Dan McCarthy

Two years ago, the role of talent engineer didn't exist. Today a16z is funding a fellowship for it, and Benjamin Mena sits down with one of its founding members to find out what it means for every recruiting team, agency and in-house alike. Dan McCarthy took the least likely path into this seat: jazz musician, New York bartender, wine educator, and Brooklyn CrossFit gym owner before Shopify hired him into tech recruiting at 40 years old. Two layoffs later, he's a Senior Talent Engineer at Zapier, where he built a talent intelligence MCP in about a month using completely free APIs including the Department of Labor, WARN Act data, and Indeed Hiring Lab, so recruiters walk into every intake call armed with real market data. Benjamin and Dan get into the ego build problem on LinkedIn, the difference between building to learn and building to ship, what a solo recruiter could stand up in a weekend to change their next client pitch, whether a three person agency could really bill five …