How to hire a cofounder
Signing a cofounder is like getting married. Whom do you need? When? Why? How much to pay and how to fire (think about that too!). Learn our insights here.

We identify potential cofounders and present them on our platform.
"Many people in startup environment dream of becoming cofounders one day. You just have to approach them at the right moment in their career."
Silvia Montvil, Recruitment Assistant
Our bots execute multi-touch campaigns for approved candidates. Then we communicate with responders individually.
"When drafting messages for potential cofounders, I emphasize the mission and growth potential."
Gouda Jakubk, Recruitment Assistant
We drive the process until you get results - interviews with qualified candidates that lead to a successful hire.
"There are many ways to attract investment. jobrely is tested and it works."
Indre Kaikare, Founder and CEO
Eran Amir, Founder and CEO
General Management / CEO. Time for some adult supervision? If you are a young team and things are getting a bit messy, finding a seasoned CEO might be what a doctor prescribed.
Technical / CTO. If you have never coded yourself, getting a CTO is a no brainer. Perhaps not right away, but eventually you will need one.
Marketing / CMO. Growing a startup is all about traction. A seasoned veteran on this front might be a groundbreaker.
Operations / COO. A COO is the right hand to a CEO who takes over everything the CEO is - well, not fond of. Wouldn’t that be nice to focus only on the stuff that you are best at?
In small batches, we will present as many candidates as necessary to arrange 10 interviews. Once you approve 50 initial profiles, we will start reaching out with a five-touch LinkedIn and email campaign (see more below regarding the outreach process). We will continue sourcing and reaching out in batches of 50 approved candidates until we reach 10 interviews.
We carefully evaluate your requirements and use sophisticated sourcing tools to go through a large number of profiles. But before presenting final profiles on our mobile app, we review them one by one. That’s why our candidate approval rating is 80%, and no AI/ML sourcing tool can match that.
The main source is LinkedIn. We also check CofoundersLab, GitHub (for technical co-founders), AngelList and other databases.
Sure, you can. You will probably ask your friends and colleagues; then you might jump on LinkedIn and reach out to a few people. However, if you want to do this systematically at scale, you will need to allocate quite a bit of time for sourcing, finding emails, writing messages, and perhaps researching some new tools and learning how to use them. You may also need a simple ATS system to track your candidates and make sure everything is organized. However, in our experience, very few startup founders have the time to do it from start to finish themselves. That’s where jobRely comes in.
A recruitment agency will present a small number of active candidates while jobRely will present a relatively large number of passive candidates. The difference between active and passive is that active candidates are looking for a new opportunity while passive candidates are not. A rule of thumb is that only 5% of candidates are active and 95% are passive, meaning that jobRely draws from a much wider audience, producing richer choice.
But more importantly, every interview arranged by jobRely is with a relevant and qualified candidate, because he/she was previously reviewed and accepted by the client during the sourcing stage.
Last but not least, jobRely is more than 10 times cheaper than using external recruiters.
To summarize, there are three advantages to jobRely’s approach: richer choice of candidates, only relevant interviews and much better value. The only disadvantage of working with jobRely is that it requires more involvement from the founders, because there are more profiles to review.
For a co-founder role, we expect to arrange 10 interviews by reaching out to 150-300 candidates. It is possible to find a co-founder in a few weeks, but the process from launching the project to completing the 10th interview may take about two months.
No. But in 95% of projects, 10 interviews are sufficient to make a successful hire. For those 5% who don’t hire, we offer a 20% discount on the next project (which can be for the same role).
1. Sign up and onboard on our platform.
2. Review candidates as we source them.
3. Review draft messages after we prepare them.
4. Connect your LinkedIn and email accounts on our platform.
5. Watch us execute a five-touch LinkedIn/email campaign and see new messages flood your inbox without you moving a finger.
6. Monitor how our recruitment assistants pick up on conversations where candidates have responded.
7. Accept calendar invitations as we book interviews for you.
We prepare draft outreach messages and ask you to review them. Once ready, we set up a five-touch LinkedIn and email campaign. We recommend that the communication sequence starts with a LinkedIn Connect message. It is imperative that the client’s LinkedIn profile is perfect as this may impact the response rate. If the candidate connects but doesn’t respond, a follow-up message will be sent on LinkedIn after 48 hours. If there is still no response, we will send another LinkedIn follow-up message after five business days.
If the candidate didn’t connect via LinkedIn, he/she will be sent LinkedIn InMail, which reaches unconnected candidates both on their LinkedIn and email inboxes. If he/she still doesn’t respond, we will turn to email and send an intro message with one follow-up.We usually achieve a 30% response rate on our co-founder campaigns.
Because this campaign is executed from the client’s LinkedIn/email account, all communication will be visible to the client on his/her LinkedIn/email as well as on the jobRely platform.
There are three parts in the process — sourcing, outreach and interview scheduling.
Sourcing is mainly manual; outreach and following up with non-responders are automated, but once the candidate responds, a recruitment assistant picks up the conversations and continues individually until the interview is arranged and the lead is passed to the client.
To increase the response rate, we highly recommend conducting all messaging from the hiring manager’s LinkedIn and email accounts. This way the candidate will not even be aware that jobRely is in the picture. We take rigorous measures to protect your credentials, and our platform filters only messages that come from the candidates in the project. You will approve the copy of the final messaging campaign before we start reaching out, and we will make sure that we don’t exceed LinkedIn’s daily activity limits. The connection is secured as our software runs on a cloud, and browser fingerprinting is enabled. Yes, it’s safe. Not a single client has ever had a problem.
Interview candidates that you like.
Get on calls with interested prospects.
Pitch to investors who are listening.