Hiring as an Early Stage Startup

About Us:

- Building AI creative tools on the web

- We have 11 months of runway

- Are offering competitive US Bay Area (non-MAGMA) salaries.

- We are raising our seed round with good prospects

- We are offering 1% equity

- We are growing ~25% monthly in active users with over 1000 already

Point is, we're doing alright, and offering a good job.

What I'm Looking For:

- Full Stack Web Engineer(React, Typescript, Node, Server Mgmt.)

- Someone passionate about the product, Individualistic, who can build things from scratch and work independently, with their own side projects (basically, a great engineer).

Why They Should Chose Us:

- We are a engineering oriented team working on an interesting problem in applying generative AI to 3d asset creation

Things I've Tried:

- Joining engineering discords

- Exploring open source commits

- Tech twitter

- job postings

My Results:

- Weak responses on most cold outreaches

- The responses showed people not looking for work

- When I post on job boards like LinkedIn and AngelList the applicants don't meet the standards.

Thoughts?

I ended up finding peopl through a personal connection. After going through lots of personal connections that were not interested. I think that (unfortunately) one of the key things you are expected to bring as a founder is the connections to hire people.

- Does your 25% MoM growth translate to revenue? If so, be clear about that

- Can your existing engineers refer friends they know?

What you're experiencing is pretty typical of a pre-seed startup that's unknown right now

- Cold outreach has low uptake anyway, especially if not targeted properly. People tend to largely just ignore or decline these kinds of messages.

- People not looking for work confirms you're probably targeting the wrong people, especially on LinkedIn.

- Job ads by design, will get a lot of responses. Filtering them out quickly and effectively is an art.

I've had all these same problems myself when hiring, crafting the ad and targeting the right people is BY FAR the hardest part to get right.

Find a good tech recruiter that's experienced in your area, maybe even a couple of them, and let them do the work. It's very hard to compete with the years or even decades of connections, skill, and networking that a good recruiter will have.

I've had the best experiences with people who aren't just ex-HR drones looking for more money - ideally you want someone mildly technical themselves who's able to tell if a candidate is a BS artist and screen them out early. One of the main benefits of using a recruiter is not having to do 90% of the screening yourself, so make sure they're good at it.