Tacit Awareness is a relationship practice devoted to tacit hiring.

There are two kinds of information in the world.

1) Explicit information survives being written down (titles, schools, keywords, manuals). You can query it from anywhere.

2) Tacit information lives in people. Lived experiences, advice, anecdotes. How do you teach someone to ride a bike? How do you explain the moment you know to fold?

Hiring is tacit. But, in the interest of volume & scalability, we now rely on explicit information to shoulder hiring. Headhunters fight over the same small pool of people, sorted by the same signals. Recruiting is now a volume business where nobody’s incentives required exceptionality, and churn was always the client’s problem.

We help in three ways.

Tacit <> Ghostwriting

We live with the company. Its culture, its momentum, what fit actually means there. Then we shoulder the hardest part of any CEO’s job, which is selling trust. Trust that this is the right place for someone’s livelihood. Trust that the role fits their north star.

Tacit <> Discovery

The market overlooks arc and tenacity because neither fits on a resume. PhD chemical engineering coursework at Columbia while in middle school. Took the MCAT for fun. Memorized the first 500 digits of pi to win a bet. Three years backpacking Europe until four languages & 10+ dialects stuck. We read these as evidence.

Tacit <> Nodeing

One great hire sets the bar for the next ten. We work closer to executive search than staffing. Place one person, then help them hire the next ten. Trust compounds in serendipitous ways, and we only want to be paid when everyone wins.

We started Tacit because, like the folks we discover, we learn by doing. Along the way we built our own tacit gut and met archetypes of brilliance we now call friends.

Lastly, to call it living vicariously: we have championed people into their life’s work at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Ramp, xAI, Mercor, Centerview, Bridgewater, Jane Street, and more. They are still moving, still growing. So are we :)