4 ms·

I met with Patrick for a couple hours this spring to talk about Starfighter and recruiting and such (I've been in recruiting for almost 20 years), and I shared

by fecak 10y ago

I met with Patrick for a couple hours this spring to talk about Starfighter and recruiting and such (I've been in recruiting for almost 20 years), and I shared some of the challenges the industry has faced. Patrick shared some anecdotes about his brief experience (at the time) on the recruiting side of the business, and it does take some time to get to the point where you don't take rejection personally. Recruiting is hard for a lot of reasons, and you do need to have a certain stomach for the industry. I'm not a huge fan of it either. The advantage Starfighter had was that the most painful rejections for recruiters aren't necessarily the "no offer" at the end of an interview, but the "no response" to outreach - even when highly targeted. Starfighter was designed to have a pipeline of qualified candidates who would conceivably be much more approachable than those who are cold-called/emailed by agency recruiters, not to mention the benefit of the names. Getting approached by Patrick or Thomas & Erin is much different for a candidate than getting approached by a recruiter with no name recognition. Even recruiters with a bit of name recognition don't get high response rates all the time. I was personally rooting for Starfighter for several reasons, most of which to try and take recruiting in a bit of a different direction. I still hope the idea can be salvaged in some way, and wish Patrick and Thomas & Erin the best in the new endeavors.

tptacek 10y ago
That's really interesting! Our experience was: we didn't need to do any outbound sales work at all (our entire client base was cold inbounds), and we could close a contract with 1-2 phone calls. Our referrals I think with 1 exception? all got interviews. But we're sourcing non-traditional candidates, and the --- you know what, I'm getting ahead of myself on a blog post I'm still tuning up. In any case, that might explain what was so painful about the business for us: we had high frequency exposure to the worst part of it.
- fecak 10y ago
  The outbound sourcing work is the worst part without doubt, but the game took care of that for you. That, and the fact that it was backed by people with good industry names, was the beauty of Starfighter. I told Patrick that you already had the two hardest parts covered - engaging with qualified candidates and establishing credibility. You also had cred with the hiring folks, so that was taken care of as well - hiring clients were going to be easy to identify without much effort. The hard part would be scaling it to some degree - Patrick and you/Erin wouldn't be able to talk to every candidate if you were going to make serious $, and then you'd have to hire actual recruiters (who are wildly unpopular), and then you're starting to approach the problem of being like everyone else (other than the game) if the recruiters behave like...recruiters. If you ever want to discuss recruiting stuff, I'm easy to find.
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    > If you ever want to discuss recruiting stuff, I'm easy to find. Yeah you are. Do you use this same username everywhere?
    - fecak 10y ago
      It's my last name, the name of one of my companies, and it's always available.
  - elptacek 10y ago
    Talking to every candidate (the ones that were loosely designated as 'mine') turned out to be my most favorite part of this whole deal. In some ways, even better than having an opportunity to write an AVR emulator. These guys are smart and they have interesting stories, and the enthusiasm they expressed for what they wanted out of their careers plucked my mom strings pretty hard. I always knew that if we continued to grow, that this part would go away, but I would have struggled to keep this going as long as I could. Even if it meant less serious $. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that had we grown to the point where hiring "actual recruiters," it would have been impossible to find ones with the same mindset.
    - fecak 10y ago
      Not impossible, but you'd be looking for the same caliber of recruiter as you were looking for engineers. Perhaps even more rare.

by fecak 10y ago

tptacek 10y ago

That's really interesting! Our experience was: we didn't need to do any outbound sales work at all (our entire client base was cold inbounds), and we could close a contract with 1-2 phone calls. Our referrals I think with 1 exception? all got interviews. But we're sourcing non-traditional candidates, and the --- you know what, I'm getting ahead of myself on a blog post I'm still tuning up. In any case, that might explain what was so painful about the business for us: we had high frequency exposure to the worst part of it.

fecak 10y ago
The outbound sourcing work is the worst part without doubt, but the game took care of that for you. That, and the fact that it was backed by people with good industry names, was the beauty of Starfighter. I told Patrick that you already had the two hardest parts covered - engaging with qualified candidates and establishing credibility. You also had cred with the hiring folks, so that was taken care of as well - hiring clients were going to be easy to identify without much effort. The hard part would be scaling it to some degree - Patrick and you/Erin wouldn't be able to talk to every candidate if you were going to make serious $, and then you'd have to hire actual recruiters (who are wildly unpopular), and then you're starting to approach the problem of being like everyone else (other than the game) if the recruiters behave like...recruiters. If you ever want to discuss recruiting stuff, I'm easy to find.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  > If you ever want to discuss recruiting stuff, I'm easy to find. Yeah you are. Do you use this same username everywhere?
  - fecak 10y ago
    It's my last name, the name of one of my companies, and it's always available.
- elptacek 10y ago
  Talking to every candidate (the ones that were loosely designated as 'mine') turned out to be my most favorite part of this whole deal. In some ways, even better than having an opportunity to write an AVR emulator. These guys are smart and they have interesting stories, and the enthusiasm they expressed for what they wanted out of their careers plucked my mom strings pretty hard. I always knew that if we continued to grow, that this part would go away, but I would have struggled to keep this going as long as I could. Even if it meant less serious $. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that had we grown to the point where hiring "actual recruiters," it would have been impossible to find ones with the same mindset.
  - fecak 10y ago
    Not impossible, but you'd be looking for the same caliber of recruiter as you were looking for engineers. Perhaps even more rare.