How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
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How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
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Re: How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
#2This is, in my opinion, one of the largest issues startups face today. OSS and a culture of blogging have significantly reduced the barriers to entry for many technical issues including, but not limited to, scaling, data processing, and even general development.
What's still just as difficult is building the right team - my personal pain point is university recruiting, but it's bad across the board. If you're a startup that's expanding beyond the second or third round of technical hires the ability to draw on your network becomes increasingly limited as you've likely tapped out all your personal connections at this point, and your team's calendar still resembles one of the world's worst games of Tetris [1].
Traditional recruiting agencies are poor at matching technical hires with opportunities that are interesting to them because most recruiters are non-technical. GitHub profiles are worthless if the hiring manager (Read: /founders?/) have no time to read them, and dealing with phone screens and in-person interviews and arranging travel for candidates is a huge distraction from what they should be focusing on, building their business [2]. There's a huge potential for upset in the space, and I look forward to seeing a managed hiring provider that manages the scheduling, very initial matching of candidates, and once a hire is made follows-through with assistance on all of the ensuing paperwork and documentation.
[1] http://media.edge-online.com/files/imagecache/article/tetris...
[2] Hiring is one component of building a company, one of the most important even, but it is a distraction. In an idyllic world perfect employees seek you out and apply ;)
Re: How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
#3Exactly. I found a direct correlation between how successful a company was and how good they were at hiring. I have been meaning to write something about this however it would more or less echo your post. I don't think there is a shortage of good devs it's just that most companies don't know how to hire them.
Re: How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
#4Is any of this different because the person in context is a business role?
In my personal experience, smaller, tech-heavy focus startups are quick to make an offer for technical candidates.
However business roles take much longer, partly because its not clear if the company needs a full-time person running marketing, sales or business development, and because the new hire can add to "product-market" fit noise.
Re: How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
#5I experienced the exact same thing last time I was looking for a job. I had companies go completely silent, then contact me weeks after I had already accepted another position. With the dearth of available iOS developers in the valley right now, I don't know how these places hire anyone at all, let alone good devs.
Re: How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
#6Is any of this different because the person in context is a business role? In my personal experience, smaller, tech-heavy focus startups are quick to make an offer for technical candidates. However business roles take much longer, partly because its not clear if the company needs a full-time person running marketing, sales or business development, and because the new hire can add to "product-market" fit noise.
I still see some companies take a long time to fill tech roles.
It's the difference between companies who really know what they're looking for, and those who the "best" person but aren't quite sure what that is.
The former will hire as soon as they meet somebody who can do the job.
The latter will dither until they have a few possibles. Then dither some more weighing up the various pros and cons... by which time their best candidate has gone.
In the worst cases they then reject all their other candidates (since they're "worse" than the best candidate they've just lost) and start the whole process again!
Re: How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
#7This is, in my opinion, one of the largest issues startups face today. OSS and a culture of blogging have significantly reduced the barriers to entry for many technical issues including, but not limited to, scaling, data processing, and even general development. What's still just as difficult is building the right team - my personal pain point is university recruiting, but it's bad across the board. If you're a start…
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Re: How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
#8Is any of this different because the person in context is a business role? In my personal experience, smaller, tech-heavy focus startups are quick to make an offer for technical candidates. However business roles take much longer, partly because its not clear if the company needs a full-time person running marketing, sales or business development, and because the new hire can add to "product-market" fit noise.
I still see some companies take a long time to fill tech roles. It's the difference between companies who really know what they're looking for, and those who the "best" person but aren't quite sure what that is. The former will hire as soon as they meet somebody who can do the job. The latter will dither until they have a few possibles. Then dither some more weighing up the various pros and cons... by which time thei…
I think you're absolutely right, Adrian. If you aren't sure what specific role you'd like someone to be able to fill, you're just a window shopper, and serious candidates aren't going to wait for you to make up your mind. For every req, you've got to be able to answer the ? "What, specifically, do we need this person to do?" That's a functional ? - it's not enough to say "This person needs to be able to code in .NET " like many BigCorps do.
It astounds me how hard many organizations can find it to answer that ?, though. Even if you set up a company that espoused a "we'll hire as many smart people as we can get" policy, you could still say "Immediately, we need someone to work on the performance of our frobnosticator, so they'll need to know Java classloaders REALLY well." That's specific enough that you can know "we found our engineer" when they show up, and doesn't use a lame proxy for knowledge like years of experience (there are certainly Java developers out there with 15 years of experience who know nothing about classloaders).
Re: How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
#9As a start-up CEO in the hiring-efficiency space, I get to see a lot of company's hiring process in gory detail. Anyone who's been around new start-ups (and old guys, see: Google) has seen a great candidate withdraw from a req due to long response time. In a larger organization these inefficiencies can be handled by adding more schedulers, sourcers, recruiters, but in a small start-up you need a top-down commitment to speedy processing of candidates.
As a company gets larger (~series A) there comes a sudden crunch wherein you need 10 developers, yesterday. At that moment, if you haven't laid down the ground work for a successful recruiting/hiring strategy you can experience a very lossy hiring process. You'll miss out on great opportunities to companies who have spent the time, money and effort to make their process efficient.
To the articles recommendations, I would add the following:
- For top tier talent, recruiting is more like sales: you need to sell your company to the recruit, not vice versa.
- For each requisition do the following: decide what the relevant skills/requirements for the position, decide who on the interview team will assess each of those skills, train your interviewers to spend 1/2 their time selling the company and why they love working there and 1/2 their time grilling the applicant on their focus area. This forces you to think critically about what you're looking for (forces understanding of the org chart) and gives each person agency in the process (I'm in charge of sussing out algorithmic ability).
- Corollary to the above: train your interviewers. Make sure they know what they're looking for both culturally and technically, and make sure they have the ability to assess those properties (or lack thereof). Interviewers are your company's brand emissaries (and the source of many candidates) if they can't communicate well the recruits will come away with a bad experience.
- Track things: I think of recruiting like sales. If a VC asked you how your sales was going you wouldn't say something like "OK", you'd have numbers, metrics, graphs, funnels, pipelines, etc etc. Though this can feel a bit overkill in the beginning, getting in the habit of monitoring your candidate pipeline is extremely important as you scale. Small inefficiencies become enshrined as 'best practice' and as you scale they can turn into huge holes for your organization. This is exactly the type of problem we're trying to mitigate/measure by bringing the traditional applicant tracking system into the inbox at www.foundryhiring.com.
Re: How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
#10What advice would you give to someone who's getting a slow response?