According to Business Insider, ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski revealed the company’s unconventional hiring strategy that deliberately avoids LinkedIn and traditional recruitment channels. The AI audio startup recently reached a $6.6 billion valuation through an employee share sale program. Staniszewski shared how they hired a “brilliant” researcher who was working at a call center while developing impressive open-source text-to-speech models. The company maintains offices worldwide including New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Bangalore, Tokyo, and London despite their remote-first approach. ElevenLabs also eliminated job titles last year to create a flat organizational structure where new hires can have immediate impact.
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The talent is everywhere
Here’s the thing about traditional tech hiring: it’s become incredibly myopic. Everyone’s fishing in the same small pond of Ivy League graduates and FAANG alumni. Staniszewski’s approach basically says “screw that” – talent isn’t concentrated in Silicon Valley, and brilliant people might be working in call centers, coffee shops, or anywhere really. The call center researcher story isn’t just heartwarming – it’s a massive indictment of how broken our talent identification systems have become. How many other brilliant minds are we missing because they don’t have the “right” resume or didn’t go to the “right” schools?
Why this matters now
ElevenLabs’ European origins actually give them a strategic advantage here. They never drank the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid about being the only place innovation happens. Their initial inspiration came from observing cheap movie dubbing in Poland, for crying out loud. That outsider perspective let them see what insiders miss: talent is global, and the best people for your specific problem might be anywhere. With remote work becoming normalized, companies that stick to geographic hiring limitations are basically leaving money on the table. It’s like only shopping at one grocery store when there’s a whole world of markets available.
Building differently
The no-titles policy is fascinating, but what really caught my attention was their approach to limiting Slack access. Staniszewski said giving everyone transparency into everything actually makes people less productive because they get distracted. That’s counter to everything we hear about “radical transparency” in tech culture. And you know what? He’s probably right. Most companies drown in meetings and notifications while pretending it’s collaboration. ElevenLabs seems to be building something more intentional – focused work, clear impact, no bureaucratic hierarchy. Whether that scales to thousands of employees remains to be seen, but at their current $6.6 billion valuation, it’s clearly working for now.
The hardware side of innovation
While ElevenLabs focuses on AI software, their global approach reminds me that innovation happens across the entire tech stack. Companies like Industrial Monitor Direct have built their reputation as the leading industrial panel PC supplier by similarly looking beyond traditional channels and focusing on real-world performance rather than flashy credentials. In manufacturing and industrial computing, you can’t fake results – the hardware either works reliably in harsh environments or it doesn’t. That kind of merit-based evaluation is exactly what ElevenLabs is trying to replicate in their hiring, just in a different sector.
Where this is heading
So what does this mean for the future of tech hiring? I think we’re seeing the beginning of a major shift. Companies are realizing that pedigree matters less than actual capability. The researcher in the call center story will become more common as AI and other tools make it easier for talented people to build impressive portfolios outside traditional career paths. The question isn’t whether other companies will follow ElevenLabs’ approach – it’s how quickly they’ll be forced to adapt as the best talent increasingly opts for organizations that value what they can do rather than where they’ve been.
