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Excellent thoughts, thank you. > We took things very personally. You build relationships with your earliest users (candidates, in our case). Recruiting funnels

by neilv 3y ago

Excellent thoughts, thank you. > We took things very personally. You build relationships with your earliest users (candidates, in our case). Recruiting funnels at our clients had no such connection. The impedance mismatch was demoralizing; our lived experience was that every time a candidate we presented to a client got rejected, we had ourselves failed (I mean, really, we had!). Similarly, the idea that we were just another hoop that candidates had to hop through (but only the non-name-brand candidates who didn't know how to skip us to get an interview at a client) grated on us. That sounds rough. If you could do it over, do you see a way you could get more buy-in from some clients, such that they commit to "advanced placement" in their process, to candidates you provide? Or are pretty much all companies going to have their entire hiring process set in concrete? What about interfacing at the hiring manager level, at companies where the hiring manager normally has some discretion to vouch for the candidate and bypass a lot of process? Could you get sufficient trust with those? Still the rejection problem?

tptacek 3y ago
No, I don't think we could ever have "fixed" hiring at companies with enough scale to be lighthouse customers for a business like Starfighter, which was I think a conclusion all 3 of us simultaneously landed on. The engineering team has to be committed to doing things that way. For instance: prior to Starfighter, I hadn't had the misfortune of working in a "leveled" engineering team (I'd worked at big tech companies before, but "levels.fyi"-style leveling, which is universal now, wasn't a thing back when I was still working at bigcos). Work-sample hiring doesn't just impact how you make yes/no decisions on candidates, but also how you level them. If I was going to do it over again --- and, again, I wouldn't, because I feel like I also learned this just isn't a great business to be in --- I would have done something much closer to "Stack Exchange, but for CTFs". Run a couple of pure investment years, build up a base of users and some public profile, and then do lightweight recruiting stuff (probably just curated job ads for awhile) on top of that.

by neilv 3y ago

tptacek 3y ago

No, I don't think we could ever have "fixed" hiring at companies with enough scale to be lighthouse customers for a business like Starfighter, which was I think a conclusion all 3 of us simultaneously landed on. The engineering team has to be committed to doing things that way. For instance: prior to Starfighter, I hadn't had the misfortune of working in a "leveled" engineering team (I'd worked at big tech companies before, but "levels.fyi"-style leveling, which is universal now, wasn't a thing back when I was still working at bigcos). Work-sample hiring doesn't just impact how you make yes/no decisions on candidates, but also how you level them. If I was going to do it over again --- and, again, I wouldn't, because I feel like I also learned this just isn't a great business to be in --- I would have done something much closer to "Stack Exchange, but for CTFs". Run a couple of pure investment years, build up a base of users and some public profile, and then do lightweight recruiting stuff (probably just curated job ads for awhile) on top of that.