Average time to offer
Talent retention
Offer acceptance
Y Combinator
Andreessen Horowitz
General Catalyst
Greylock Partners
Benchmark
Index Ventures
Most founders don't realize how much time and money they're losing to slow, inefficient hiring processes. Here's how we compare.
41 days
Save 17 days
$49,500
Save $16,500
79%
+19% better retention
67%
+26% more acceptances
You make better hires, faster
Your engineers actually stay (98% retention vs 79% industry average)
You save $16,500 per placement in recruiting costs
Candidates say yes (93% acceptance vs 67% average)
Source:
CompTIA
Ashby
Robert Half
LinkedIn is full of "senior engineers" who've never worked at a startup.
250 applications. 3 worth interviewing. 0 who understand your stage.
Competing with FAANG comp on a startup budget feels impossible.
6 months in, you realize they can't handle ambiguity. Now you're back to square one.
Let us show you how
Real searches. Real results. The details that actually made the difference.
SERIES B DIGITAL HEALTH
$60M FUNDING
A digital health company scaling rapidly needed their first data engineering leader. After 3 months of searching, they'd interviewed 12+ candidates - all either strong data engineers with zero healthcare experience or healthcare analysts who couldn't architect scalable pipelines.
Kickoff to signed offer. 6 months later: 5-engineer team built, 99.8% SLA achieved, 90% reduction in manual data handling.
"We'd been searching for three months and kept hitting the same wall - great data engineers who didn't understand healthcare, or healthcare people who couldn't build scalable pipelines. Matt understood the challenge immediately and found someone who actually had both skill sets. That's incredibly rare."
— CTO, Series B Healthtech
Our Approach:
The Complete Result:
28 days from kickoff to signed offer. Six months later, the hire:
EARLY-STAGE AI STARTUP
$6.3M FUNDING · 8 EMPLOYEES
An AI infrastructure startup needed a Principal AI Engineer who could build production ML systems from scratch. The CEO had extremely high standards but early-stage comp constraints. After 4 months, every candidate was either too senior/expensive (wanted $300K+ FAANG comp) or not senior enough (could ship features but couldn't architect systems).
Kickoff to signed offer. 12+ months later: owns entire AI/ML roadmap, built core infrastructure enabling market expansion.
"Most recruiters would have just sent us $300K+ candidates we couldn't afford. Matt was honest about our constraints and helped us reframe the search. He found an engineer who cared more about ownership and impact than maximizing base salary. That honesty saved us months."
— CEO, Series A AI Startup
Our Approach:
The Complete Result:
34 days from kickoff to signed offer. 12+ months later, the hire:
The difference between a good early hire and a great one isn't always obvious on a resume. It shows up six months later - in how quickly they ship, how well they own decisions, and whether the systems they build scale or crumble under growth.
We've spent 15 years learning to spot that difference before it matters.
Open Select was founded to solve a specific problem: early-stage founders making high-stakes engineering hires without the time, network, or process to consistently get them right. Most recruiters treat hiring like a numbers game. We treat it like the founder decision it actually is.
We work with venture-backed startups from Seed through Series B and beyond - at the moment when team composition has the most leverage. Whether you're making your first technical hire or scaling from 10 to 50 engineers, your hiring decisions will define whether your technical foundation supports growth or becomes the thing that slows you down.
What makes us different isn't just what we do - it's when we get involved and how we think about the problem.
Early-stage hiring isn't about filling headcount. It's about finding engineers who can thrive in ambiguity, own entire systems, and make architectural decisions that won't need to be undone in six months. We know what "founding engineer" actually means because we've placed dozens of them.
Most of our best work happens before a formal search even starts - helping founders think through team structure, sequencing hires, and pressure-testing whether the role they think they need is actually the one they should hire for first.
Every profile you see has been vetted against your stage, stack, and culture. If someone doesn't fit, we don't send them. Our shortlists are small because they're honest - and founders appreciate not wasting time on interviews that were never going to work.
"Matt brought us high-quality candidates who actually understood our product and the stage we were at. Every profile felt hand-picked, not spray-and-pray."
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CS
"Working with Matt was different from other recruiters. He took the time to understand our technical needs and only sent us engineers who could genuinely build in an early-stage environment. No wasted interviews."
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CT
"Matt has always been trustworthy and straightforward to work with, which is why we continue using Open Select. He delivers results without wasting time, and his ongoing support and commitment make the entire hiring process smooth and efficient."
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GM
We dig into your product, technical stack, team structure, and hiring goals. No generic intake forms. We quickly grasp your technical context so every candidate we surface actually fits your stage and challenge.
We help you pressure-test the role, define the profile, and sequence hires if you're building multiple positions. We're often involved before a formal search exists.
We tap our curated network of proven backend, infrastructure, and AI engineers and run targeted outreach. No generic resumes, only engineers who can genuinely build in 0-to-1 and early-scale environments.
You get 3-5 high-signal candidates, not 30 mediocre ones. Every profile comes with our honest assessment.
We stay involved through offer negotiation and onboarding to ensure a smooth start. This isn't transactional for us. We're building long-term partnerships.
Most searches take 3-6 weeks from kickoff to offer acceptance - assuming we're aligned on profile and comp from the start. We move fast because we know the best candidates don't stay available long.
We work on a contingency basis with payment on successful placement. For select early-stage companies, we offer flexible structures. First conversation is always free - let's discuss what makes sense for your situation.
We work with venture-backed startups at the moment when hiring decisions have the most leverage - when your engineering hires will determine whether you can scale quickly or spend the next year fixing technical debt.
Who can own entire systems and make architectural decisions that last.
Who set up deployment, monitoring, and scaling before it becomes a crisis.
Who can ship models to production, not just notebooks.
Who've built at scale and can mentor as you grow.
We don't optimize for placements. We optimize for the engineers who are still with you
two years later, leading teams and shaping your technical culture.
We're currently working with Seed through growth-stage startups across the US and UK hiring for:
Building scalable systems from the ground up
Shipping models to production, not just notebooks
Owning entire systems with equity that matters
Leading technical direction at early-stage companies
The best early-stage roles aren't posted on job boards. They're at companies where you'll own entire systems, make architectural decisions that matter, and have equity that could actually be worth something.
We work with Seed through growth-stage startups across AI, fintech, insurtech, and healthtech - teams solving hard technical problems with founders who respect engineering.
If you're tired of FAANG bureaucracy or mid-stage feature factories and want to build something from scratch, we should talk.
I started Open Select in 2011 because I kept watching talented founders make the same expensive mistake: hiring the wrong engineer at the wrong time, then spending six months undoing the damage.
Most recruiters optimize for speed. I optimize for the hire you'll still be happy with two years later.
Over 15 years, I've learned that great early-stage hiring isn't about finding "the best engineer" - it's about finding the right engineer for your specific stage, stack, and founding team dynamic. That distinction matters more than most founders realize until it's too late.
I've spent the last decade working with Seed through Series B companies building technical foundations in AI, fintech, insurtech, and healthtech. Not because these are the only industries that matter, but because I've built deep pattern recognition in what works (and what breaks) when you're building and scaling engineering teams from early stage through growth.
Most of my time isn't spent "recruiting" in the traditional sense. It's helping founders think through problems like:
Should you hire a founding engineer or a senior backend engineer first?
Is this person actually technical enough to own your infrastructure, or will you need to hire over them in six months?
What equity and comp actually close top engineers in 2026?
The search itself - the part most recruiters focus on - is usually the easy part once you've answered these questions correctly.
If you're a founder about to make a critical technical hire and want someone to pressure-test your thinking before you pull the trigger, that's exactly the conversation I'm built for.
We work on a contingency basis with payment on successful placement. For select early-stage companies, we offer flexible structures. Let's discuss what works for your situation.
We work on a contingency basis with payment on successful placement. For select early-stage companies, we offer flexible structures. Let's discuss what works for your situation.
We work on a contingency basis with payment on successful placement. For select early-stage companies, we offer flexible structures. Let's discuss what works for your situation.
We work on a contingency basis with payment on successful placement. For select early-stage companies, we offer flexible structures. Let's discuss what works for your situation.
We work on a contingency basis with payment on successful placement. For select early-stage companies, we offer flexible structures. Let's discuss what works for your situation.
We work on a contingency basis with payment on successful placement. For select early-stage companies, we offer flexible structures. Let's discuss what works for your situation.
We take on 3–5 new searches per quarter.
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