Talented Hires

At Talented Hires, we partner with tech founders to help them build the world-class teams they need to achieve breakout growth, secure funding, and deliver on the promise of artificial intelligence.

Beyond recruiting, we provide strategic guidance to help you:

◦ Define your ideal tech stack and organizational structure
◦ Implement best practices for onboarding, training, and career development
◦ Foster a mission-driven culture that aligns with your values
◦ Position your startup's technical vision to attract investors and top talent

Having scaled talent solutions for Fortune 500 companies and hired over 2,000 engineers, I bring a wealth of insights and best practices to help you navigate the unique challenges of scaling a startup with AI. 

If you're looking for a strategic partner to help you build an elite team, secure funding, and achieve your world-changing vision, let's connect. 

I'm always happy to share insights, make warm intros to VCs and experts in my network, or brainstorm how we can leverage AI to create a better future.

Founder and CEO

Project People

Global technology search & placement 
Specialised focus on AI & DevOps
Over 2,000 successful appointments from CTO to Senior Software Engineers
Retained Search projects for critical niche hires
Impactful Diversity and Equality initiatives
Deep customer relationships built on partnership, trust, and continuous innovative delivery

Senior Search Director, AI & DevOps

Rethink

Search Director

Experis

Search Consultant

Tech Founder | AI Enthusiast | DevOps Expert

Fellow founder and CTO,

I understand the challenges of building an elite team to bring a vision to life and navigate the complex funding landscape. 

My journey began at age 8 when my father brought home a computer, sparking a lifelong passion for technology. 

This led me to study Computer Science in 1999, where I discovered the potential of AI.

Frustrated by recruiters' lack of technical understanding, I realized my CS degree could be a powerful asset in building world-class tech teams. 

Over the past 20 years, I've partnered with founders to:

✓ Clarify Talent Needs: Develop winning hiring strategies
✓ Foster Innovation: Create a culture that retains top talent
✓ Attract A-Players: Identify & recruit elite engineers
✓ Achieve Growth Milestones: Build the right team to secure funding and scale
✓ Navigate Fundraising: Provide warm introductions to VCs and domain experts

After scaling Fujitsu's talent solution to £500M annually, I founded Talented Hires to help startups achieve their world-changing visions. 

Here are some of our success stories:

Pienso

— Hired 2 dream engineers (DevOps & FS)
— Secured Series A funding
— Launched 2 new products and signed $XXM in customers

Mersive Technologies

— Hired 8 dream engineers (DevOps, FS, FE, BE)
— Established a new engineering division
— Signed a $XXM contract with WeWork

Spacelift

— Hired a critical DevOps Engineer after 3 interviews in 14 days
— Engineer promoted to Chief Product Officer
— Increased customer base by 400%

GSR & Lake Parime

— Made 4 business-critical hires for each company (DevOps, SRE, Go, CTO)


✅ VC APPROVED

— Approved by Insight Partners due to positive customer feedback
— One of 11 IT globally recognized recruiters


As a strategic partner, I share battle-tested insights on scaling teams, nurturing culture, and navigating the evolving AI landscape. 

Whether you're hiring your first critical engineer in 14 days or scaling your team to 50+, I'm here to support you.

Let's chat about your startup journey, swap founder stories, or brainstorm how AI can positively impact society.

Join over 1,000 tech leaders who receive my newsletter, 'Hiring Tips from 2K+ Recruits': 

Subscribe here: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7184211996072951812

Rich Roberts

Leo Selie ⭕

Zapier

• Leading a team of up to 10 direct reports (L2/L3) through individual coaching, growth planning, mentoring and performance management
• Won the Support Leadership Impact award in Nov 2023
• Managed quality assurance (QA) and key performance indicator (KPI) metrics for team and self
• Conducted performance, compensation, and promotion reviews and proposals
• Propose promotions and process improvements, often through developing new workflows and no-code solutions
• Consulted with hiring team on interview practices and candidate evaluation
• Architected and build automation ecosystems to aggregate data about individual and team performance
• Regular contributor to Zapier Community, providing high-impact resolutions
• Assisted in Premier support chat (white-glove support) and screen-share troubleshooting
• Course on Looker: built dashboards for data-first decision-making
• Implementation manager for 'Zapier Virtual Assistant', an AI/NLP chatbot for ticket deflection (ada.cx)
• Special project: designed and implementation of a scalable solution to connect with churned users using no and low code, onboarded an L2 to take over the project
• Special project: leveraging ChatGPT/OpenAI to improve chatbot experience

Support Team Lead

• Continuing the work as a Technical Support Specialist (see previous role)
• Peer leadership: lead by example (default to action, default to transparency), provided constructive and positive feedback to peers and management, 360 feedback (give and receive)
• Advanced troubleshooting, and sharing learnings with group-support
• Created Super Star, which is a fully-automated, internal, gamification tracking system, to stimulate helping out peers—leveraging Zapier, Airtable and a custom Slack app
• Assisted with RFI/procurement of new support tool (HappyFox, Zendesk)
• Assisted as interviewer for the Technical Support Specialist role
• Ranked #1 on Super Star for helping out with peer questions, taking call-backs, assisting incidents, and creating knowledge base articles
• Completed internal Pathway to Management
• Improved self awareness: impact versus intent, completed interpersonal communication course, crisis communication course
• Special project "Paid Calls": architected, implemented and delegated a scalable solution to offer paid technical support through Zoom, led a team of 2 successfully—thinking data first
• Led and hosted a postmortem with engineers around an impactful incident
• Became Zapier Coach, coached and mentored a colleague from Learning & Development

Senior Technical Support Specialist

• Empathically helped +5,000 users with workflow recommendations, technical troubleshooting, billing questions and resolving disputes
• Queue-crusher: reached top-line metrics/KPIs within 6 months, +90% customer satisfaction (CSAT), first-contact resolution (FCR), etc.
• (Interim) lead for the weekend team
• Consistent contributor to internal knowledge base, and internal lessons (using Lessonly)
• Highest contributor to answering internal questions for +1 year, supporting peers
• Created Zapier Tools, an internal Alfred workflow to get access to various internal resources faster, saving +1h per person, per week
• Internal bot builder: call-back reminder bot (custom Slack app, webhooks, Airtable), automated team-specific needs (Coda, Help Scout, Airtable)
• Wrote CSS style guide to use Help Scout in dark mode, and for Async (an internal blogging tool in Zapier)
• Advocated for users to receive an upcoming renewal email, to avoid billing surprises > was implemented
• Incident management: highest contributor to incidents as Communication Lead (internal and external communicator, status updates and gauging customer impact)

Technical Support Specialist

Wild Workflows

You want to automate parts of your business.

You know tools like ⚡ Zapier & Airtable get the job done.

But instead of:

→ Saving time
→ Do creative work
→ Have family time

You're now stuck:

→ Learning tools
→ Wasting energy
→ Not automating

Sounds familiar?

I was there too, but working at Zapier since 2019 has its perks.

Having helped +10.000 customers since, it's safe to say I've seen what can be automated.

More importantly I know how to automate it.

So, how can I help?

→ Recommend what to automate
→ Build these workflows for you
→ Support & troubleshoot

Want to leverage AI and automation?

Take any of these steps:

1. Send me a LinkedIn DM
2. Book a FREE discovery call
3. Visit wildworkflows.com

I respond quickly and I'm here to help.

All the best,
~ Leo

Saving you +24h a month via AI+Automation

Flow Digital

• Solving the toughest of workflow automation problems using Zapier & Airtable
• Using AI to streamline Zaps—adding more value, for less money
• Master troubleshooter
• Master optimizer of business operations

Zapier Expert and Airtable Accredited Builder

Greek Internet Marketing

Business Development Specialist

Teleperformance

Multi-channel support (phone, chat, email and remote assistance). Worked on projects Western Union and Kaspersky Labs

Customer Service Representative

Belgian Defence

I started off as a soldier to learn the basics. After two years, I enlisted for NCO training, which lasted about two years. I went on numerous trainings and missions and also served in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2014. Additionally, I was an instructor at the NCO school in my last year.

Sergeant

You want to automate parts of your business.

You know tools like ⚡ Zapier & Airtable get the job done. However...

instead of:

→ Saving time
→ Do creative work
→ Have family time

You're now stuck:

→ Learning tools
→ Wasting energy
→ Not automating

Sounds familiar?

I was there too, but working at Zapier since 2019 has its perks.

Having helped +10.000 customers since, it's safe to say I've seen what can be automated.

More importantly I know how to automate it.

So, how can I help?

→ Recommend what to automate
→ Build these workflows for you
→ Support & troubleshoot

Want to leverage AI and automation?

Take any of these steps:

1. Send me a LinkedIn DM
2. Book a FREE discovery call
3. Visit wildworkflows.com

I respond quickly and I'm here to help.

All the best,
~ Leo

• Leading a team of 8 direct reports (L2/L3) through individual coaching, growth planning, mentoring and performance management
• Won the Support Leadership Impact award in Nov 2023
• Managed quality assurance (QA) and key performance indicator (KPI) metrics for team and self
• Conducted performance, compensation, and promotion reviews and proposals
• Propose promotions and process improvements, often through developing new workflows and no-code solutions
• Consulted with hiring team on interview practices and candidate evaluation
• Architected and build automation ecosystems to aggregate data about individual and team performance
• Regular contributor to Zapier Community, providing high-impact resolutions
• Assisted in Premier support chat (white-glove support) and screen-share troubleshooting
• Course on Looker: built dashboards for data-first decision-making
• Implementation manager for 'Zapier Virtual Assistant', an AI/NLP chatbot for ticket deflection (ada.cx)
• Special project: designed and implementation of a scalable solution to connect with churned users using no and low code, onboarded an L2 to take over the project
• Special project: leveraging ChatGPT/OpenAI to improve chatbot experience

taplio

The Battle

Rich Roberts

Leo Selie ⭕

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