in Montenegro, which i found really cool.
Y'all should check out his profile and video interview. His salary expectations are around $2500!
pavago.co/c/7bdf2195-038d-46…
The video intro on a candidate profile tells you more in 90 seconds than a resume tells you in 20 minutes.
Resumes are backwards-looking documents written by people who know how to write resumes. They compress years of context into bullet points optimized for passing a filter, not for helping you make a decision.
A 90-second video does something a resume cannot. You hear how someone explains their own work. You see if they can organize a thought under mild pressure. You get a read on communication style before you've spent a single minute on a call.
For remote roles especially, this matters more than people admit. A remote hire communicates in writing, on video, and asynchronously, every single day. If you can't assess those things before the interview, you're flying blind through the most expensive part of the process.
The pushback I hear is that video intros are a nice-to-have, not a filter.
I think that's backwards. For a full-time remote role, a video intro is the filter. Everything else is confirmation. The interview becomes faster when you already know someone can communicate.
You're not spending the first 20 minutes deciding if there's a there there. You're already one level deeper.
The shift worth making: stop treating the resume as the primary signal and the video as the supplement. Flip that order. Watch the video first. Read the resume second. The hire quality conversation changes when you do.
Tim Tofill retweeted
Recruiting is your most important job as a founder.
If you have a team of 5, the next hire is 18% of the total team
A team of 10, then the next hire is 9%, a team of 20, 5%.
Stop hiring under emergency conditions, use pavago.co to make hiring a continual process.
Have live roles, matched candidates to review when you’re ready, schedule interviews in minutes.
Tim Tofill retweeted
The hard part of hiring isn't choosing the person.
It's everything before you get to speak to them.
Writing the job ad. Reading CVs that all sound the same. Booking calls with people who turn out to be wrong in the first two minutes.
That's where the week goes.
So here's how we've set it up:
-Browse candidates for free.
-Watch their video interview before you book anything.
-Only pay when you actually want to talk to someone.
We can't make hiring fun. But we're trying to make the annoying bit a lot shorter.
Tim Tofill retweeted
A demand gen marketer in Brazil influenced 67% of a US SaaS company's pipeline.
That's $43M.
MQLs: 800 to 2,700 a year.
SQLs: 220 to 420 a year.
Email click-through rates: 1.6% to 3.7%.
Before that, at a fintech SaaS:
Beat her MQL target by 75% in her first 3 months.
Grew organic traffic 245%.
She runs ABM, attribution and paid media, and she's the HubSpot and Salesforce admin.
She already works with a US sales team. From Rio.
Her profile, video, CV and LinkedIn are in the comments.
Honestly, you can build some really cool stuff with Claude now. Websites, little internal tools, automations, designs, pretty much whatever you want.
But if you run a small business, it's worth asking yourself whether it's actually a good use of your time.
It's so easy to get sucked in. You sit down to tweak one thing on your website, and three hours later you've rebuilt the whole homepage, automated your invoices and you're halfway through redesigning your logo. Feels great. Did it bring in a single customer though?
For most SMB owners, your time's better spent on the stuff that actually makes you money. Getting customers, making content, fixing churn, whatever's holding you back right now.
If you want the cool shit built, hire someone who's good with making products and let them get on with it. Shameless plug, but that's exactly the kind of person you can find in a day with @HirePavago
And I don't think we're at the point where you can replace your team or your SaaS tools with a few prompts just yet. You'll get something that works on a Tuesday afternoon, but someone still has to keep it running.
Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone. If you're technical, or building is genuinely the fun part for you, crack on. But for most people running a small business, it's a very fun way to avoid the thing that pays the bills.
If you know what good looks like, you're going to win with AI. If you don't know what good looks like, you're going to struggle.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Tim Tofill retweeted
He studied psychology at the University of Wyoming.
Now he books 30–40 qualified sales opportunities a month. From Mexico.
This is Hector. He runs outbound as a freelance SDR.
Qualified opportunities: 30–40 a month.
Team: 2 SDRs.
Closed revenue he helped drive for an AI SaaS client: $116K+.
He works the phones, email and follow-up to reach enterprise decision-makers, runs discovery, and only hands off deals that fit.
Fluent in English and Spanish. Already selling into the US market.
His profile, video, CV and LinkedIn are in the comments. Free to sign up and browse.
pavago.co/c/4e5e723d-07d1-44…