10 ms·

One of my top lessons I've learned doing successful startups: 1. Recruiting is the #1 job of any startup CEO, and the #1 determiner of corporate success. 2. U

One of my top lessons I've learned doing successful startups: 1. Recruiting is the #1 job of any startup CEO, and the #1 determiner of corporate success. 2. Up market, down market, side market, it doesn't matter: You will get better employees if you treat candidates with respect and you will be more competitive. 3. It's a lot of work for the 95% of clowns out there you interview, and there's a push towards automated process, but it will hurt your business. 4. There's a lot more to recruiting than just treating candidates with respect. It involves how you present yourself as an employer (participating in conferences / meetups / etc.), how you find candidates, checking references, reviewing github repos, etc. It's a crazy amount of work. 5. This is hard, but if you can do this, you will have a huge edge. The flip side is that as an employee, doing a good job interviewing / recruiting, especially at a big company, is one of the lowest value-add tasks you can bring on, from a purely selfish / incentive structures perspective. This friction, I think, is a major reason why recruiting is handled so badly. There is absolutely no upside to doing a good job, and it takes a lot of time to do so.

geraldhh 3y ago
your last paragraph resonated very well with me as i can't remember the last time i spoke to a recruiter that seemed to have a horse in the race.
sokoloff 3y ago
I think the last paragraph is blunted in companies where teams recruit/interview for their own team (as opposed to recruiting/interviewing for the company in general). In the former, if I do a good job, at least I get better colleagues on my team, making my daily life better and giving my team more chance to be seen as successful.
tayo42 3y ago
> is one of the lowest value-add tasks you can bring on, from a purely selfish / incentive structures perspective. At one place I worked, interviewing was one of the check marks you could participate in for promotions.
- 1920musicman 3y ago
  But that's exactly what it is then: a check mark. I can interview dozens of candidates, and then add a total count to my self review. There is no incentive to do a good job (how would that even be evaluated?..).
  - filoleg 3y ago
    > how would that even be evaluated? Depends on the company. At my current workplace, the candidate is given an option to provide feedback at the end (either through a form or an email), and all interviewers are also required to submit written notes on how everything went down. Given that a candidate at the onsite will get interviewed by 4-5 people, with each of them providing a very detailed set of notes, it would be fairly trivial to smell out a misbehaving interviewer, if one cared to do so. What actually happens at the end of the day with those notes and candidate feedback, that’s the part i am not sure about. Once they get submitted to the hiring committee (or HR), it is out of my hands. But just saying, they do have ways of evaluating it, just on a less precise scale and more on a “bad/good enough/amazing” scale. With only the “bad” outcome raising any eyebrows/having any meaningful effect, and with 99% of them getting the “good enough”/“amazing” ratings. And how often the signal for that “bad” rating gets caught is also not something I know much about. P.S. Your assessments and notes are all preserved in the centralized hub, so you (and some others) can always access them later as well. And, sometimes, you indeed have people checking them out for assessment or such. Especially during your first couple interviews, you have a person supervising you and taking notes in parallel as well, and then you discuss them and they give you improvement suggestions and such.
    - 1920musicman 3y ago
      I am sure what you are describing is being tracked at my company. The concern with misaligned incentives I have is that there is a vast gap between conducting a passable interview in terms of engaging with the candidate and actually investing yourself in the process. So it's not really about being a bad interviewer (as in rude, openly biased, etc) but about having the energy to do the best job you can - which all candidates deserve IMO.
drewcoo 3y ago
> treat candidates with respect > 95% of clowns out there you interview What's your company affiliation?
- FredPret 3y ago
  You can and should treat someone with respect, even if your expectation is that there's a 95% chance they will turn out to be a clown.
  - foldr 3y ago
    IMO this way of looking at it is indicative of a lack of respect for candidates, even if communication is superficially respectful. If someone performs badly in an interview then by all means don't hire them, but it's both unkind and irrational to jump to the conclusion that they're a 'clown'. If someone is making such a harsh judgment about 95% of their applicants, on the basis of an interview process which we know to be highly imperfect, then I would not want to work for them.
- michaelt 3y ago
  He works for Clownr, the Uber of children's party entertainment.
  - 1920musicman 3y ago
    I had a good laugh reading your comment and then found this: https://www.clownr.com/ https://www.clownr.com/
    - arcanemachiner 3y ago
      > Are You a Clown? > Say hello to you new best friend.
- LargeTomato 3y ago
  I worked at a rocket startup. 1/3 ex SpaceX. 1/3 ex Google/Facebook. I interviewed a guy and asked him, essentially, "find the biggest number in a 2D array". This guy spent half an hour struggling because he "wasn't sure how to look through the grid in a circle pattern". You'd be incredibly surprised who gets interviews.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
You'd think if professional sports could figure out how important this is we could too, but for some reason there's a tendency to give it lip service then put absolutely no effort into doing a good job. Scouting and screenings are done by people that companies treat like dirt, we incentivize them only for body count, interviews are done by low experience employees and employees who don't even like interviewing. We don't know how to identify and cultivate talent in this industry yet, it's clearly dysfunctional and deprioritized.
- philwelch 3y ago
  In professional sports you are selecting one of the few hundred or thousand best people in the world. Its not even remotely the same impact.
  - tracerbulletx 3y ago
    Every successful athletic team makes player scouting and development a core function, not only the elite levels. In the US that means minor league baseball teams, university teams from volleyball and fencing, to football and basketball. Pro cycling teams that pay almost nothing and aren't competitive world wide.. It's not just the elite teams that make this top priority. They ALL know that the most driven talented players they can get at their level is what will make them win.
    - philwelch 3y ago
      Most of your examples are talent pipelines for the top leagues. Regardless I think you made my point for me at the end: > They ALL know that the most driven talented players they can get at their level is what will make them win. This is not how normal employment works. Sports are competitive by nature so the difference between a 60th percentile player and the best player is the difference between winning and losing. But for most businesses, the difference between the best frontend developer and the 60th percentile frontend developer is close to zero.
      - 3y ago
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
This is so true it hurts. If you get burnt once with hiring, it’s something you’ll never forget but could destroy the startup/small business in the process
realusername 3y ago
> There is absolutely no upside to doing a good job, and it takes a lot of time to do so. I've also learned this the hard way. I've conducted about a 100 interviews in 2 years and didn't get compensated any for it despite being one of the most critical part of the company. Conducting interviews is also very tiring and time consuming, I'm estimating that two interviews in a day and your day is gone. I also evaluate it 2x more tiring than coding personally. It wasn't a complete waste of time though, I got a lot of experience from that which will be very valuable in future management positions.
- 1920musicman 3y ago
  I have the same experience. Interviews are very time consuming (prep 30 min, interview 1h, fill out the feedback form 30m-1h), and having several interviews each week means I spend ~1 day weekly on something that's not going to benefit me directly in any way (excluding the benefit of potentially working with good engineers I helped hiring). So unless the incentives change, I don't see this process improving in big tech.
  - realusername 3y ago
    Yes exactly, the interview itself is a bit less than half of the work surprisingly and then you do need a real break after all of that very intense concentration anyways. 1 interview = roughly half a day gone, that's what I've experienced. And then it's indeed never valued inside the company, worse than that, it might be counted against you since you will achieve less in your team where all the evaluation will take place... I really don't understand why companies don't value engineers capable of conducting interviews because it's really not an easy task, you need much better than average interpersonal skills and much better than average tech knowledge as well.
    - 1920musicman 3y ago
      Agreed. I mostly conduct system design interviews which already have a smaller pool of interviewers at my company. This contribution has been included exactly zero times in the countless review cycles I went through.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Almost every place I’ve worked (early at startups later at megacorps) there were never enough recruiting resources. So eventually I just got my own recruiter account on LinkedIn and started using my knowledge of the industry and state of hiring to make my own search queries and reached out directly. I had an incredible conversion rate - the senior person actually hiring saying “hey you look like you could fit in here” was very powerful. It was a hell of a lot of work, but I could fill seats faster than anyone around me with high quality people and my projects landed successfully. At a certain point I became too senior for that as my direct teams became smaller and more senior, and I’ve never been able to convince a single other manager to do it. Not a single person. I’ve since switched back to IC at a super senior level so am even further removed from direct recruiting, but I can see even more broadly. All I see now is engineering managers whining about recruiting, and I’ve still yet to see another manager take direct control of their recruiting. Why? The only thing I can guess is they don’t actually care about being successful at what they’re doing, they just care about successfully doing what they were hired to do, which doesn’t include recruiting.
- plugin-baby 3y ago
  100% with you, but it’s not always easy to get control of your own recruiting. I’ve also seen HR get upset when their involvement is not what they expected.
  - ineptech 3y ago
    Agreed, which is insane! We'll spend untold zillions fine-tuning and A/B testing the process by which we get users, but when it comes to getting coworkers it's "Well HR says the applicants have to make an account to apply so I guess that's just the way it is".
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      It will be that way inevitably as an organization grows, usually it's an investor requirement to prevent outright nepotism hires or discrimination. No one cares too much for the first few dozen employees but anything larger usually will come with "ffs go and implement at least some basic hiring standards to reduce the legal risks".
ivan_gammel 3y ago
>It's a lot of work for the 95% of clowns out there you interview, and there's a push towards automated process, but it will hurt your business. If 20 candidates enter your funnel before you hire one in a screening-technical-offer flow, that’s maybe 5-6 hours per week spent on recruiting in 1 month. You can even send a few personalized rejections to worthy but unfit applicants, sending 80% of applications to trash. The effort is noticeable, but it is not a lot of work with good automation, planning and interview design.
oramit 3y ago
In the last year of my last job I took on recruiting and mentoring tasks as one of my goals for the year. Management encouraged it, I got great feedback all year, and in my annual retrospective I highlighted it as a big win. When the annual review came around though it got no mention and I was basically punished for taking on those tasks because my billable time went down a small amount, even though we all knew (and agreed) that would happen. That, and other reasons, are why I found a new job the next month. My experience is the same as yours OP. Hiring just isn't treated with any respect and your career will probably suffer if you take it on. Now that i've finished complaining... I think there's a good reason for this behavior. In the US, where most of our posters are from, you can fire people for any or no reason. It's true that you can put in more effort at the beginning of the hiring process to find better candidates but you won't really know if they are a good fit until they work there for a while. You can have great candidates on paper who don't work out in person, and terrible candidates on paper who are great on the job. This randomness to the hiring process means that people don't treat it as a real discipline. And if you do hire a dud, you just fire them. Is it really any wonder that most recruiting processes are so callous?
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > This randomness to the hiring process means that people don't treat it as a real discipline. And if you do hire a dud, you just fire them. Is it really any wonder that most recruiting processes are so callous? It's just the same in Europe with way higher standards on recruiting (i.e. anti-discrimination laws are actually enforced) and employee protection laws. Recruiting, accounting and IT are usually seen as a "cost center" by the remainder of the employees instead of being respected as vital contributors to the business, so it's inevitable that people eventually "check out".
varispeed 3y ago
You forgot about fair remuneration. Most employers think that they are doing potential employee a favour and the employees should kiss their feet just for reading the offer. I don't respond to job offers that don't include _minimum_ pay (not "up to") and I don't respond to low-ball offers. Fair remuneration should also include true equity in the business as otherwise it is exploitation, as at software business the profits are typically not linked to rewards for people creating those profits - it's all get creamed by shareholders. So if your company generates millions or billions and you only offer a salary? No thanks.

geraldhh 3y ago

your last paragraph resonated very well with me as i can't remember the last time i spoke to a recruiter that seemed to have a horse in the race.

sokoloff 3y ago

I think the last paragraph is blunted in companies where teams recruit/interview for their own team (as opposed to recruiting/interviewing for the company in general). In the former, if I do a good job, at least I get better colleagues on my team, making my daily life better and giving my team more chance to be seen as successful.

tayo42 3y ago

> is one of the lowest value-add tasks you can bring on, from a purely selfish / incentive structures perspective. At one place I worked, interviewing was one of the check marks you could participate in for promotions.

1920musicman 3y ago
But that's exactly what it is then: a check mark. I can interview dozens of candidates, and then add a total count to my self review. There is no incentive to do a good job (how would that even be evaluated?..).
- filoleg 3y ago
  > how would that even be evaluated? Depends on the company. At my current workplace, the candidate is given an option to provide feedback at the end (either through a form or an email), and all interviewers are also required to submit written notes on how everything went down. Given that a candidate at the onsite will get interviewed by 4-5 people, with each of them providing a very detailed set of notes, it would be fairly trivial to smell out a misbehaving interviewer, if one cared to do so. What actually happens at the end of the day with those notes and candidate feedback, that’s the part i am not sure about. Once they get submitted to the hiring committee (or HR), it is out of my hands. But just saying, they do have ways of evaluating it, just on a less precise scale and more on a “bad/good enough/amazing” scale. With only the “bad” outcome raising any eyebrows/having any meaningful effect, and with 99% of them getting the “good enough”/“amazing” ratings. And how often the signal for that “bad” rating gets caught is also not something I know much about. P.S. Your assessments and notes are all preserved in the centralized hub, so you (and some others) can always access them later as well. And, sometimes, you indeed have people checking them out for assessment or such. Especially during your first couple interviews, you have a person supervising you and taking notes in parallel as well, and then you discuss them and they give you improvement suggestions and such.
  - 1920musicman 3y ago
    I am sure what you are describing is being tracked at my company. The concern with misaligned incentives I have is that there is a vast gap between conducting a passable interview in terms of engaging with the candidate and actually investing yourself in the process. So it's not really about being a bad interviewer (as in rude, openly biased, etc) but about having the energy to do the best job you can - which all candidates deserve IMO.

drewcoo 3y ago

> treat candidates with respect > 95% of clowns out there you interview What's your company affiliation?

FredPret 3y ago
You can and should treat someone with respect, even if your expectation is that there's a 95% chance they will turn out to be a clown.
- foldr 3y ago
  IMO this way of looking at it is indicative of a lack of respect for candidates, even if communication is superficially respectful. If someone performs badly in an interview then by all means don't hire them, but it's both unkind and irrational to jump to the conclusion that they're a 'clown'. If someone is making such a harsh judgment about 95% of their applicants, on the basis of an interview process which we know to be highly imperfect, then I would not want to work for them.
michaelt 3y ago
He works for Clownr, the Uber of children's party entertainment.
- 1920musicman 3y ago
  I had a good laugh reading your comment and then found this: https://www.clownr.com/ https://www.clownr.com/
  - arcanemachiner 3y ago
    > Are You a Clown? > Say hello to you new best friend.
LargeTomato 3y ago
I worked at a rocket startup. 1/3 ex SpaceX. 1/3 ex Google/Facebook. I interviewed a guy and asked him, essentially, "find the biggest number in a 2D array". This guy spent half an hour struggling because he "wasn't sure how to look through the grid in a circle pattern". You'd be incredibly surprised who gets interviews.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

You'd think if professional sports could figure out how important this is we could too, but for some reason there's a tendency to give it lip service then put absolutely no effort into doing a good job. Scouting and screenings are done by people that companies treat like dirt, we incentivize them only for body count, interviews are done by low experience employees and employees who don't even like interviewing. We don't know how to identify and cultivate talent in this industry yet, it's clearly dysfunctional and deprioritized.

philwelch 3y ago
In professional sports you are selecting one of the few hundred or thousand best people in the world. Its not even remotely the same impact.
- tracerbulletx 3y ago
  Every successful athletic team makes player scouting and development a core function, not only the elite levels. In the US that means minor league baseball teams, university teams from volleyball and fencing, to football and basketball. Pro cycling teams that pay almost nothing and aren't competitive world wide.. It's not just the elite teams that make this top priority. They ALL know that the most driven talented players they can get at their level is what will make them win.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    Most of your examples are talent pipelines for the top leagues. Regardless I think you made my point for me at the end: > They ALL know that the most driven talented players they can get at their level is what will make them win. This is not how normal employment works. Sports are competitive by nature so the difference between a 60th percentile player and the best player is the difference between winning and losing. But for most businesses, the difference between the best frontend developer and the 60th percentile frontend developer is close to zero.
    - 3y ago

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

This is so true it hurts. If you get burnt once with hiring, it’s something you’ll never forget but could destroy the startup/small business in the process

realusername 3y ago

> There is absolutely no upside to doing a good job, and it takes a lot of time to do so. I've also learned this the hard way. I've conducted about a 100 interviews in 2 years and didn't get compensated any for it despite being one of the most critical part of the company. Conducting interviews is also very tiring and time consuming, I'm estimating that two interviews in a day and your day is gone. I also evaluate it 2x more tiring than coding personally. It wasn't a complete waste of time though, I got a lot of experience from that which will be very valuable in future management positions.

1920musicman 3y ago
I have the same experience. Interviews are very time consuming (prep 30 min, interview 1h, fill out the feedback form 30m-1h), and having several interviews each week means I spend ~1 day weekly on something that's not going to benefit me directly in any way (excluding the benefit of potentially working with good engineers I helped hiring). So unless the incentives change, I don't see this process improving in big tech.
- realusername 3y ago
  Yes exactly, the interview itself is a bit less than half of the work surprisingly and then you do need a real break after all of that very intense concentration anyways. 1 interview = roughly half a day gone, that's what I've experienced. And then it's indeed never valued inside the company, worse than that, it might be counted against you since you will achieve less in your team where all the evaluation will take place... I really don't understand why companies don't value engineers capable of conducting interviews because it's really not an easy task, you need much better than average interpersonal skills and much better than average tech knowledge as well.
  - 1920musicman 3y ago
    Agreed. I mostly conduct system design interviews which already have a smaller pool of interviewers at my company. This contribution has been included exactly zero times in the countless review cycles I went through.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

Almost every place I’ve worked (early at startups later at megacorps) there were never enough recruiting resources. So eventually I just got my own recruiter account on LinkedIn and started using my knowledge of the industry and state of hiring to make my own search queries and reached out directly. I had an incredible conversion rate - the senior person actually hiring saying “hey you look like you could fit in here” was very powerful. It was a hell of a lot of work, but I could fill seats faster than anyone around me with high quality people and my projects landed successfully. At a certain point I became too senior for that as my direct teams became smaller and more senior, and I’ve never been able to convince a single other manager to do it. Not a single person. I’ve since switched back to IC at a super senior level so am even further removed from direct recruiting, but I can see even more broadly. All I see now is engineering managers whining about recruiting, and I’ve still yet to see another manager take direct control of their recruiting. Why? The only thing I can guess is they don’t actually care about being successful at what they’re doing, they just care about successfully doing what they were hired to do, which doesn’t include recruiting.

plugin-baby 3y ago
100% with you, but it’s not always easy to get control of your own recruiting. I’ve also seen HR get upset when their involvement is not what they expected.
- ineptech 3y ago
  Agreed, which is insane! We'll spend untold zillions fine-tuning and A/B testing the process by which we get users, but when it comes to getting coworkers it's "Well HR says the applicants have to make an account to apply so I guess that's just the way it is".
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    It will be that way inevitably as an organization grows, usually it's an investor requirement to prevent outright nepotism hires or discrimination. No one cares too much for the first few dozen employees but anything larger usually will come with "ffs go and implement at least some basic hiring standards to reduce the legal risks".

ivan_gammel 3y ago

>It's a lot of work for the 95% of clowns out there you interview, and there's a push towards automated process, but it will hurt your business. If 20 candidates enter your funnel before you hire one in a screening-technical-offer flow, that’s maybe 5-6 hours per week spent on recruiting in 1 month. You can even send a few personalized rejections to worthy but unfit applicants, sending 80% of applications to trash. The effort is noticeable, but it is not a lot of work with good automation, planning and interview design.

oramit 3y ago

In the last year of my last job I took on recruiting and mentoring tasks as one of my goals for the year. Management encouraged it, I got great feedback all year, and in my annual retrospective I highlighted it as a big win. When the annual review came around though it got no mention and I was basically punished for taking on those tasks because my billable time went down a small amount, even though we all knew (and agreed) that would happen. That, and other reasons, are why I found a new job the next month. My experience is the same as yours OP. Hiring just isn't treated with any respect and your career will probably suffer if you take it on. Now that i've finished complaining... I think there's a good reason for this behavior. In the US, where most of our posters are from, you can fire people for any or no reason. It's true that you can put in more effort at the beginning of the hiring process to find better candidates but you won't really know if they are a good fit until they work there for a while. You can have great candidates on paper who don't work out in person, and terrible candidates on paper who are great on the job. This randomness to the hiring process means that people don't treat it as a real discipline. And if you do hire a dud, you just fire them. Is it really any wonder that most recruiting processes are so callous?

mschuster91 3y ago
> This randomness to the hiring process means that people don't treat it as a real discipline. And if you do hire a dud, you just fire them. Is it really any wonder that most recruiting processes are so callous? It's just the same in Europe with way higher standards on recruiting (i.e. anti-discrimination laws are actually enforced) and employee protection laws. Recruiting, accounting and IT are usually seen as a "cost center" by the remainder of the employees instead of being respected as vital contributors to the business, so it's inevitable that people eventually "check out".

varispeed 3y ago

You forgot about fair remuneration. Most employers think that they are doing potential employee a favour and the employees should kiss their feet just for reading the offer. I don't respond to job offers that don't include _minimum_ pay (not "up to") and I don't respond to low-ball offers. Fair remuneration should also include true equity in the business as otherwise it is exploitation, as at software business the profits are typically not linked to rewards for people creating those profits - it's all get creamed by shareholders. So if your company generates millions or billions and you only offer a salary? No thanks.