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How to hire a lot of talented people, very quickly
- lucian1900 14y agoNice benefits indeed.
- bflesch 14y agoI like this approach, it is very straightforward and allows for easy internal collaboration. Obviously, buckets visualize the amout of people in different stages of your hiring process very well. If I had to hire people, I'd try this instantly. Edit: I have to apologize. I overlooked that the names are made up, so the following statement is incorrect. Sorry Ryan! Sadly, I have to whine about some privacy issues: I don't approve of Ryan Carson's publishing the names of his applicants how it can be seen in the screenshot at [1]. I'm quite sure these are real names beloging to their applicants, and I wouldn't like to see my name published when I'm applying for a position at this company. On top of that, I would feel sad to see that my name had been greyed out but Person XY has advanced to the next stage. Perhaps it is better to anonymize the information as I suspect it was not Ryan's intention to publish these names. [1] http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4s36gOUJz1rneiz8.png http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4s36gOUJz1rneiz8.png
- commondream 14y agoAs someone with access to the Treehouse's real hiring board I can say that those aren't real names :)
- bflesch 14y agoOops, sorry for the mistake. Its time to get off the computer I suppose :) Thanks!
- pinko 14y agoHe says, "I’ve created a public example that you can view, copy and then edit." [1] and the names there match his screenshot. They also include ringers like "Jenny Craig" and "Billy Jean". How/why are you "quite sure these are real names"? If you're right, I agree with you, but it seems hard to believe. [1] https://trello.com/board/hiring-process/4fc4942316b650d22d09fb77 https://trello.com/board/hiring-process/4fc4942316b650d22d09...
- ryancarson 14y agoThose are just fake names ;)
- cheap 14y agoMoney, it grows on trees and its great for balling up and hurling toward people.
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- cridal 14y agoFirst of all, I'd like to congratulate Ryan Carson on the idea of 4-day work week. Hopefully this would start the ball rolling on the whole discussion of work/life balance here in the states. It is such a great concept and I'm sure will attract a lot of top talent. The only thing is, it needs validation. I hope the company does really well in the long run, and therefore puts 4-day work week on the table for others to follow. Wouldn't that be great...
- salimmadjd 14y agoI'm not sure how sustainable this 4day work week will be. Will it last the acquisition? Imagine buying a company that either makes your existing employee unhappy, make you lose the talent you just got, or forces you to convert the entire company into a 4 day week operation.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mey 14y agoTwo comments, you assume they intend to be acquired, and why optimize for something that late stage when you are trying to remain an competitive edge? (The edge in this case is a skillful happy workforce)
- ryancarson 14y agoThanks for the kind words :) We've been doing a 4-day week since 2007, so it's been five years and thankfully we've been successful.
- trustfundbaby 14y agoHi Ryan, I've never worked at a place that had a 4-day week and I'd love if you could one day do a blog post about it (forgive me if you you've already done this before). The things that changed, adjustments that needed to be made, how it has affected productivity. I would like to run a company like that someday, but it feels so scary to lose 8 hours of paid work a week.
- scottshea 14y agoAdditional step: Write a post like this and have it make the front page of Hacker News
- ryancarson 14y agoGuess that always helps :)
- scottshea 14y agoI have to admit it caught my interest and I am not even really looking at the moment
- ltcoleman 14y agoI'm very happy to have found your blog. I'm also happy to see a company focusing on what's important... gaining that elusive talent. I am currently just starting to use treehouse to train a group of new grads for the company I work at. I'm very impressed with the site. @Ryan : if I was in your region, I would so be applying for a job ;)
- ryancarson 14y agoThank you! :) We're working really hard to improve the service as fast as we can.
- djb_hackernews 14y agoInteresting they don't hire any technical talent it seems, or am I missing something? Product Marketing Sales Teaching Video If that's the case (which I'm now doubting considering what they teach) I can only see the bottle neck being onboarding. It can take a lot of effort and time to get one developer up to speed, never mind dozens of them in a matter of months.
- jyu 14y agoProduct encompasses the overall engineering / design talent.
- commondream 14y agoThat's correct - product for us includes development, design, and support.
- djb_hackernews 14y agoInteresting. Hope that leads to a new blog post, how to bring all of these talented engineers up to speed at the same time while keeping the product on track.
- heliodor 14y agoI don't think the 4-day week makes sense. Once everyone switches to 4 days, what then? 3 days? I think limited hours per day makes more sense. People can be laser focused for 5 or 6 hours per day if you give them a good work environment. Once you move to the usual 9 or 10 hours per day, personal life gets in the way and people goof off, achieving as much productivity as in the focused 5 hours.
- ryancarson 14y agoWe don't work a 9-10 hour day. I've written up the whole thing here if you're curious: http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/21708810513/4-day-week http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/21708810513/4-day-week
- heliodor 14y agoWell, your blog post says 9am-6pm, which is 9 hours, lunch included. But I wouldn't expect anything less if you're going to do 4 days per week. I'd much rather work five days a week, 11am-5pm or 12pm-6pm, without a lunch break. Can you really put off your personal life every day from 9-6? I think the two biggest interruptions to a programmer's concentration are lunch (or other food) and meetings. Basically, anything that's on the clock. If you want to reduce the total hours per week, doesn't it make more sense financially to work fewer hours per day but for five days and be able to pick up your kids at an earlier time each day? I would think that would be the case for most family folk. Don't your kids get off school or child care at somewhere around 3pm? Who takes care of them between 3pm and 6pm and how much does it cost you? Finally, what a family person wants differs from what a single 20-something year old wants. 9am works great for a family man. 9am does not work fine for a 20-something year old, but in the majority of companies the family man is the boss and dictates the 9am start time.
- ryancarson 14y agoMy wife is a full-time Mother and she picks up our kids from school. It's interesting how you think a 20-year old can't fit into the world's normal working hours. I managed just fine working normal hours when I was in my 20s.
- sebslomski 14y agoI would prefer to have to be 5 days a week in the office, but only have to work for 4 days. One day should be dedicated for your own projects. Whatever you want, but, in the office.
- ryancarson 14y agoThat's no good for people who have interests outside of the office. For example, I have two young boys and I want to spend my time with them on a Friday, not in the office.
- sebslomski 14y agoWell, it should't be a day off, you should do something that has to do in general with what you do at work if possible. I haven't though about it that much, it was just an idea. If you get the day off, most people would probably just do what they want and "waste" the day (which means not being productive).
- Trezoid 14y agoThis whole idea of being productive every single day is why burnout happens. Using that extra day to not be productive (say, get the shopping done while the shops are quite and everything is open) means you can spend the weekend relaxing, so you're way more productive come Monday.
- ricardobeat 14y agoBeen there. Most people are not motivated enough to do something like that, and it ends up feeling like a chore. In that case it's more productive to not be at the office. It makes some kind of sense: boxing the time for creativity ends up killing it.
- Aqua_Geek 14y ago> boxing the time for creativity ends up killing it. John Cleese argues the opposite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg From the rest of your comment, it seems to me that the feeling that it's a chore might be more the reason it kills creativity - not the setting aside time in and of itself. If you don't look forward to that time (not saying that's a bad thing, one way or the other), you probably won't get much out of it.
- elmuchoprez 14y agoLet me start by saying that I don't know anything about Treehouse or their profitability... but based on that benefit list, they're either REALLY profitable or they've got a bunch of upfront investor money to burn through. Given how young they are and that their investor list includes the likes of Kevin Rose and Reid Hoffman, I'm going to go with the latter. I operate a small ecommerce company with about 15 employees that include everything from developers to warehouse workers. There's no way I could sustain such benefit list and I know none of my competitors could either. There's just not a high enough margin (and we're in a high margin business). The answer might be that a company whose product is "knowledge work" might be in a different boat, but it really makes me wonder if you can sustain that kind those kinds of benefits when you're standing on your own two feet.
- ryancarson 14y agoWe were profitable before we raised any money. Now that we've raised $5m, we can increase our burn to outpace our revenue to speed up customer acquisition and product development.
- elmuchoprez 14y agoWell then congrats to you sir. When a company can manage that kind of profit, it's nice to see them using those resources to invest in serious talent for the long haul.
- ryancarson 14y agoGracias
- flyosity 14y agoBack in November, Ryan Carson revealed that they were earning ~$150,000 in revenue per month and growing rapidly. Venture capital money + revenue money = lots of money to pay benefits. http://mixergy.com/treehouse-ryan-carson-interview/ http://mixergy.com/treehouse-ryan-carson-interview/
- cft 14y agoI am running a bootstrapped start-up (by choice). We pay salaries to 5 people (three MIT EECS grads, one Berkeley CS). I think these people are very good. From my prospective, if you operate without VC money, I.e. from the actual revenues that you get, what's described in the post is irrational exuberance. It's a sign of a VC investment bubble. We absolutely could NOT work 4 days a week and remain competitive ( we could not even run the existing service that way, with user all complaints, attack threats, vendor interactions, hardware failures).
- commondream 14y agoI'm a member of the product team at Treehouse, and was employee #3. We don't go around talking about the 4 day work week because it's something that we think is a great gimmick that we were fortunate enough to be able to pull off because we hit the VC lottery. It's something at the core of who we are as a company and something we've seen help us compete - not only in hiring but also in productivity. We see a huge benefit in rest, fresh thinking, and a healthy balance between our work and the rest of our lives. The 4 day work week builds that into who we are. It's not the only way to achieve those goals, but one of the primary ways we pull it off. We've been working the 4-day work week far longer than we've had VC money. Our first investment came in the fall of 2011, long after we existed as a company, and we were profitable prior to raising VC.
- ericson578 14y agoI think it's great that you guys are trying out new ways to work. I'm an entrepreneur myself, and while I don't have employees yet I'm open to new business models. I wish more companies, funded or not, would be more daring.
- tsuraan 14y agoSo how do you address the points made in the GP post? Specifically, attacks, hardware failures, other issues that immediately impact customers? I assume that you don't wait until monday to address a failure that occurs thursday night, right?
- benjaminwootton 14y agoIt's great that they are having success with the 4 day work week. However, one thing that would still appeal to me more though as a developer would be the ability to work remotely. It's surprising even to me that I'd rather do 20% more work for the same money if it's at home! I also suspect this would make it easy to 'hire talented people, very quickly' as it opens up the whole world to you in terms of candidates. What are your thoughts on this Ryan?
- ryancarson 14y agoA lot of our Product and Marketing Team Members work remotely. The only folks required to be at our Orlando office are the Video Pros and Teachers.
- skeletonjelly 14y agoHow often are they required to travel to your head offices for face to face meetings?
- ryancarson 14y agoWe have a huge company-wide meeting for a week, every quarter.
- zerop 14y agoSpend VC money like this, work 4 days a week and then finally go down. !! :(
- michaelpinto 14y agoReading this post makes me fear for a bubble -- when I read stuff like this it brings me back to 2000 all over again: "401(k) contribution matching, 100% matching up to 6% of your salary + Full coverage for medical, dental, and vision". I'll grant you that this isn't quite on the level of "your own private sushi chef" but it makes me uncomfortable that a company that's a startup would do this. I realize that good talent is hard to find, but this scares me...
- ryancarson 14y agoWhat's more expensive? 1) Paying $20k-$50k to a recruiter, per person 2) Taking good care of your team so you get tons of applications for every job opening, from very talented people Keep in mind that there's also a huge cost to attrition. Every person that leaves your company, because the culture is so-so, costs you a huge amount in time and cash resources to replace
- WildUtah 14y ago"401(k) contribution matching, 100% matching up to 6% of your salary + Full coverage for medical, dental, and vision" Those are normal benefits in corporate America. The 6% 401k match level is an IRS safe-harbor threshold most large employers try to meet each year. Even the vacation time (18 days) is modest for your European competition. I don't see where any of that is getting bubbly.
- clevep 14y ago> we’re about to hit 40 people at Treehouse and we’ll be at 60 in three more months. There was only seven of us 12 months ago, so we’ve grown very fast. For a small company that's growing this quickly, it's probably going to take more than 12 months to know for sure if a hire is good or not. Declaring them as good does not make them so. I'd be interested to see a follow up post 12 months from now giving an update on retention rates and any hiring process updates they've subsequently made.
- ryancarson 14y agoTreehouse is my fourth company and I've been running a 4-day week with all my teams since 2007. I have a pretty good sense, based on experience, whether someone is a good hire or not. You often know within 30 days.
- clevep 14y agoMajor props on pulling off the 4-day week. I hope it catches on. My criticism was limited to your early declaration of victory on your hiring binge. The bottom line is that you can't know if someone is going to end up ROI positive until they actually get there. After 30 days you can tell if someone is a good dude and they can get stuff done, but you can't tell if some other company will come along in 2 months and poach him. Shit happens. By building a strong culture you are taking good steps to minimize the chances of losing people, but you won't really know if you've succeeded with these hires until they are a net positive.
- ryancarson 14y agoYou shouldn't hire someone unless they are going to add value to the business. If you're not sure about that then you shouldn't be giving them a job.
- clevep 14y agoBut hiring comes at a cost. Recruiting, on boarding, and getting new employees up to speed all cost money and resources. My only point is employees need to stay long enough to recoup those losses.
- michaelhoney 14y agoWe've been doing four-day weeks since 2008, with two offices in Australia and remote team-members in Berlin and the Phillipines. Apart from the obvious 50% more weekend for 20% less work, and the flexibility to work from anywhere, doing it this way has a less-tangible benefit: it requires and inculcates discipline and responsibility. Your attention is like a gas: it'll diffuse to fill the space available. Timeboxing your energy provides more work potential -- and your downtime is more productive too. It's also a great talking point with clients. The 4DWW is gaining traction in the wider world: I was interviewed this week on dot-au national television to talk about it.
- rdl 14y agoAlso, move to a "developing" startup market, like Portland, where a Treehouse is one of the top 5-10 startup employers, vs. SF or Silicon Valley, where you are competing with a lot more startups, and where the Giants (FB, Google, Palantir, ...) are stronger competition than the giants in Portland. (and living on 50-60k in Portland is fine even if you have kids; it is poverty unless you're either long established (own a home from the 1990s, or cheap rent), or alone. This opens up a lot more potential hires for non engineering roles)
- jasonlotito 14y agoEveryone is competing with Silicon Valley for talent, regardless of where you are.
- rdl 14y agoTrue for the high end (where it's worth relocating), but not for any of the jobs I've seen posted on treehouse's site.
- checkorbored 14y agoHow does the 'Project Trial' work for people who have full-time jobs already? I am sure it is great for evaluating those who are able to commit to such a thing, but aren't you leaving potentially valuable team members unable to pass muster due to time (rather than lack of fit) reasons?