In this episode of the Leaders in Talent podcast, Adriaan Kolff sits down with Nancy Martinez, former Head of Talent at Relativity Space and now Head of Talent at Machina Labs. Nancy spent 17 years in talent acquisition, starting at Google as a technical sourcer and scaling Facebook and Twitter when both were under 500 people, before moving into hardware. She joined Relativity at 600 people, eight months before its first rocket launched, and left when the company was 2,100.

When Eric Schmidt invested and became CEO, the Terran R timeline moved up and the team had to hire roughly 1,000 people in nine months. Nancy's first instinct was to ask how to hire faster, how many recruiters and sourcers to add. She decided those were the wrong questions. Instead she asked where the real bottlenecks were, whether leaders could absorb that pace of hiri ...