Backdoor
You've probably heard it: 70 to 80% of jobs are never posted. Career coaches repeat it, LinkedIn posts repeat it, and it's on half the career center websites on the internet.
Nobody has a clean study behind that exact number. It gets passed around more like folk wisdom than a statistic. But spend a week inside a startup that's hiring and it stops sounding like an exaggeration. At small companies, most hires happen before anyone writes a job description.
Here's why, and what to do about it.
Why startups hire before they post
A big company has a hiring process. A team asks for headcount, someone writes a description, a recruiter posts it, and applications pour in.
A 12-person startup has none of that. It has a founder who's also doing sales, product and support. Hiring usually goes like this:
- The founder notices they're drowning. Maybe they just raised a seed round and have money to spend, or they launched and support is on fire.
- They ask around. Investors, friends, ex-colleagues, people who've emailed them.
- If someone good shows up during that window, they talk to that person. Often that's the hire.
- Only if nobody shows up does someone write a job post.
So the role exists for weeks before the post does, and in many cases the post never happens at all, because someone walked in first.
That's the hidden job market. A career site didn't hide it from you. The job just lived in a founder's head and inbox the whole time.
Why the job post is the worst way in
When a startup does post a role, you're competing with everyone at once. One post on LinkedIn or Wellfound can pull hundreds of applicants in a few days. The founder is reading those between investor calls, so most of them never get a real look.
Auto-apply tools make this worse. They help you send more applications, but they help everyone else too, so the pile just gets taller. Applications to interviews in the US fell from about 15% in 2016 to about 3% in 2024, and floods of near-identical applications are a big part of why.
The math doesn't work. If the job you want gets filled from the founder's inbox before it's posted, more applications to posted jobs won't get it for you.
How to reach the founder before the post
What works is old-fashioned and simple: a short, specific email to the person who decides, at the moment they need someone.
1. Find startups at the moment they need people
Startups hire right after something changes. Watch for:
- A new funding round. A seed or Series A means money to spend on people, usually within weeks.
- A launch. Product Hunt, Hacker News and launch posts on LinkedIn or X mean a team about to be stretched.
- A hiring signal. A founder posting "we're growing" or "know anyone who…", or a careers page that just appeared.
2. Write to the founder, not a careers inbox
At a startup under 50 people, the founder or a team lead reads their own email. Find their address on the company site, a launch post or their profile. A jobs@ address gets read by the same pile process you're trying to skip.
3. Make it about them, in under 120 words
The emails that get answered have the same shape:
- Their news, in one line: "Congrats on the seed round."
- Your proof, in one or two lines: something you actually built or did that maps to what they're building.
- Why them, in one line: why this startup and not any startup.
- One small ask: "Open to a 15 minute call next week?"
No resume dump, no "I hope this email finds you well", no "I'm passionate about".
4. Follow up, because founders are busy
Silence usually means "busy", not "no". A polite follow-up in the same thread a few days later is often what gets the reply. In Backdoor's data, about 3 in 10 founder replies came only after a follow-up.
5. Do it every day, for a few weeks
This is where most people stop. Finding fresh startups, finding the right email, writing a specific note and keeping track of follow-ups takes an hour or two a day. Done for a few weeks, it works. In Backdoor's data, 6 in 10 people who kept going for three weeks heard back from a founder, and 9 in 10 first replies came within two weeks of the first email. See the full numbers.
The shortcut
That daily routine is exactly what Backdoor does for you. You text it your LinkedIn on WhatsApp or iMessage. Every morning it picks startups that fit you from funding, launch and hiring news, finds the founder's email, and drafts a short note about why you fit them. Nothing goes out until you reply SEND, it sends from your own Gmail, and it follows up three times in the same thread until someone answers.
Whether you do it yourself or let Backdoor do it, the point is the same. The best startup jobs go to the people who show up before the post. So stop waiting for the post.
