Below the Surface

Paradigm
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  • Management

Below the Surface is a show about what the world's best companies are doing right now to build high-performing teams. Each episode, Joelle Emerson (co-founder and CEO of Paradigm) talks with a leader who's rethinking people, talent, and culture. Conversations consider how AI is reshaping work, what hiring should look like as organizations evolve, and how to create the conditions for performance. If your work touches people, talent, or culture, this one's for you.

Episodes

  1. 9h ago

    Cursor’s Hiring Secret: Treat Every Role Like an Executive Search

    What does hiring look like at the frontier of AI? 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.

    44 min

  2. 5d ago

    Below the Surface Trailer

    The job of the people team is being rewritten in real-time. We created Below the Surface to learn how category-defining companies are navigating people, talent, and culture right now.

    1 min

Trailer

About

Below the Surface is a show about what the world's best companies are doing right now to build high-performing teams. Each episode, Joelle Emerson (co-founder and CEO of Paradigm) talks with a leader who's rethinking people, talent, and culture. Conversations consider how AI is reshaping work, what hiring should look like as organizations evolve, and how to create the conditions for performance. If your work touches people, talent, or culture, this one's for you.

Information

  • Creator
    Paradigm
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    2
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    ©2026 Paradigm Strategy Inc.