Articles by Troy
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Why I'm Leaving Google After Only 9 Months
Why I'm Leaving Google After Only 9 Months
Last week was my last at Google. I spent the past weekend reflecting on my time there with good friends at a small…
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Troy Sultan shared thisThere are two ways to implement a new TA tool (and imo most teams pick the wrong one by default): - Plug it into your existing workflow changing only what’s necessary - Use as a catalyst to remove 1-2 key bottlenecks/behaviors adjacent to the implementation Interesting visualization/example from a Guide customer below who chose the latter. Former state = RC owns the whole chain and is the bottleneck. New state post-implementation = workload is partially redistributed in areas that leverage humans best once the new tool/capabilities are in place.
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Troy Sultan shared thisFriendly reminder: Recruiting Coordination isn’t an admin role, it’s an *experience* role. Look at any RC job posting. Scheduling is vital but it’s hardly the only responsibility: - Prepping candidates & interviewers for interviews - Memorizing and managing preferences of each interviewer- Constant touchpoints w candidates, recruiters HMs to keep engagement and alignment - Last minute logistics for onsite interviews - Implicitly owning at least some of the tooling, data, systems - Being a culture carrier (90% of your employer brand in the early days *is* the RC)
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Troy Sultan shared thisWe just released improvements to how events are stacked on the Guide calendar view to make busy schedules easier to read and navigate. When multiple events overlap, they now stack in a way that mirrors Google Calendar’s own layout for clearer visibility into each event. This is a small update but impactful for those using Guide’s calendar views - it should help you better understand what’s going on across the busiest/most packed interviewer calendars.
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Troy Sultan shared thisAria can now choose conference rooms based on interviewer tags using custom instructions. If you’re using location tags, tell Aria to check where an interviewer is based to book an available conference room in the matching office. If Aria needs a room but can’t find the right location tag, she’ll also notify the coordinator to step in. It’s an in-the-weeds feature for Guide but I’m excited about this one.
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Troy Sultan shared thisWe're excited to expand Guide's support across the technical assessment tooling ecosystem. Guide now integrates with the leading assessment platforms like HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad and Coderbyte - plus custom assessment links for any platform we don't natively support yet. Once you connect an integration in your Guide account, assessment links are generated automatically for interviews that require them and Guide then shares those links with both the candidate and the interviewer for easy access.
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Troy Sultan shared thisGuide has had Slack notifications for interviewers for a while, but now TA teams get Slack notifications as well 🎉 For RCs and recruiters, you can now enable Slack notifications alongside existing channels (email, in-app) so important updates like scheduling changes, approvals and candidate activity are pushed directly to Slack.
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Troy Sultan posted thisSoftware isn't going to replace RCs this year (we get asked this often). The tech isn’t there yet. But I do believe within 6 months the “bottom 50%” of the role will be automated. Aside from the most complex scenarios (ie exec coordination and EA workflows), “recruiting coordination” in the near future won’t include basic interview scheduling. If true, this is a great thing. We want RCs to level up to more strategic and creative work that software can’t do - and playing calendar tetris isn’t fulfilling work for many. There’s a trove of higher leverage TA work we ignore today bc we don’t have the bandwidth. And the many hours we’ll get back from automating scheduling can be reinvested directly into more strategic and impactful projects which benefits everyone: recruiters, RCs, leadership, interviewers and candidates.
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Troy Sultan shared thisYou can now add restrictions to candidate availability requests in Guide, giving you more control over when candidates can propose times. Limit availability requests to specific days or time windows that better align with interviewer calendars. Live now for all Guide customers 👇
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Troy Sultan shared thisIf you’re buying any TA software, YOU need to drive the demo - not the vendor. You know your needs best. You know what features gaps you have with your current solution. You know your team’s idiosyncratic workflows. And you can have Claude or ChatGPT write up relevant demo scenarios in <15 minutes with this context. Spend the extra time before you start your RFP. Even if you’re “just looking” and not ready to buy. Draft demo scenarios that enable the vendor to demo their tools in the specific context of your needs, and send it to them a week before. This helps everyone (you and the vendor) find the signal (or anti-signal) faster and make a more confident decision. Here’s a real example - one of 5 scenarios sent to us ahead of a demo with Guide. This org will learn 2x more from their demo time as a result.
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1mo
We love and use Decimal daily. Excellent product, and Sanjeet and Kevin are A++.
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Troy Sultan reacted on thisTroy Sultan reacted on this⚡ WE’RE HIRING: Recruiting Coordinator (6-Month Contract) ⚡ Gusto’s Candidate Experience team is looking for a stellar Recruiting Coordinator to help us deliver a memorable experience for every candidate! What you’ll bring: ✅ High-volume coordination, including batch scheduling ✅ Executive-level coordination with a high-touch approach ✅ Hands-on experience with Greenhouse and ModernLoop (or similar tools) 📍 Must be based in SF or Denver (this is a hybrid role, working from a Gusto office 2-3 days per week) Sound like you, or someone you know? Shoot me a DM or tag a strong RC in the comments!
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Troy Sultan reacted on thisTroy Sultan reacted on thisPat Grady’s recent Loom to Sequoia’s LPs accidentally made the best case I’ve heard for building AI services businesses over product companies. He details that the best AI application companies have to rebuild their product every 4 months as the underlying models improve. The part he didn’t get into is that the pace of change leaves these AI startups with two pretty crappy options. They can ship the rebuild and re-onboard enterprise customers who just learned the workflow & UI. Anyone who’s sold enterprise software knows how painful (or plain impossible) that is. Or they can hold the rebuild back because customers like the product as is, which is exactly the opening a competitor needs. Cursor probably felt a version of this when Claude Code showed up with a totally different surface (the terminal & agents) aimed at the same developers. So I’d push founders toward the services-native version, when possible. Instead of selling software your customer has to learn, run it yourself with the best practitioners in the space and sell the outcome. Your cracked team can relearn the product every 4 months. And this way your customer never has to. It’s often just a better business too. Pick customers where you’ll clearly drive dollars generated or saved, take a cut, and you can charge way more than a seats or usage-based pricing model would allow. Most people think of outcome-based pricing as a support & sales thing (Sierra getting paid for the upsells it drives), but it’s showing up in healthcare, CPG and a bunch of other places. SmarterDx (a Floodgate company) helped hospitals capture additional revenue they’d overlooked, took a cut, and got acquired for over $1B in under four years. Midstream Health is scaling fast by finding rebates health systems earned but never claimed and taking a cut of the savings. Waystation AI (another Floodgate company) started as sourcing software for CPG brands, then got pulled into running full-stack sourcing efforts and taking a cut of the found savings. What other companies should I be tracking that do the work themselves and take a cut of the results?
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Troy Sultan reacted on thisTroy Sultan reacted on thisI recently left OpenAI. While it was a short chapter, it reminded me how much I love this work, and I got to do it alongside truly world-class people. To my teammates who put so much care into every candidate's experience, and to the candidates I had the privilege of meeting: thank you. Next, I’m heading home to SoCal. Watching my parents slow down has been difficult, and I’m looking forward to more ordinary moments with family (and some overdue uncle duties). I’m also excited about a new chapter ahead. More on that soon. Grateful for the people, the lessons, and the froges!
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Troy Sultan reacted on thisTroy Sultan reacted on thisCareer Update 👋🏼 Excited to share that I've launched my next startup called VibeWorks, an AI fluency platform for knowledge workers and the companies they work for. How well we work with AI is about to matter as much as - if not more than - anything else on our resume. And for a lot of companies, it already does. For those who don’t know me, I’ve spent half my career in tech recruiting and the other half as an HR tech founder and product leader (across TalentWall™ by Crosschq and our acquiring company, Brilliant). Over the last 12 months, I’ve been doing deep research on the Future of Work (shoutout Kyle Lagunas 👊🏼), putting me in rooms with CHROs, talent leaders, founders, and executives across every stage and industry. While virtually nothing is predictable in the world of AI, the one certainty I walked away with is that AI fluency will separate the careers and companies that thrive, from those that stall. Yet today, almost no one actually knows where they stand, or how to get better. VibeWorks helps individuals and organizations understand where they stand with AI today, give them the tools to build real proficiency, and help them prove it. Prove it to their manager. To their leadership team. To their board. To their next hiring manager. And I’m not building it alone. 🤝 Sarah Lent (Co-Founder): 20 years across four continents as an agency leader, CMO, and growth advisor helping enterprises turn emerging tech into real-world business impact. She lives for leapfrog moments of change and has seen up close what separates teams that adapt from those that get left behind. 👨🔬 Dr. Steve Hunt (Chair of VibeWorks’ Science Advisory Board): A PhD I-O psychologist who literally wrote the book on hiring assessment and joins NYU in January as Academic Director for Human Capital Management. Dr. (and Professor!) Hunt is authoring our AI Fluency rubric - science-backed, objective, and explainable. The reason I’m so passionate about this is pretty simple: there's an obnoxiously loud narrative right now that AI is only here to replace the workforce. I think it’s bullshit, and that future is far from settled. I don’t want a replacement-first future for my 12-year-old son, or for any of us. I've watched too many people pick up these tools - myself included - and do game-changing work that was never possible before. It supercharges what people can deliver, but the bigger unlock is that it makes work fun again! It removes the tedious part of our jobs and enables us to do the parts we love. And we all do our best work when we're actually enjoying it. IMO, the future of work won't be decided by what AI can do on its own. It will be decided by how effective we get at working with it. And that's the gap VibeWorks is closing. We soft launched last week at #HRTech, and the formal launch is coming soon. Join the waitlist in the comments 👇🏼
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Troy Sultan reacted on thisTroy Sultan reacted on thisI’m fired up to share that Metaview has raised an additional $60M led by Insight Partners, with participation from GV (Google Ventures), Intrepid Growth Partners, Seedcamp, Vertex Ventures US, Plural, and Garuda Ventures. This brings our total funding to $110M. We're re-engineering hiring with AI at the core. Always-on agents that take on huge chunks of the end-to-end recruiting workload. So people can focus on what humans do best: judgment, relationships, and making the right calls. The next era, we need to go beyond adoption and move onto actual transformation of how this vital work gets done. We'll make it 100x more efficient and precise. We’ve got a lot to build. Time to lock in.
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Troy Sultan liked thisTroy Sultan liked thisErik Torenberg, David Booth, and the entire Andreessen Horowitz team knocked it out of the park with Cosign. I think your success in life can largely be defined by the the number of people who are willing to vouch for you. That's certainly been true for me. Nearly 10,000 of you have supported me in public, and I'm grateful for every one of you. You were there while I led recruiting at X1 and through our acquisition by Robinhood. Now you're here as I build something new, after more than three incredible years scaling Robinhood into a $100B+ public company. But for most people, that support happens in private, if at all. Cosign makes it public. You can see who someone worked with, who shaped their career, and who would work with them again. You can also privately say "I'd hire them" or "I'd invest in them," and Cosign connects you when the interest is mutual. It's the tool I wish I had when I was starting out. It'll make a huge difference for anyone early in their career, scaling their career, or building something new. It's still in early beta, and the a16z team gave me three invites. Want one? If we've worked closely or know each other deeply, please send me a DM and I'll cosign you.
Experience & Education
Honors & Awards
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Startup Weekend 2011 - Winner
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"A new company that wants to make audio from the Internet’s mountains of written materials was the winner in Tallahassee’s first-ever Startup Weekend." Tallahassee Democrat
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