51–60 of 161 posts
It seems that the author is confusing placement agencies with recruiters working directly for a company (also see pg's comment). I've had great experiences with experienced recruiters at a startup, to help us find candidates, while at the same time getting pounded by unethical, moronic agencies. The recruiter helped us wade through hundreds of CV's, and eventually found an awesome Stanford CS MS that we ended up hiri…
A few days ago I moderated a panel discussion at the Computer History Museum with the founders of Dropbox, Evernote, and Wildfire. I asked whether it was worth dealing with outside recruiters, and they all said no. They all had recruiters working for them in house. In fact between 3% and 5% of their employees were recruiters. They said the best source of people initially were the friends of the founders and the first…
Is this package consistent with your advice? Does it generally work out well for the companies in question?
Quote: 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. That really is asking for everything. I hope you have figured out a way to explain your value proposition to these dream candidates.
Are there people who really want to work at all hours? Maybe eager students right out of college.
Personally, I'm at the point where if I'm going to be working at all hours, I'd better be one of the primary beneficiaries of that work.
So where do you search for engineers if you're a startup?
Go to various tech meetups/meetings that seem relevant and then try to identify smart people by what they say in meetings. Then approach them. Maybe sponsor a relevant meeting by buying the pizza/beer for it. This buys you the opportunity to give a company introduction and let people know you're hiring. Very cheap advertising. meetup.com is probably the generic place to look for these types of meetings, but every cit…
An onsite interview is 4-hour sell meeting: sell your coworkers on the candidate, and sell the candidate on the coworkers and office and etc.
If you aren't pretty confident in a hire before the onsite, the onsite won't help.
As a technical recruiter I am not shocked by this post but I am a little frustrated with the large brush that is painted on the industry as a whole. I mean, I have worked with some BAD Developers, everything they write breaks the minute it is in production, you can never pry them away from the foosball table or lunch room, they smell and can’t speak in complete sentences BUT I still recruit for technical talent becau…
She then asked me to explain what Ruby on Rails was, how it related to other technologies and was it popular because a lot of people seemed to be asking for it.
Of course I explained the best I could, to make the world a better place and all that, but it seems (as other commenters have pointed out) that there could be a real niche for techies to run a recruiting firm that know what they're talking about.
I'd be interested in wow do other companies hire without a recruiter.
Recruiter "I have a great role for you as a Ruby developer!"
Me: "Do you have a copy of my CV?"
Recruiter: "Yes indeed, I have it on my screen right now!"
The word "Ruby" does not appear on my CV, at all. This has happened to me more times than I can remember; with Ruby, C++, C# and a whole bunch of other things not mentioned anywhere on my CV.
You don't even need to have heard of a technology (never-mind understand it) to narrow candidates down more than this.
This cuts both ways: looking for work takes a substantial, non-zero amount of time, and it's extremely frustrating when startups decide to speak with you even though they know hiring you is "a long shot." Searching for work at a startup has been a protracted, fruitless process. They have no problem conversing with you and checking out your background over coffee, lunch, whatever. After a few conversations and a techn…
My opinion: if startups aren't serious about hiring you, they shouldn't go through the dance. Why are they wasting everybody's time?
If you keep getting contacted by companies for interviews, but fail to get past that stage, I would recommend two things. 1. Make absolutely sure that your resume is accurate. If, in the interview, it looks like you 'embellished' your qualifications on your resume a bit too much, it is guaranteed to get you tossed into the 'no' pile. 2. Work on your interview skills. It is surprising how bad some people interview. It took me a couple practice tries before I really became comfortable with the process.
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…
Contract programmers often switch jobs once a year. That's driven my duration limits set by companies, layoffs and the wanderlust that contractors often have. Big companies don't seem to want to be bothered with in-house recruiters, so they pay third-party companies to do the work. In the midst of that shuffle, a job requirement is handed from a hiring manager (who may not know how to code) to a company HR rep (who may edit it) to the recruiter. What you end up with looks like this:
Req: JAVA Developer
REQUIRED:
- 5-7 Years Java Experience
- 3-5 Years J2EE Experience
- 1 Year JDBC
- 3-5 Years Oracle
- MUST HAVE WEBLOGIC 10.3.5
PLUSSES:
- C/C++
- Perl
So, the recruiter goes around spamming folks, and manages to find someone who's just hit their 12-month limit at BigCo and is open to find another position. The recruiter gets paid, the contractor may or may not like the position (but gets paid, anyway), and the hiring manager gets bagels brought in, courtesy of the recruiter's firm. Everyone wins, so to speak. That's why the cycle persists.
I'm describing this as someone who played that game successfully for many years. To someone who's working in startup circles it may seem like madness, and it would be if applied to startups. But it's how Fortune 500 companies, for better or worse, find talent.
To put it in startup terms, the third-party recruiter model seems to work well for companies who've found their business model and need people to execute it. For companies who are in a race to iterate and find a product-market fit, it's the kiss of death. Skip the free bagels, delete the emails and find people on your own or with internal recruiters who really know your company well.