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How not to recruit for a startup

wepay.com

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51–57 of 57 posts

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#51

Post by liljimmytables »

cHalgan wrote: post #25

This 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…

If this happens, you should take them up on the offer and see whether they notice when they try to initiate an introduction.

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#52

Post by dasil003 »

0x12 wrote: post #35
dasil003 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reas…

You should hire the most skilled people you can, period. If you can get a brilliant developer or designer for 6 months, that's better than hiring some schlub just because he'll stick with you.

Perhaps more apropos, skill is more of an unwavering quality than loyalty. The way to make a great developer loyal is to give them interesting stuff to work on and have the right culture. If loyalty is your metric, it's more effective to worry about your office conditions than to try to pick the right candidates.

I'm a prime example. At 33 I've only had 5 jobs since I was 20, so I look incredibly loyal as an employee. But there's a reason I stayed at each of those jobs for so long. I would not suffer a pointy-haired boss for a single day.

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#53

Post by sneak »

I had seriously considered applying there 6 or 8 months ago, until I read this:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf-...

I've had enough professional nightmares as a result of Rasmus' technical decisions in the past, so I didn't pursue it further.

Food for thought for anyone considering working there (if indeed he's even still there - I haven't kept up).

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#54

Post by nirvana »

angelbob wrote: post #36
nirvana wrote: post #21

Recruiters 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…

You make a good point. I wasn't intending to promote incestuousness, and to limit potential hires to ones who got referred.... if I ever get an email out of the blue from someone looking for a job, I'll help them, and I'll be keen to see if they might be a good fit. Someone with some gumption like that is automatically more interesting to me than someone who comes from a recruiter.

Also, kids in high school, new college grads, self taught hackers.... show me someone with a strong drive and I'm half sold.

So, no, I didn't mean to imply any sort of incestuousness... I'd like the opposite. I'm interested in a lot of people that reciters would filter out. "No college degree? Trashcan!" For me, its "No college degree because he spent the four years building a crappy startup that totally failed stupidly? Hire 'em!"

PS- please don't take this as me trying to recruit. I'm not. We're not ready for that, yet.

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#55

Post by intev »

johnrob wrote: post #10

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?

New features, atleast for us. The first set of features were easy to implement (to create the minimum viable product), but then things got more and more complicated. The old code base was slowly deteriorating due to lack of future proofing (ha! as if there is such a thing in programming), and we needed to rewrite large chunks of code. This was slowly consuming everyones time, and we were slowing down. Hiring more engineers gave us more man hours to continue to make the product better, while keeping the codebase tidy and maintainable.

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#57

Post by makattack »

Firehed wrote: post #29
johnrob wrote: post #10

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?

It's not so much requirements changing as simply the timeframe for implementation. As I work at WePay (with the author of the post), I can at least comment on our specific growth needs: * UI. As your customer base grows (along with your company's reputation), the overall expectation of a quality product grows with it. Bugs that are a minor irritation for some people are dealbreakers for others, especially when you're…

For those reading, working at WePay was an amazing experience. They're a talented, high energy team, moving fast and aimed for success.

@Firehed you guys might also want to post your openings at http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs too. Miss you guys!

--Andrew M

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