11–20 of 57 posts
This recruiter's blunder gave you a great hook for this blog post, which is certain to bring in some well qualified applications. So, in some sense, this was a successful relationship.
I sent him a "thank you" email for that exact reason. Seriously.
An open ended question I've wanted to ask for a while: when a startup (all of a sudden) needs to hire a bunch of engineers, what kind of things do those engineers work on? What requirements change so rapidly that doubling headcount becomes necessary?
We launched with a duct-tape and baling wire version of an idea cobbled together from mostly stock components. It blew up overnight and kept on growing exponentially for months.
All that time we managed to extend the life of the first version by throwing money at the problem, buying larger servers and tweaking the bits to remove the bottlenecks whenever they popped up.
In the meantime we re-wrote the code until it would scale reasonably well, and this included the re-writing of a bunch of those off the shelf components that had kept things afloat.
That re-write took 3 times as many developers as we had had until that time.
The final version scaled through 4 orders of magnitude growth (in tests, in real life we never got that far) without any major hickups and I suspect it could have grown quite a bit further had we made all the right decisions.
Unfortunately we didn't and that's where we got stuck, around 100K uniques / day.
Recruiters, like any other service professionals, are always trying to sell you on their experience, but you owe it to yourself to closely inspect their claims and methods. If recruiter is any good they won't be offended and would cooperate.
Contingency fee recruiters are especially renowned for sloppy work. If they only get paid when they place a candidate their only incentive is to sell you the first warm body they find. This type of attitude you have to nip in the bud.
Recruiters really aren't the best route for hiring designers anyway, but you know this. ;)
"First, if the candidate didn’t have an online portfolio, personal site, or blog, I didn’t want to see a resumé. " The author is an idiot. ETA: I had a program manager who thought that having a blog meant the developer was an accomplished/published author. The developer quit for having to work 10 hour days after the first week and a half. Again, idiot.
It's a litmus test I use for early-stage companies: who is doing the recruiting? At early-stage companies, having the right people is ultra-critical. It's not work to be outsourced at that stage.
"First, if the candidate didn’t have an online portfolio, personal site, or blog, I didn’t want to see a resumé. " The author is an idiot. ETA: I had a program manager who thought that having a blog meant the developer was an accomplished/published author. The developer quit for having to work 10 hour days after the first week and a half. Again, idiot.
I agree with the author. If they didn't have an online portfolio, personal site, or blog, then I probably wouldn't want to see a resume. To me it shows that they're driven and they trust their work enough to have it public for anyone to judge. You also get a sense of what the person is like, rather than what their experience is like.
"First, if the candidate didn’t have an online portfolio, personal site, or blog, I didn’t want to see a resumé. " The author is an idiot. ETA: I had a program manager who thought that having a blog meant the developer was an accomplished/published author. The developer quit for having to work 10 hour days after the first week and a half. Again, idiot.
Designers design, and like to show off their designs. If a designer doesn't have anything to show off, it doesn't pass the smell test for me.