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Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

blog.tutorspree.com

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Re: Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

#91

Post by dpritchett »

tptacek wrote: post #86
dpritchett wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg, I'm curious about the advice you give to YC founders on identifying and recruiting early employees. Based on tutorspree's job posting they need roughly the same level of technical skills as a founder but they're getting a maximum of 3% equity and a below-market NYC salary. I'd guess the founders are getting 5-10x the equity and a salary that's not too far off from the one offered above. Is this package consistent…

Equity grants are based on risk, not ability. Sometimes, very talented technical people are assuming extra risk due to opportunity cost; perhaps some other startup is offering comparable equity but has a longer runway and/or more traction. If those people are good at negotiating, they get better equity grants. A few factors play in to the gulf between founder and early employee equity: * Founders have by definition c…

I would counter that equity grants are ultimately based on negotiating leverage rather than on risk or ability, each of which are important components of the negotiation picture. As a founder of a hypothetical company, I wouldn't offer more than 3% to an employee either if I could succeed without making that sacrifice. I completely understand the value proposition for a founder - pg has outlined it in exhaustive detail over a decade's essay writing. I'm not sure I've seen where he outlines the upside of taking a sub-market salary in exchange for low-single-digit equity.

My best guess is that early-employee startupping is an investment in one's network and skills: The company, like all startups, is likely to fail. Your equity has a low chance of paying off. On the upside, you're getting startup-tier technical experience that would be dramatically harder to come by in a BigCo job. And best of all, you're gaining entry into the professional networking world of startup founders and the extended YC family.

I don't mean to imply that early employees are getting shafted or that they are inherently owed large equity stakes, I'm just working my way to an understanding of exactly what the value proposition is for someone in this position.

Re: Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

#92

Post by cydonian_monk »

hkmurakami wrote: post #77
fennecfoxen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one idiot who made me an offer which might have been somewhat realistic: it was at a networking company, doing C++ for APs/controllers (5 years experience wanted). I told him something like "sorry, no, I'm just leaving that field (and that city) for a little startup, I was more of an NMS guy anyway, and I wasn't using C++ - you could do a better job of convincing me that you understand my background and skill-…

"you could do a better job of convincing me that you understand my background and skill-set; I see you even are advertising for NMS positions on your company's site." I had a similar experience, and because I had multiple people from their office call me about different positions in the same time period, I became convinced that recruiters are just allotted a concrete list of positions that _they_ are responsible for.…

I've always mentally associatted third-party recruiters with 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' so the idea that there are a number of 'leads' they all fight over would make sense. Just reversed with the easy to fill jobs being the good 'leads'. Some of the third party groups I've dealt with certainly had that aroma. (Some of the megaCo recruiting depts, too.)

Re: Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

#93

Post by tptacek »

dpritchett wrote: post #91
tptacek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equity grants are based on risk, not ability. Sometimes, very talented technical people are assuming extra risk due to opportunity cost; perhaps some other startup is offering comparable equity but has a longer runway and/or more traction. If those people are good at negotiating, they get better equity grants. A few factors play in to the gulf between founder and early employee equity: * Founders have by definition c…

I would counter that equity grants are ultimately based on negotiating leverage rather than on risk or ability, each of which are important components of the negotiation picture. As a founder of a hypothetical company, I wouldn't offer more than 3% to an employee either if I could succeed without making that sacrifice. I completely understand the value proposition for a founder - pg has outlined it in exhaustive deta…

It's kind of a banal observation to say that if you can do better than 3% / $70k in NYC, you shouldn't accept a 3% / $70k offer "just because it's a startup". But it's a valid observation, so, there you go.

Re: Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

#94

Post by cperciva »

tptacek wrote: post #88
cperciva wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as soon as you've exhausted this source you should start hiring recruiters. Did they present any evidence to support this position, or does "should" in this case just mean that this is what they did? There have been a few times when I've talked to technical people at startups and come away thinking "if it weren't for Tarsnap, I'd totally go work for them". In contrast, every time I talk to a recruiter, I come away th…

When a smart small company hires a recruiter, part of the goal is to have recruits never really realize they're talking to recruiters. Presumably most YC recruiters aren't randomly cold calling people; instead their job might involve a lot more of "setting up circumstances so that the right person in their company is likely to end up talking to Colin Percival".

Aha! Good to know that there are such things as good recruiters out there, even if I've never encountered them (knowingly, at least).

Re: Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

#95

Post by pnathan »

benmathes wrote: post #68

The roles that we fill at this stage are highly specialized and generally call for nearly contradictory attributes in candidates. You need incredible good engineers who are not already in golden handcuffs, are crazy enough to join a risky early stage company, do not want to found their own company right now, want to work at all hours, and are aligned with the culture you are trying to build. It seems that this is ind…

Certainly I fall somewhere in that category. I'm not in a position to co-found, but would like to wind up at a startup. However, due to the high-risk nature, I want to have a good solid chunk of equity that I could cash out (loosely equivalent to the valuation of the risk that I took on)

Re: Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

#96

Post by dpritchett »

tptacek wrote: post #93
dpritchett wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would counter that equity grants are ultimately based on negotiating leverage rather than on risk or ability, each of which are important components of the negotiation picture. As a founder of a hypothetical company, I wouldn't offer more than 3% to an employee either if I could succeed without making that sacrifice. I completely understand the value proposition for a founder - pg has outlined it in exhaustive deta…

It's kind of a banal observation to say that if you can do better than 3% / $70k in NYC, you shouldn't accept a 3% / $70k offer "just because it's a startup". But it's a valid observation, so, there you go.

I must've overstated my case. I've never worked in a technology startup and I'm only trying to suss out the motivations behind the different classes of players. There's plenty of ink spilled about VCs and founders, but not so much about early employees. I assume the people entering into these arrangements are rational players comfortable with their possible outcomes, and I'd like to better understand the deals.

Please don't take my observations upthread as dismissive or authoritative. I certainly don't have the startup experience to make such claims. I have no reason to mistrust pg (or you for that matter) and I'm genuinely hoping for digestible explanations. Perhaps I shouldn't have asked on HN but rather through a private channel.

Re: Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

#97

Post by dabent »

arethuza wrote: post #22
danilocampos wrote: post #11

I need to write a post to discuss this at greater depth, but... I am fucking astonished at how inept most recruiters are. I mean, just awful and useless at their "jobs." If we concede the point that, especially in the Valley, technical talent is in high demand, it stands to reason that any overture to such talent needs to be persuasive, informative and intriguing. It should explain the role in reasonable detail, whil…

I had one idiot who kept phoning me about a "great position" with an investment bank that offered less money, a lot less holidays, a lot more pressure (which I interpreted as being required to be available 24x7) and less interesting work than what I currently do. I kept asking him why I should be interested in such a role, of course, he couldn't tell me. The sheer desperation in his voice was almost enjoyable.

The sheer desperation in his voice was almost enjoyable

The first time I sent my resume out to recruiters, my phone rang nearly continuously for two days. I complained about it once to my wife. She said I should never be ungrateful for a recruiter calling. He father went through a few periods of unemployment and in her eyes a call from a recruiter was a cause for celebration. From that point on, I've always been patient with recruiters, even the dull ones.

I've been around long enough now to have the tables turn. In 2002-2003, calls from recruiters almost completely dried up. I had a job at the time, but I was looking to leave for greener pastures and became very grateful for any calls I received. Now I'm back to getting lots of unsolicited emails and calls, but I just politely decline and maintain a contact, because if the table do turn again, I'll have a wide net already cast to pull in my next gig.

Re: Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

#98

Post by tptacek »

cperciva wrote: post #94
tptacek wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a smart small company hires a recruiter, part of the goal is to have recruits never really realize they're talking to recruiters. Presumably most YC recruiters aren't randomly cold calling people; instead their job might involve a lot more of "setting up circumstances so that the right person in their company is likely to end up talking to Colin Percival".

Aha! Good to know that there are such things as good recruiters out there, even if I've never encountered them (knowingly, at least).

Most of the time, when people complain about recruiters, they're complaining about dialing-for-dollars cold-call transactional recruiters.

Recruiting is a special form of sales/marketing, and most businesses wouldn't expect randomly calling people on the phone to be their best early sales strategy. But that doesn't mean they don't do sales; they just execute on an early sales strategy.

Jeff Cox's _Selling The Wheel_ is a good, if somewhat patronizing, summary of the different sales strategies companies use at different stages of the adoption curve for their offerings. The same insight applies to recruiting.

Re: Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

#100

Post by tptacek »

dpritchett wrote: post #96
tptacek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a banal observation to say that if you can do better than 3% / $70k in NYC, you shouldn't accept a 3% / $70k offer "just because it's a startup". But it's a valid observation, so, there you go.

I must've overstated my case. I've never worked in a technology startup and I'm only trying to suss out the motivations behind the different classes of players. There's plenty of ink spilled about VCs and founders, but not so much about early employees. I assume the people entering into these arrangements are rational players comfortable with their possible outcomes, and I'd like to better understand the deals. Pleas…

Early employees accept offers at startups because:

* The working culture is almost always superior to that of better compensated big company jobs

* The career experience at a startup is often more valuable at a startup than a bigco job; at a BigCo, you're unlikely to be able to even use a good language, whereas at a startup you might own a whole product

* Early employees might not want to lock themselves down to a single company for a long time, and if you're aiming to work at lots of different places, the startup career track is more amenable to it than the bigco career track (where "job hopping" is stigmatized)

* The equity upside of a startup is extremely easy to overestimate

* Early employees have a good shot at becoming key employees, and key employees get better comp later on

* If you truly believe in a startup's offering, a 3% stake in it can still be reasonably valued at "life changing". A 2% stake in the second startup I joined was extraordinarily lucrative, well beyond "excellent bonus for every year I worked there"

* Over the long term, early employees might themselves want to found startups, and a good path to doing that is succeeding in an employee role in a smart startup (for the track record, the education, and the networking).

* Finally, most people satisfice. They'll quickly accept a good job rather than expending months of effort trying to find the optimal job.

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