u/renishh_23

This has been bothering me for a while.

Stripe owns payments globally. Amazon owns commerce globally. Google owns search globally. But there is no single company that owns hiring across markets. Not even close. LinkedIn comes nearest and still doesn't actually control how most hires get made.

The recruitment industry is worth close to a trillion dollars. There are thousands of job boards, ATS companies, staffing firms, and sourcing tools. India alone has over 5,000 staffing firms. And nobody has built the global operating system for hiring.

I used to think this was a technology problem. Like, nobody had built the right product yet.

I don't think that anymore.

The reason is that hiring isn't a transaction; it's more of a trust decision. And trust doesn't cross borders the way money does.

A payment clears or it doesn't. A candidate has to decide if a role is worth changing their next three years. That decision is full of context that won't globalize. In India you're working around 90-day notice periods, counteroffer cultures, compensation anchors set by GCCs, and trust that travels through WhatsApp groups and ex-colleague intros before any formal outreach lands. In Germany it's works councils. In Japan it's something else entirely. Every market has a different answer to the question "why would I actually leave."

Every tool that's tried to go global has had to choose between building for one market's behavior and underperforming everywhere else, or building something so generic it fits nowhere well.

I'm not sure this is fixable. Maybe the category structurally resists global winners because the product you'd need to build isn't a payment rail. It's a cultural translation layer for every labor market on earth. That's not a product. That's twenty products pretending to be one.

Which is a strange thing to sit with when every investor conversation goes back to global TAM.

For people who have hired across multiple countries: does the local context actually change how you operate, or do you find a way to run one process everywhere?

Hiring is getting tricky. You find someone you like, they accept the offer, but then you have to wait for months for them to start.

Often things change during that long wait and it makes it very hard to plan product or stay on schedule.

How are other founders handling this? Are you only looking for people who can join fast or is there a better way to find people who are serious about the role and will actually join?

We did 25 Demo calls in month 1, and I thought we were ahead. Turns out we were just busy.

Every person we spoke to: HRs, founders, TA leads, even 2 VCs, and they said some version of the same thing. Hiring is broken, agencies are painful, and yes, this is a real problem. And I genuinely believed that meant we were close.

We weren't close. We didn't even know who we were building for exactly.

Validation of a problem is not the same as finding the person who will open your product at 9 am daily because they genuinely have no better option. We were mixing those two things up the whole time.

Somewhere around Demo call 18 or 19, someone said something that stuck ... stop asking whether the problem is real and instead find five people who will use this thing daily. Don't try it. Use it. See if even 15-20% of how they currently hire shifts because of you. That's our real signal.

We're in that phase now. It's slower than I expected and less exciting than the calls were.

Curious if anyone has hit this...and also, how did you find your first ‘must-use’ users?

we kept calling it progress. Turns out we were just busy.

Every person we spoke to: HRs, founders, TA leads, even 2 VCs, and they said some version of the same thing. Hiring is broken, agencies are painful, and yes, this is a real problem. And I genuinely believed that meant we were close.

We weren't close. We didn't even know who we were building for exactly.

The calls felt like wins while they were happening. They weren't. Validation of a problem is not the same as finding the person who will open your product at 9 am daily because they genuinely have no better option. We were mixing those two things up the whole time.

Somewhere around Demo call 18 or 19, someone said something that stuck ... stop asking whether the problem is real and instead find five people who will use this thing daily. Don't try it. Use it. See if even 15-20% of how they currently hire shifts because of you. That's our real signal.

We're in that phase now. It's slower than I expected and less exciting than the calls were.

Figuring out the difference between someone who validates an idea and someone who actually needs it!

I want to be upfront that I'm not calling anyone out.

But I keep noticing this and haven't seen it discussed directly many of the times.

A lot of Indian founders I follow have San Francisco on LinkedIn. Some are building from Bengaluru. Some from cities you'd never hear about in a YC application. And there's a quieter version: founders from Surat, Indore, Bhopal quietly listing Bengaluru. Not because they're there. Because showing their actual city felt like it would cost them something.

I've thought about why from two angles.

- Practically, it's not irrational. Warm intros, office hours, the way a cold email gets replied to; it all flows through location. If your profile reads "tier 2 India," you're one filter behind before anyone's opened your deck. The lie gets you past that filter. The business hasn't changed. Just three letters.

But there's something else running underneath it Psychologically.

- Geography carries identity. Claiming SF doesn't only signal "serious founder" to an investor. It signals something to the founder themselves. Sometimes that's aspiration. Sometimes it's shame. I'm building from Surat. I've felt the second one.

SF looks past India. Bengaluru quietly filters the rest. The power law just repeats itself at every layer.

I'm not saying founders are wrong for doing it. I'm saying when lying about your zip code becomes the rational move, something in how we evaluate people is broken.

What is the signal actually measuring when it's this easy to fake?

Genuinely curious if anyone's thought about this or made that call themselves.