Recommendation: Neither the word 'career' nor the word 'job' appear anywhere on your front page. The best I can see is a contact us page. I had to do a google search to find your jobs page: https://www.wepay.com/about/jobs
duly noted - will update
How not to recruit for a startup
31–40 of 57 posts
Re: How not to recruit for a startup
#32You need to closely screen and supervise your recruiters. Start with an open-ended question: "how would you go about sourcing candidates for XXX position", "how would you screen them", "how would you entice them"? Listen closely to what they say and if you do not feel comfortable this would yield you the candidates you are looking for, fire the recruiter and look for one that would understand your needs. Recruiters,…
You almost need a recruiter to recruit recruiters...
At the end of the day the responsibility for recruitment is with the company management. Recruiters could have a role to play, but it is above their pay grade to decide what kind of candidates you want. They could surely help sourcing and pre-screening though. But if you are going to use recruiters you have to manage them carefully. Recruiter not given clear direction is poised to waste your time and money trying to place the first wrong candidates they come across.
Re: How not to recruit for a startup
#33Employees that you gain through a recruiter, you will probably lose through a recruiter. Building a company is hard, hiring lots of good, loyal people in a short time is a lot harder than scaling some software.
Loyalty is probably the last quality you should be looking for as a hiring manager at a startup. Granted, you want people to be loyal, but it also has a loose correlation to incompetence, mainly because incompetent people tend to (rightly) fear losing their job more than people at the top of their game. Better to hire the best you can by other criteria and let the chips fall where they may.
Agreed. Loyalty is a useless metric when you hire talent. For sure you want someone smart with a positive attitude but you will have to get used to smart people wanting to move on.
Re: How not to recruit for a startup
#34You need to closely screen and supervise your recruiters. Start with an open-ended question: "how would you go about sourcing candidates for XXX position", "how would you screen them", "how would you entice them"? Listen closely to what they say and if you do not feel comfortable this would yield you the candidates you are looking for, fire the recruiter and look for one that would understand your needs. Recruiters,…
Also, ask your new hires for opinions on recruiters. They've just been barraged by recruiters, and will likely have an idea of which are worth anything.
Re: How not to recruit for a startup
#35Employees that you gain through a recruiter, you will probably lose through a recruiter. Building a company is hard, hiring lots of good, loyal people in a short time is a lot harder than scaling some software.
Loyalty is probably the last quality you should be looking for as a hiring manager at a startup. Granted, you want people to be loyal, but it also has a loose correlation to incompetence, mainly because incompetent people tend to (rightly) fear losing their job more than people at the top of their game. Better to hire the best you can by other criteria and let the chips fall where they may.
Interesting, I think it would be one of the first.
The reason why is that people that you hire early and that put together the core of the company will have a bunch of extremely important knowledge that will be very hard to transfer to another new hire. If a start-up spends a great deal of time replacing people that were hired and that left just as fast that would seriously affect continuity.
It is for that very reason that in later funding rounds it is not unusual to ask these people to sign on for an X number of years in return for some stock with a vesting period.
Re: How not to recruit for a startup
#36Recruiters are playing a numbers game and don't have the bandwidth to be filtering candidates. The "only send me candidates with a portfolio" criteria is completely objective. Imagine a recruiter trying to decide if a programmer is any good? (e.g.: "I'm sorry, but the client [for this job writing java software] is looking for a candidate with Oracle 9i experience"...when my previous job had been using Oracle 8i. It w…
But I think that the startup culture would do well to evolve away from using recruiters and rely more on networking.
The problem with that is that it makes it even more incestuous and hard to enter from outside. Yes, yes, if you can't find an employee to introduce you, you're not trying hard enough, etc, just like pitching a VC.
But seriously, given how hard a time we're having getting new blood now, making it harder to get in is negative progress. It's a lose.
Re: How not to recruit for a startup
#37This is so funny. A while ago recruiter (expensive one) which was working for me to fill up a senior position in my team (I was a dev manager in a big company) sent me an email trying to recruit me... Regarding design candidates, there are some very very good designers working in big corporation and they don't have online portfolio or personal site (in many cases because HR does not allow it). For example, as far as…
True. But if they don't have that, it's hard to tell if they're really good. In a startup, that may be a reason to reject them by itself :-/
With engineers, at least there's a semi-reasonable way to see in a few hours if they can code. It's not clear that you can do anything similar for designers.
Re: How not to recruit for a startup
#38It's more likely the recruiter just didn't realize that the employee had already been placed at WePay. For whatever reason, communication at recruiting firms is terrible. I suspect it has something to do with recruiters not wanting their coworkers to steal their commission.
Re: How not to recruit for a startup
#39This 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.
So was the recruiter pulling a spam shotgun, or did that engineer just do a really great job of self-promotion?
Also, of the portfolio sites you linked, Sacha's seems to be the good one. The others make errors ranging from "dies with no JavaScript" (Alex, Zach) to "spends the whole page talking about their childhood" (Zach) to "what is this, I don't even" (Dustin). Alex and Zach pass if we're talking about a junior role, but I'd filter them if it was for a sole or senior role.
Re: How not to recruit for a startup
#40Recruiters are playing a numbers game and don't have the bandwidth to be filtering candidates. The "only send me candidates with a portfolio" criteria is completely objective. Imagine a recruiter trying to decide if a programmer is any good? (e.g.: "I'm sorry, but the client [for this job writing java software] is looking for a candidate with Oracle 9i experience"...when my previous job had been using Oracle 8i. It w…
LinkedIn is good as far as it goes, but I wouldn't call it a complete or ideal solution to the hiring problem. Worth using - but also worth competing with.