POACH

The best startups don't recruit. They poach.

Talented people are scarce. The best ones are never on job boards — they're excelling somewhere else, heads down, not looking.

Poach is the first ever AI native headhunter. Every company that changed an industry did it with people they took from someone else. That is not a secret. It is just how it works at the highest level. The best people already have jobs. We poach them for you.

Poach from
50K+
Verified profiles
ready now
$0
Upfront cost.
Pay per hire.
24H
First shortlist.
Guaranteed.
100%
Insured.
Every hire.
Who's already waiting to leave

They are exceptional and want to move.
They just can't be seen looking publicly.

Senior professionals at these companies have registered their interest on Poach under a pseudonym. Fully verified. Completely invisible to their employer. Waiting for something worth leaving for.

Google
Apple
Meta
Microsoft
Amazon
Tesla
Netflix
Nvidia
Stripe
OpenAI
Salesforce
Goldman Sachs
McKinsey
JPMorgan
Airbnb
SpaceX
Uber
DeepMind
Anthropic
Palantir
200+ more

50,000+ verified profiles · Identity confirmed · Employer never notified

Anyone can post a job. Poach is different.

This isn't recruiting.
This isn't a job board.
This is poaching.

Recruiters find people who are looking. The people you want are never looking. That is precisely what makes them the best.

A job board shows you who applied.
Poach shows you who is exceptional — and quietly open.
A recruiter searches people who are available.
The best people are never available. That is the whole point.
A headhunter charges $45,000–$90,000 per placement.
Poach does the same job. A fraction of the cost. Insured.
Traditional outreach gets ignored in 30 seconds.
Poach approaches each target the way only a real read of their work allows.

Recruiters find
who's looking.
Poach gets
who's winning.

That's the only hire
that changes things.

Fully verified
Every profile is confirmed. Work email. Seniority. Role. Not self-reported. Not guessed. Verified before you ever see them.
Fully anonymous
Professionals register under a pseudonym. Their employer never finds out. That is why the best ones come here and nowhere else.
Every hire insured
If they leave within the agreed period we replace them. No argument. No additional fee. Full stop.
The proof

Every company that broke through
went and got the person.

None of them applied. Every one of them was specifically identified and deliberately pursued. Every single one of those hires changed the entire trajectory of the company that made the move.

Sheryl Sandberg was a VP at Google. Facebook pursued her in 2008. She built their ads business into $55 billion a year and turned Facebook into a business that actually made money.

Claire Hughes Johnson spent a decade at Google. Patrick Collison personally identified and pursued her in 2014 to become Stripe's COO. She built the operational infrastructure that scaled Stripe from a small startup to a $95 billion company.

Belinda Johnson was at Yahoo. Brian Chesky pursued her specifically to be Airbnb's first COO. She built the infrastructure that let Airbnb operate in 190 countries.

Keith Rabois was at LinkedIn. Jack Dorsey specifically recruited him as COO of Square in 2010 when Square was a handful of people in a small office. Rabois brought the discipline that turned Square into a public company.

Tim Cook was VP at Compaq. Steve Jobs personally identified and pursued him in 1998 when Apple was weeks from bankruptcy. Cook didn't apply. Jobs went after him specifically. He rebuilt Apple's supply chain and became CEO.

That is the move. Poach helps you make it. The person who changes your company is at Google right now. They want to leave. They just need the right door.

Hire the engineer who scaled to 400M users
They built it at Google. Now they build it for you.
Infrastructure knowledge that takes 10 years to build. Available now.
Get the product leader who ships
They have shipped to a billion people. They know what good looks like.
Instincts that cannot be taught. Only earned at that scale.
Acquire the executive who cracked the market
They did it at Tesla. At McKinsey. At Goldman. They can do it for you.
Every lesson from the biggest stages applied to your specific problem.
Bring in the team that built it
Acquihire an entire team from a target company. Not one person. The whole unit.
Move fast. Get the muscle memory and the relationships.
The intelligence

Not a profile.
Not a resume.
A complete picture.

Poach builds a full intelligence profile on every target — what drives them, what they have built, what they are missing in their current role, and the exact moment they are most likely to say yes.

Every approach is built around that specific human being. Not a template. Not a blast. A deliberate, researched move that gets a response from someone who has not responded to anyone in three years.

Target Intelligence · Confidential
Current company
Google
Level
L7 — Staff Engineer
Domain
Distributed Systems
Tenure
9 years
Team size led
38 engineers
Flight risk
HIGH — 87%
Comp expectation
$280K–$340K + equity
Open to
Series A–B · AI infra
Intelligence Summary
Has architected infrastructure serving 400M+ daily users. Equity fully vested Q1 2025. Recently passed over for promotion cycle — team restructure cited. Three public talks in past 18 months on startup infrastructure challenges. Likely open window: next 60–90 days.
PCH · 2025 · TGT-004471
Identity Verified · Anonymous
Flight Signals · PCH-2025-TGT-004471
Promotion Passed Over — Structural Signal
High weight
Q3 2024 promotion cycle skipped — peer at L6 promoted ahead despite lower output metrics. Team restructure attributed publicly. Historical pattern: 78% of L7 candidates approach within 90 days of missed promotion cycle. Equity cliff aligned with window.
Startup Infrastructure Interest — Public Signal
High weight
Three conference talks in past 18 months on scaling infrastructure for resource-constrained environments. Blog post published November 2024: "What I wish I knew before building at Google scale." Language consistent with someone preparing a transition narrative.
Equity Vesting — Timing Signal
Medium weight
Final RSU cliff: Q1 2025. No new grant announced. Standard retention pattern predicts 60-day post-cliff consideration window. Optimal approach window: February–March 2025.
Ask Poach about this target
🔒Verified companies only
"What's the right angle to approach them?"
Their three public talks are all about startup infra constraints. Lead with the technical problem, not the opportunity. They want to solve something hard.
"How soon should we move?"
Equity cliff was Q1 2025. We are now in the optimal window. Move this week. Every week you wait the window closes.
Every signal traceable to specific verified data above.
How it works

Two ways to poach.
Both work.

Tell us what you need. We handle everything from first contact to the moment they are sitting across from you.

Mode 01 — Targeted Acquisition
You know who you want.

You have followed their work. You know their name, their company, their impact, and exactly what changes for your business the moment they walk through your door.

Give Poach the name.

Our team of AI agents research everything. What drives them. What is missing in their current role. What the right message is, through the right channel, at the right moment. We make contact and manage the entire process until they are sitting across from you.

This works for individuals. It also works when you want to bring an entire team out of a specific company.

01
Mode 02 — Executive Search
No name required.

Give poach the criteria. A VP of Engineering at a FAANG company who has scaled infrastructure to 100 million users. A CMO who has taken a consumer product from zero to a household name. A CFO who has navigated Series B through IPO.

We find everyone who fits.

Our agents identify who is most likely to be open right now based on everything we know about their current situation. We approach them. We bring you the shortlist.

If they are already in our verified private network you have them within 24 hours. If they are not we go find them.

02
What it feels like

Pursued.
Not posted.

A job posting waits for talent to find you.
Poach goes and gets the talent you actually want.

You tell poach the role. Not a job description with bullet points. Tell us what this person needs to have done, what they will do here, and what success looks like in twelve months.

First contact happens within days. Not months. The entire process moves faster than any headhunter you have worked with because we do not sleep, do not have competing clients, and do not rely on a rolodex built in 2009.

If they are the right person — you will have them.
Questions

Everything you
want to know.

Recruiters find people who are actively looking. LinkedIn surfaces people who are publicly available. The best people are never looking and never publicly available. Poach reaches into the companies you care about and brings out people who are quietly open but invisible to every other channel. That is a completely different talent pool.
Two ways. First, thousands of senior professionals have already registered their interest on Poach anonymously — they are waiting for the right opportunity. Second, for targeted acquisition we build a complete intelligence profile on your specific target and make contact through the right channel at the right moment with a message built specifically around that person. Not a cold blast. A deliberate, researched approach that gets a response.
Professionals register under a pseudonym. Their identity is fully verified by Poach but completely hidden from employers and anyone outside the platform. Their current employer never finds out they are on Poach. This is why exceptional people come here — it is the only place they can safely signal openness without destroying everything they have built at their current company.
If the person we place leaves within the agreed guarantee period, we replace them at no additional cost. No argument. No negotiation. Traditional headhunters offer this in theory. We build it into the product because we are confident enough in our process to put it in writing every time.
For executive search — if the profile you describe matches people already in our verified network — you have a shortlist within 24 hours. For targeted acquisition of a specific individual, first contact typically happens within days. Full process to a signed offer moves significantly faster than traditional headhunting because we run 24 hours a day with no competing priorities.
Yes. This is targeted acquisition and it is one of the two core modes Poach operates in. Give us the name. We research everything about that person — their motivations, their current situation, the right angle and the right moment — and we execute a deliberate, multi-layered approach designed specifically around them until they are sitting across from you.
Yes. Targeted acquisition works at the individual level and at the team level. If you want to bring an entire engineering team or product unit out of a specific company, we build the strategy and execute it. Tell us the company, the function, and what you are trying to accomplish and we design the approach from there.
Early results

The hire that
changes everything.

"

We had been trying to hire a senior ML engineer for eight months. Three recruiters. Zero results. We gave Poach a name on a Tuesday. By Friday we had a conversation scheduled. He joined six weeks later.

A
Arjun S.
CTO · Series B · AI Infrastructure
"

I knew exactly who I wanted. I just had no way to reach her. Poach reached her. She is now our VP of Product and we shipped three months ahead of schedule.

M
Maya L.
CEO · Seed Stage · Consumer
"

We used executive search. Gave them the profile. Had a verified shortlist of four candidates within 24 hours. We hired one. Best hire I have made in ten years of building companies.

D
David O.
Founder · Series A · FinTech
Transparent pricing

The rest charge a ransom.
We don't.

Traditional headhunters take 20–30% of a hire's annual salary. That's a six-figure bill for a single senior hire. Poach charges 10% of one monthly salary — the same quality candidate, a fraction of the cost.

Traditional headhunters
Everyone Else
20–30%
of annual salary · per hire
Example · $120K/yr hire
Annual salary: $120,000
Their fee (25%): $30,000
$30,000 per hire
Paid upfront before results
Bloated agency overhead
Same fee every hire
Human-speed, no AI advantage
VS
Poach
Poach
10%
of one monthly salary · per hire
Same example · $120K/yr hire
Monthly salary: $10,000
Our fee (10%): $1,000
$1,000 per hire
Pay on successful hire only
AI-powered, 24/7 execution
Shortlist in 24 hours
Every hire insured — guaranteed
On that same $120,000/yr hire, you save $29,000 compared to a traditional headhunter charging 25%. Hire five people a year? That's $145,000 back in your company's budget — or three more headcount.
97% cheaper
vs. traditional headhunters

Stop posting.
Stop waiting.
Start poaching.

The person who changes your company is at Google right now. We will go get them.

Start Poaching →