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How not to recruit for a startup

wepay.com

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#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 wasn't a DBA position and SQL had not changed much, and both companies were using ORMs anyway!)

For a startup, I think your early employees are so critical that you have to do the recruiting job yourself. I know it is seductive to think that you can outsource it, but you really can't.

These days you've got an entire social network -- LinkedIn -- designed to have people help refer other people for jobs.

Further, it was very early in my career that I just completely gave up on working with recruiters, and long before social networks even existed. I think that other good programmers probably are the same way-- why send your resume to people who will retype it with typos just to remove your name, lie to you, and send it randomly to hiring managers without talking to you first?

Perfectly good blog post and amusing story. But I think that the startup culture would do well to evolve away from using recruiters and rely more on networking.

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#22

"First, if the candidate didn’t have an online portfolio, personal site, or blog, I didn’t want to see a resumé. " The author is an idiot. ETA: I had a program manager who thought that having a blog meant the developer was an accomplished/published author. The developer quit for having to work 10 hour days after the first week and a half. Again, idiot.

Can you expand on that a little?

Some designers are not PR machines, or don't really care about recording thoughts, some just lower their heads and work, and when it's all said and done they may not have anything they are compelled to write about. There is a difference between a good/great designer and a popular one.

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#23
I've yet to meet a startup that had a good experience dealing with recruiters, at least when it comes to finding designers. I think the problem is that a lot of designers are self-taught and the ones that have the best credentials might not always produce the best work.

So I think design recruiting should be done by designers, and that's why I built Folyo (http://folyo.me). Companies that have submitted an offer have received an average of 8 replies each, and they're all from good designers with solid portfolios.

(By the way, if you're wondering WePay was one of the early users of the service, but the designers who replied were not in the US, and the visa issues proved to be too big an obstacle)

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#24
post #19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the author. If they didn't have an online portfolio, personal site, or blog, then I probably wouldn't want to see a resume. To me it shows that they're driven and they trust their work enough to have it public for anyone to judge. You also get a sense of what the person is like, rather than what their experience is like.

I'm ambivalent about this. Requiring an online portfolio for a designer does make sense, but a blog? The only "drive" that attention whoring on a blog shows is the drive to get attention.

He said "or blog," not "and blog" — some people prefer to show off their work in blog format rather than a traditional portfolio.

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#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 know, designers working at Apple (which are probably people you want to hire) will not have online portfolio or personal blog site.

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#26
First, on the mail to the existing employee: get it, ha ha, recruiter so stupid. It's generally kind, though, to make room for the capacity for human error: it seems like a safe bet that the recruiter made a mistake and didn't think that would actually work. People make mistakes, even recruiters(!), especially when they send a fair amount of mail each day (which every one does, some smart and targeted, some dumb and spammy).

We're a boutique shop, we're super-careful, and we still make mistakes: one of my recruiters sent a mail about Client A to an employee of Client B. She screwed up - she saw an old resume that didn't have Client B's name, and didn't double-check on LinkedIn. The employee was pissed, Client B was pissed, I was pissed, my recruiter was embarrassed, but we all got over it, because we're adults.

Second, on finding an agency you like, I wrote a blog post on this a month back: http://roosterpark.com/blog/hiring-a-recruiter-how-to-choose.... dmk23 is right that you should be asking real questions: I've included some examples in the post. (I've never even submitted this to HN before. Wonder why.)

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#27
post #3

Employees 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.

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#28
post #13

You 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...

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#29
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 taking on an industry giant - so minor problems make you lose customers (often permanently, given the "tried them three years ago, buggy, will not come back" attitude of most people). We're taking on PayPal - which, while not exactly known for a quality user experience, is extremely stable. We found this problem increased by at least an order of magnitude when we launched our stores product.

* Testing. Front and back-end. Like above, growth = reputation = expectation of quality. Gotta keep things stable, and there are some things that have absolutely zero margin for error (I've spent three days to produce a three-line patch, simply because I had to be aware of and handle dozens of different scenarios, and making an error could result in the wrong amount of money ending up in an account. Yes, it worked correctly)

* Support. If you're dealing with people's money, it's kind of a big deal. I'll let you use your imagination.

* Fraud. A non-trivial portion of our payment review involves human screening. With a couple hundred payments per day, that's manageable. Hundreds or thousands per hour? Not so much. We have to make smarter automated rules to avoid human screening where possible, and improve the UX in our back-end review panels so that humans can make intelligent decisions faster where necessary. Good code can replace (or free up, or avoid the need for) several human reviewers, and good human reviewers are just as hard to hire as good programmers. This and support are currently our tightest bottlenecks, since they directly limit the number of payments we can process in a day.

* UX. Not so much "is it pretty", but "does it do what I want?", "will I use it again?", etc. A huge percentage of our user base is virally acquired (ex. someone who previously made a donation comes back and sets up his own donation campaign and starts collecting money), which costs us nothing. The more we can entice users to stay engaged or engage their friends, the faster we can grow. If we can turn a payment receipt into a customer acquisition medium (customer meaning person collecting money, not paying), that's more users at effectively no cost to us.

* Scaling (in the traditional code sense). Not just server load, but weird problems that simply don't happen except at volume - database row locking, update collisions, etc. Detecting and fixing those types of problems is much harder than most people would think.

* Sales + Marketing. Not only expanding your markets, but making sure that as you're spending more on those efforts that your spending is effective. Have you saturated a tiny niche? You need more niches, and bigger groups to go after.

* Compliance and legal stuff. Did you know that as your annual payment volume increases, you have to adhere to stricter security guidelines for PCI compliance? While we've always held ourselves above and beyond the strictest guidelines, you still have to deal with compliance audits and such that don't happen at lower payment volume.

* Analytics and metrics. We're past the point where we can randomly guess at what's working and what's not. While we don't hold ourselves up with internal red tape and politics, we do actually need to measure the efficacy of the changes we're making. It's no longer a single new customer bumping the graphs by 20%, so we need pretty fine-grained measurements for this kind of thing (thankfully, we have enough volume where we don't need to let stuff sit in production for weeks to get a statistically significant sample size)

There's plenty more than that - most is quite general, though some is very specific to our company (fraud, in particular), and obviously not all of it is specific to engineering. My day-to-day is around payment stability and related back-end services, which also includes fraud management and our admin panel. Working 50+ hour weeks - quite a bit less intense than the 80+ I did during YC, but actually sustainable - simply doesn't allot me enough bandwidth to do everything that I need to do (I'm only commenting because the original post is a thinly veiled recruiting attempt and I've got desks that need filling). I have to solve problems like "an API call to a credit card processor timed out, how can I resume this automatically in a way where I know we will not accidentally charge a card twice" and "what changes do I need to make to ensure that a data integrity check never fails?" while at the same time architecting data models for new features, interviewing developer candidates, refactoring old systems for reliability and future-proofing, and providing our support team tools that allow them to do their job but don't allow them access to sensitive information (see again: PCI regulations). And I don't even touch the front end anymore.

Obviously, we're hiring. wepay.com/jobs :)

Re: How not to recruit for a startup

#30
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on that a little?

Some designers are not PR machines, or don't really care about recording thoughts, some just lower their heads and work, and when it's all said and done they may not have anything they are compelled to write about. There is a difference between a good/great designer and a popular one.

Then you should have a portfolio, no?

I'm not saying that having a blog makes you an "accomplished author" as the original commentator suggests I was implying, I'm just saying that seeing your work is the easiest/only way to screen for talent.

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