Dan Medlin works in recruiting and talent acquisition. Medlin teaches a structured STAR hiring approach for finding high achievers and presents himself as a fractional recruiting partner for growing companies.
Structured hiring is presented as the fix for gut-feel decisions · A bad hire is framed as a financial problem, not an HR chore · Founders should keep the final interview and hand off the pipeline
Dan Medlin works in recruiting and talent acquisition and is known for the STAR Hiring Masterclass, a 10-module series about finding, attracting, and hiring high achievers.
The posts present the series for managers, executives, and talent leaders, and pair it with a broader message for founders: delegate recruiting operations to a talent partner while keeping a role in the final hiring decision.
Readers interested in structured hiring or the division of work between founders and recruiters can start with their Masterclass posts and compare their promotional claims with the available session materials.
Medlin connects hiring advice to specific organizational choices.
In the Masterclass posts, they frame hiring around evaluating past performance and reducing reliance on resumes, standard questions, and gut feelings.
In a separate founder-focused post, they distinguish sourcing and process work from the founder’s final evaluation of culture, vision, and mission alignment, and name practical burdens such as screening unvetted messages and setting salary bands and scorecards.
The posts offer both a structured-hiring theme and a clear view of how recruiting should fit into a growing company.
Ask for the course materials to see how the framework is taught and applied, and to assess the cited cost and performance figures.
Dan Medlin argues that hiring decisions should rely on structure and evidence, not polished resumes and gut feel, and that the cost of a bad hire makes hiring a financial decision, not an administrative one.
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The posts call the people worth hiring STARs and present identifying them as a learnable method involving structured interviews, past-performance assessment, scorecards, and market salary bands.
They also make a division-of-labour case for growing companies: founders keep the final interview, where vision and mission alignment are judged, while an outside talent partner handles sourcing, screening, compliance, and benchmarking.
The teaching comes through a multi-module masterclass, with a live instruction-and-Q&A session and an on-demand module.
Structured hiring is presented as the fix for gut-feel decisions
Dan Medlin argues that polished resumes, standard interview questions, and gut feelings are poor grounds for hiring decisions.
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Instead, the posts lay out a defined framework: structured interviews, assessment of past performance, scorecards, and market salary bands. They call people worth hiring STARs and frame identifying them as a skill managers can learn, not a talent some leaders happen to have.
The STAR Hiring Masterclass Series is a 10-module workshop for managers, executives, and talent leaders. It promises a playbook for finding, attracting, and hiring top-tier High Achievers, replacing interview bias and guesswork with a repeatable process.
A bad hire is framed as a financial problem, not an HR chore
Dan Medlin puts a price on hiring by linking failure to lost productivity, team instability, and future recruiting costs, and success to substantially greater value than an average hire.
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The framing gives leaders a reason to treat hiring as a business decision rather than leave it to chance.
Two posts make the same claim: a single bad hire costs the average company over $210,000 in lost productivity, team disruption, and re-recruiting fees.
One adds that top performers deliver up to 250% more value than average hires.
Founders should keep the final interview and hand off the pipeline
Dan Medlin challenges the story that legendary founders personally found every hire.
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They argue that those founders protected the final gate — judging vision, trajectory, and mission alignment — rather than sourcing candidates late at night.
The post compares delegating recruiting mechanics to an outside partner with founders’ existing practice of delegating the cap table to an outside CPA and intellectual property to legal counsel.
The partner handles sourcing, screening, compliance questions, salary bands, and scorecards.
The post lists what a founder should not be doing: posting jobs manually at 11 PM, sifting through 800 unvetted LinkedIn messages, sorting spam and AI-generated resumes, and guessing at compliance, market salary bands, and scorecards.
It argues that every hour spent on DIY recruiting comes at the expense of enterprise sales, investor calls, and the product roadmap, and that growing from 10 or 20 people to 100 or 200 takes more than grit.
The tension is deliberate: the founder's voice in the final round is non-negotiable, so the argument is about who runs the process, not who makes the decision.
Teaching combines a live session with an on-demand module, and attendees are encouraged to bring a colleague
The delivery format is part of the method: instruction comes with live questions, and registration is designed to bring a second person from the same company — a co-interviewer, recruiter, or business partner — so more than one person involved in hiring shares the framework.
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Module 1 is also available on demand afterwards.
The live session is advertised for Tuesday, September 8, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM CDT, with one hour of instruction followed by an interactive live Q&A.
A 2-for-1 offer lets a co-interviewer, recruiter, or business partner attend at no extra cost.
On-demand Module 1 is published with an invitation to comment or continue watching on YouTube.
Answers the question: what does Dan Medlin offer beyond individual recruiting posts?
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Start here for the full series framework and STAR terminology before looking at a single session.
This post introduces the STAR Hiring Masterclass Series as a 10-module workshop series for managers, executives, and talent leaders.
It says the series gives them a playbook for finding, attracting, and hiring top-tier High Achievers, or STARs.
Examples from an assembly floor, an engineering department, and a growing business show that the hiring problem is broad.
The post points readers to Module 1 on LinkedIn or YouTube.
For brands planning a campaign
A recruiting firm building a hiring-manager workshop series can treat this as evidence that Dan Medlin presents STAR hiring as a multi-module training product, not a one-off post or coaching call. The series offers a structure to evaluate: how many modules there are, who they serve, and how the content is distributed.
Answers the question: what problem does the masterclass claim to solve, for whom, and in what format?
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Start here for the concrete offer, audience, and session mechanics.
This post makes a direct business case for the masterclass.
It says a single bad hire costs the average company over $210,000 in lost productivity, team disruption, and re-recruiting fees, while top performers deliver up to 250% more value than average hires.
It promotes a virtual Module 1 on Tuesday, September 8, from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM CDT, with one hour of executive instruction and a live Q&A.
The intended audience is founders, department heads, and talent acquisition leaders.
The post offers a 2-for-1 registration deal.
For brands planning a campaign
This is the strongest promotional asset for a live or paid workshop brief: it offers a cost-of-bad-hire proof point, a value claim for STARs, a specific format, and a registration offer. A workshop planner can adapt the problem framing and two-hour live format for a hiring-manager session.
Answers the question: what does Dan Medlin believe founders should and should not do in hiring?
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Start here to understand the recruiting philosophy behind the STAR Hiring Masterclass.
This post challenges the idea that legendary founders personally found every hire.
It argues that founders such as Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin protected culture at the final gate by evaluating vision, trajectory, and mission alignment, rather than sourcing candidates at midnight.
Dan Medlin compares trusting an outside CPA with a cap table or legal counsel with IP to trusting a talent partner with hiring.
The post lists what founders should not do: post jobs manually at 11 PM, sift through 800 unvetted LinkedIn DMs, drown in spam and AI-generated resumes, or guess at compliance, salary bands, and scorecards.
It says every hour of DIY recruiting is stolen from enterprise sales, investor calls, and product roadmap work.
For brands planning a campaign
For a fractional recruiting or talent-partner offer, this post provides language about founder time, the final-interview role, and operational gaps such as compliance, salary bands, and scorecards. It can support outreach to startup founders scaling from roughly 10 or 20 people to 100 or 200 who need a hiring machine, not another sourcing chore.
Dan Medlin argues that polished resumes, standard interview questions, and gut feeling are poor bases for hiring decisions.
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A structured framework, they say, removes interview bias and evaluates past performance instead. Medlin calls the people worth hiring STARs, presents spotting them as a learnable skill rather than instinct, and packages the method as the STAR Hiring Masterclass, a 10-module workshop series for managers, executives, and talent leaders.
Medlin names structured interviews, past-performance assessment, defined scorecards, and market salary bands—the mechanics hiring managers need to run the process consistently.
For brands planning a campaign
A recruiting firm building a hiring-manager workshop series can adopt this framing: interview design, bias removal, and past-performance scoring are already central to Medlin's pitch. The workshop would extend an argument they have made publicly, rather than ask them to build one from scratch.
Two of the three posts lead with the same figure: a single bad hire costs the average company over $210,000 in lost productivity, team disruption, and re-recruiting fees.
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One adds that top performers deliver up to 250% more value than average hires. Medlin uses the numbers to frame hiring as a financial decision leaders have to defend, not an administrative task.
For brands planning a campaign
These figures give a campaign an opening hook and a reason for a finance-minded audience to keep reading. Before using them in published material, ask Medlin for the original sources.
Founders keep the final interview, not the pipeline
In a post aimed at startup founders, Medlin challenges the story that Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin personally found every hire.
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They say those founders protected the final gate, where vision, trajectory, and mission alignment are evaluated.
Medlin lists what founders should not be doing: posting jobs late at night, sifting through hundreds of unvetted direct messages, sorting spam and AI-generated resumes, and guessing at compliance, salary bands, and scorecards.
They position themself as the fractional, on-demand partner who builds the machine that feeds the final interview.
Medlin pairs the delegation argument with a concrete division of labour: sourcing, screening, compliance, compensation benchmarking, and process design go to an outside partner, while the founder's judgement stays in the last round.
Medlin does not argue that founders should step back from hiring. They say the founder's voice in the final round is non-negotiable, making this an argument about process mechanics, not outsourcing the decision.
For brands planning a campaign
For a firm selling fractional recruiting, this is usable positioning: it gives a founder a reason to hand over the pipeline without feeling they are surrendering the hire. It also sets a boundary: partners pitching a fully hands-off founder may find the offer harder to sell to this audience.
Live masterclass plus on-demand module as delivery formats
The formats shown are a live virtual masterclass and a self-paced module.
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The live version runs on a Tuesday, September 8, from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM CDT, with one hour of instruction followed by an interactive live Q&A and a 2-for-1 registration offer so a co-interviewer, recruiter, or business partner can attend free. The on-demand version, Module 1 of the ten, invites viewers to leave a comment or continue on YouTube.
For brands planning a campaign
Medlin works in both scheduled and evergreen formats, pairing instruction with a live question period and a co-registration incentive. A partnered workshop series could follow the same shape: a teaching block, a Q&A or clinic, and a second seat for the buyer's colleague.
Aimed at line leaders and technical managers, not only recruiters
One post addresses people who lead an assembly floor, scale an engineering department, or run a growing business; the other names founders, department heads, and talent acquisition leaders.
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Medlin speaks to the person making the hire in a growing company—a plant manager or engineering lead—not only to HR professionals.
For brands planning a campaign
This widens the addressable audience for a campaign built around Medlin: content can target operations and technical leaders with hiring responsibility but no recruiting background, with recruiters as a secondary audience.
The reviewed LinkedIn posts document one named commercial relationship: Dan Medlin promotes and teaches the STAR Hiring Masterclass Series.
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They don’t say whether they own the program or work for it, and name no other sponsor, affiliate, client, investment, or employment relationship. Ask them to clarify their relationship to the program and disclose any other ties.
STAR Hiring Masterclass
Disclosed partnership
Dan Medlin promotes the STAR Hiring Masterclass Series and is described as a talent acquisition veteran and author leading Module 1 of the workshop.
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The posts don’t say whether they own the program, are employed by it, or are otherwise contracted to it; ask them to clarify their relationship.
Dan Medlin's public work focuses on how to make hiring decisions based on structure rather than a polished resume and a good feeling.
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LinkedIn posts promote a STAR Hiring Masterclass, described as a ten-module workshop series for managers, executives, and talent leaders.
It covers structured interviews, past-performance assessment, scorecards, and market salary bands, with a stated aim of removing interview bias.
A second thread argues the cost side: a bad hire is framed as a six-figure hit to productivity, team stability, and future recruiting spend, while top performers are framed as worth substantially more than average ones.
A third thread addresses who does the work: a post aimed at startup founders argues they should keep the final interview, where vision and mission alignment are judged, while sourcing, screening, compliance, salary benchmarking, and process design go to an outside talent partner.
Start with the masterclass posts for the method, then read the founder post for the division-of-labour argument.
Related LinkedIn posts from other creators cover recruiting practice, applicant clarity, and interview preparation, often for a different reader or from the other side of the table.
Both write about the same weak point in hiring: the process runs on instinct and pedigree rather than defined role needs and structured evaluation.
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Cox works through Mads Faurholt-Jorgensen's argument that hiring managers want someone good at everything, interviewers hire people like themselves, and resumes screen out strong performers without the right pedigree—the same conclusion Medlin reaches about polished resumes and gut feeling. Cox also questions whether the inherited linear hiring funnel should exist at all.
Cox writes as a recruiting practitioner, commenting on other people's talks and research and pushing for process redesign, including with AI.
Medlin teaches a named method and sells its delivery: a ten-module masterclass plus a fractional talent partner who runs the pipeline.
Cox's posts end with an open question to her audience; their posts end with a registration link.
Both treat hiring quality as something fixed by getting the fundamentals right before the hire.
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Ricketts opens posts with a survey finding that 73% of HR professionals meet fabricated or misleading candidate information, and 36% say AI-generated candidate content has reduced their confidence in hiring decisions.
Her proposed fix is clear success profiles, stronger interviews, and candidate verification—an approach that overlaps with Medlin's scorecards and structured interviews.
She also writes about clarity in the job description, the interview, and the first day.
Ricketts approaches the problem from workforce strategy and retention rather than the interview room.
Her recurring theme is the disconnect between what a job posting promises and what a new employee finds.
She promotes a free workforce consultation through her own firm, while Medlin promotes a paid workshop series and positions themself as the fractional partner who runs sourcing and screening.
Both publish practical, checklist-style interview guidance meant for the next conversation.
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Edelman's posts offer structured lists of questions to ask before an interview ends, grouped by recruiter, job, team, manager, and company vision. They frame the interview as a two-way assessment—a principle close in spirit to Medlin's structured-interview discipline.
Edelman writes for candidates, teaching job seekers how to assess an employer and signal that they belong.
Medlin writes for the person doing the hiring, teaching managers how to evaluate past performance and remove bias from the decision.
A reader who wants interview preparation would follow Edelman; one who wants to run a hiring process would follow Medlin.
Dan Medlin's LinkedIn profile had 20,820 followers when captured on 9 October 2026.
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That figure shows reach on one professional network, not whether followers are hiring managers, founders, or likely to register for a paid workshop.
The three posts target a specific readership: founders, department heads, and talent acquisition leaders are named as the audience for the STAR Hiring Masterclass.
The September post offers a 2-for-1 registration so buyers can bring a co-interviewer or recruiter.
These are the audiences Medlin addresses in their promotional copy, not a measured breakdown of their followers.
The posts report no follower data by job title, seniority, company size, industry, or location, and no engagement figures, registration counts, or audience survey results.
For a hiring-manager workshop series, treat the follower count as a signal of a recruiting- and hiring-focused professional following, and verify the stated target audience before committing budget.
Ask Medlin for recent results from comparable workshop or masterclass promotions: registrations and attendance for the last two or three modules, the seniority and job-title mix from registration forms, and any short audience survey.
If paid promotion is part of the plan, LinkedIn's own ad targeting data will show who can be reached by title and seniority far better than follower count can.
LinkedIn followers
20,820
LinkedIn profile record included with this evidence the research · 2026-10-09
Dan Medlin’s posts show two commercial arrangements: paid enrollment in the STAR Hiring Masterclass Series and a fractional, on-demand recruiting partnership in which they run the hiring process while the founder stays in the final interview.
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Neither is described as a brand sponsorship.
For a hiring-manager workshop series, approach Medlin as a training provider and recruiting operator, not as a sponsored creator.
If you’re seeking a brand deal, ask whether they offer a formal sponsorship route and request their rates.
STAR Hiring Masterclass Series enrollment
Buyer requirement
Buy seats in a ten-module workshop series that Medlin presents as instruction for managers, executives, and talent acquisition leaders.
Module 1 is delivered live as roughly one hour of executive instruction followed by an interactive Q&A.
The published registration offer is 2-for-1, so a co-interviewer, recruiter, or business partner can attend at no extra cost.
Budget for a scheduled live session rather than on-demand content, and register through the link in the post.
Fractional or on-demand recruiting partnership
Buyer requirement
Engage Medlin as an outside talent partner to build the hiring process, while the founder or hiring executive leads the final-round interview.
They handle job posting, sourcing and screening against unvetted inbound, resume spam and AI-generated applications, as well as compliance, market salary bands, and scorecards.
Scope this as an ongoing recruiting function rather than a one-off project.
Confirm deliverables and term directly; the posts describe the division of labor but not pricing, duration, or contract terms.
A B2B recruiting firm building a hiring-manager workshop series is the clearest match: Dan Medlin already sells most of the product.
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The STAR Hiring Masterclass Series is presented as a 10-module workshop series for managers, executives and talent acquisition leaders.
Module 1 delivers roughly one hour of instruction followed by a live Q&A, with a 2-for-1 registration offer so a buyer can bring a co-interviewer, recruiter or business partner at no extra cost.
The teaching thesis travels well: polished resumes, standard interview questions and gut feeling are the wrong basis for a hiring decision; structured interviews, past-performance scoring, defined scorecards and market salary bands are the replacement.
Two of the three posts open with the same cost-of-inaction argument: a single bad hire costs the average company over $210,000 in lost productivity, team disruption and re-recruiting fees.
One adds that top performers deliver up to 250% more value than average hires.
That gives a workshop a ready hook and a reason for a budget holder to keep reading.
Medlin also addresses the audience the firm needs to fill a room: founders, department heads and talent acquisition leaders, plus line leaders and technical managers such as a plant manager or an engineering lead who carry hiring responsibility without a recruiting background.
They have demonstrated a live teaching block, an interactive question period and an on-demand module pushed through LinkedIn and YouTube, so a co-produced series can copy the format instead of inventing one.
One boundary matters commercially: Medlin's posts show a training product and a fractional recruiting service, not a sponsored-content program.
Treat them as a provider to contract with, and verify sponsorship terms separately before planning a paid endorsement.
When to choose a specialist
A staffing marketplace or high-volume hourly hiring platform seeking a short-form video campaign aimed at consumer-scale applicant flow is a poor match.
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Nearly everything in Dan Medlin's posts is LinkedIn text written for the person making a senior hire at a growing company.
Their advice targets founders scaling from roughly 10 or 20 people to 100 or 200, department heads and talent acquisition leaders; the masterclass is pitched to managers and executives.
The posts don't show short-form video, lifestyle or consumer-facing content, or a format built to attract hourly applicants in volume.
Medlin had 20,820 LinkedIn followers on 9 October 2026, a measure of reach on one professional network.
No breakdown by job title, seniority, company size, industry or location is published; ask for that data before assuming a specific applicant pool.
The commercial route is also unproven: the posts don't show a sponsored-content offering, rate card or brand-deal disclosure, so a campaign priced as a paid creator partnership would rest on an unverified assumption.
The structural argument for hiring discipline also runs opposite to a volume-funnel message: Medlin's framing is that reducing bad hires and slowing down to score past performance is the win, not widening the top of the funnel as far as possible.
A worked campaign example
The recruiting firm's angle is a co-produced hiring-manager clinic that extends Medlin's existing series rather than commissioning new thinking.
The proposition: a short run of live sessions, each opening with the cost of a bad hire and closing with a working method, so participants leave with a scorecard started and a past-performance question set for one real open role.
Medlin carries the instruction; the firm supplies the audience and the follow-on relationship.
Follow the structure their posts already use: one hour of teaching, then a live Q&A, with a second seat priced so a participant can bring the hiring manager or recruiter who sits in their interviews.
That co-seat offer is the strongest practical detail in the posts, because the person who needs the training is usually not the person who buys it.
Build the curriculum around the four components Medlin already names—structured interviews, past-performance assessment, scorecards and market salary bands—and keep the ten-module framing as the long-form spine, with the live sessions as the entry point.
Lead the promotion with the cost-of-inaction figure and the value gap between top performers and average hires; the firm should trace both to their original sources before publishing.
Don't pitch a hands-off founder.
Medlin's public position is that the founder's voice in the final round is non-negotiable, while sourcing, screening, compliance, benchmarking and process design are what move to an outside partner.
The campaign should sell a hiring machine that feeds the final interview, not the removal of the founder from the hire.
Before committing budget, ask for registration and attendance results from the most recent modules, the job-title and seniority mix from those registration forms, and access to Module 1 or the ten-module outline so the firm can judge the teaching rather than the promotional copy.
Confirm commercial terms directly; Medlin's posts don't state pricing, duration or contract detail.
Choose Lindzi Cox when the firm wants a session that unsettles how the room thinks about hiring rather than a step-by-step method to install.
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The two posts use sharp borrowed provocations: a TEDx talk by Mads Faurholt-Jorgensen on the fact that nobody taught us how to recruit, and the line 'don't pave the cowpath' about automating inherited processes instead of redesigning them.
Those ideas address the same buyer task as a hiring-manager workshop: interviewers who want a candidate good at everything instead of a specialist, managers who hire people like themselves, and resume screens that filter out strong performers who lack the right pedigree.
The 'what would we build from a blank page' question is a ready-made exercise for a room that already distrusts its own funnel.
The argument that a linear interview gauntlet may not deserve to exist at all is a stronger opening for a culture-change session than a checklist.
The material comments on someone else's talk and poses an open question to the audience; it is not a method.
A session built on the TEDx argument would require the firm to license or rebuild that content and supply the structure, tools and scoring itself.
The funnel post asks what should change, not how to change it.
Dan Medlin's posts do not say that Lindzi Cox offers a training product, module list or taught delivery.
Compared with Medlin for a hiring-manager workshop, the tradeoff is topic and provocation in exchange for instructional design done in-house; they arrive with a ten-module workshop series, a live teaching block plus Q&A, and a working registration offer already described.
Choose Molley Ricketts when the workshop's centre of gravity is the integrity of applications rather than the interview itself.
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The posts focus on screening and clarity: 73% of HR professionals surveyed report challenges with fabricated or misleading candidate information, 36% say AI-generated candidate content has reduced confidence in hiring decisions, and shifting job descriptions, interview expectations and accountability between posting, interview and first day start the relationship with a disconnect.
For a firm whose audience is drowning in AI-polished applications, or whose client employers attract plenty of applicants but cannot keep the right ones, this framing is closer to the daily problem than structured scoring.
The posts also offer a consultation route, inviting readers to book a free workforce consultation, which suits a workshop sold as the front end of an advisory relationship.
The two short posts rely on a single third-party survey, carrying its figures without testing them.
Before building a session around it, the firm should trace the source and widen the base.
Dan Medlin's posts do not describe a taught framework, module structure or delivery format; both offer a diagnosis followed by the same commercial invitation.
Compared with a Medlin-style series, the material addresses a current pain point but lacks instructional machinery: it stops at 'get the fundamentals right' without explaining how to structure or score a hiring decision.
Ask for a framework and delivery outline before booking.
Choose Daryn Edelman when the workshop needs the candidate's side of the interview.
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Both posts offer the same set of questions a strong candidate should ask about the recruiter, the job, the team, the manager and the company's direction: why the role was created, what top performers in the role share, what the first 90 days should accomplish, and how the company evaluates disruptive technology.
For a session teaching hiring managers what an engaged, selective candidate is probing for and how to answer well, this material is directly usable.
It also suits a firm that wants to pair interviewer training with candidate coaching or interview preparation, since the questions are written for the person being interviewed.
The audience is job seekers, not hiring managers, so each item needs reframing before it can be taught to the people running interviews.
The posts repeat one question list, with the second version truncated, and point to an infographic and tips in the comments that were not available to review.
No scorecard, past-performance or structured-interview method appears.
Compared with Dan Medlin for hiring-manager training, the tradeoff is audience and depth: a usable question bank for the candidate side of the table versus a documented, multi-module hiring-manager series on the buyer's side.
Ask for the infographic and comment tips before deciding whether they add enough material for a session.
This page draws on three LinkedIn posts by Dan Medlin: two promoting the STAR Hiring Masterclass and one about how founders can divide hiring work with an outside talent partner.
The posts do not show publication dates; one names a September 8 session without a year.
The posts do not include course materials or a transcript, and they do not say whether books, shows, businesses, or earlier work explain other searches for Dan Medlin.
