According to Business Insider, ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski revealed the company’s unconventional hiring strategy that led to finding a “brilliant” researcher working at a call center. The AI audio startup recently hit a $6.6 billion valuation through employee share sales and has expanded globally with offices in New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Bangalore, Tokyo, and London. Staniszewski said they’re “very against” using LinkedIn for hiring and instead focus on finding talent across Europe and Asia. The company eliminated all job titles last year to create a flat structure where new hires can have immediate impact. ElevenLabs maintains focus by limiting employee access to Slack channels beyond their immediate teams.
The anti-LinkedIn approach
Here’s the thing about traditional tech hiring: it’s broken. Staniszewski basically said what many founders think but rarely admit – that the best talent isn’t always on LinkedIn or in Silicon Valley. They found one of their top researchers working in a call center while building incredible open-source text-to-speech models on the side. Think about that for a second. How many other brilliant minds are out there doing jobs that don’t reflect their actual capabilities?
And this isn’t just about being nice or inclusive – it’s smart business. ElevenLabs realized early that if they wanted to solve hard research problems, they needed to look everywhere. Not just San Francisco. Not just the West Coast. They’ve built a global footprint with offices across three continents, but the hiring philosophy remains the same: find talent wherever it exists.
Why Europe matters
Staniszewski makes an interesting point about their Polish origins. He says ElevenLabs probably wouldn’t have even been created in the US. Their initial inspiration came from watching cheap movie dubbing in Poland. That outsider perspective gave them a different view of the audio technology space.
Now they’re doubling down on that European talent pool while expanding globally. It’s a refreshing take in an industry that often acts like innovation only happens between San Francisco and San Jose. The company’s recent $6.6 billion valuation suggests this approach is working pretty well.
Radical culture changes
No job titles? That’s a bold move for a company scaling this fast. Staniszewski says it creates an environment where new hires can have immediate impact regardless of their background. “If you are smart and quick and passionate, you can elevate yourself very quickly,” he explained.
But here’s the really counterintuitive part: they intentionally limit transparency. Staniszewski says giving employees access to all Slack channels actually distracts them. So they cut access to force focus on immediate responsibilities. It’s the opposite of the “radical transparency” trend we’ve seen at other tech companies.
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What this means for tech
ElevenLabs’ success with this hiring model could signal a broader shift. We’re seeing more companies realize that traditional credentials and locations don’t always correlate with talent. The call center researcher story is particularly powerful – it shows that potential can be hiding in plain sight.
So will other startups follow this approach? Probably not all of them. But the ones that do might just find their own brilliant researchers in unexpected places. And in a competitive AI landscape, that kind of talent advantage could be everything.
