Adam Ward is Head of Talent at Cursor, one of the fastest-growing software companies in history. Before joining Cursor, Adam helped scale Facebook through its IPO, led global recruiting at Pinterest as the company grew from 200 to more than 2,000 employees, and built Growth by Design Talent into the talent advisory firm behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Notion, and Figma.

In this episode, Adam joins host Joelle Emerson to talk about why most companies are still building recruiting teams the way they did decades ago, and what needs to change now. He explains Cursor’s approach to hiring, why the best recruiting processes look more like executive search than a traditional funnel, and why companies should focus less on hiring efficiency and more on hiring efficacy.

They also discuss talent density, referral mining, work trials, founder involvement, compensation philosophy, AI in recruiting, hiring junior engineers in an AI-native world, and what it takes to close exceptional candidates in a market where speed, judgment, and conviction matter more than ever.

If you’re thinking about how AI is changing recruiting, team design, and the future of high-performance organizations, this conversation is for you.