10 ms·

How to Hire

240 points by andygcook 13y ago

cjbarber 13y ago
Recruiting is a very hot industry right now, but be warned - I've talked to companies that are hiring fast, and they get 20+ offers a day from recruiting startups trying to offer their services. Recruiting is needed because there is a signal vs noise for developers. But there is also a signal vs noise for recruiters - it's a very hard industry to crack into. (AngelList is one company doing a great job here - talking to companies, it seems like AngelList talent is a fantastic resource - also Naval has talked multiple times about hiring/recruiting being a far bigger market than crowd-investing.) Regarding the personal network hiring tool: I actually started working on this recently - it looks at Facebook connections currently, so that the person who is incentivized to be hiring can just allow an employee to Auth their FB profile, and then go and browse away. A friend of mine is working on 'Tinder for Startup Jobs' - he's very close to done (iOS app, meteor.js web app is also almost ready), so if you would like to be swiping companies left and right and want to know when he pushes that and when I push this hiring tool, I whipped up a Google Form (as is all the rage these days). [1] [1]: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xijiSr7QsQ0d-fcg_fXm9dLgOXebPhLu9mmIP7D2Nbc/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xijiSr7QsQ0d-fcg_fXm9dLgOXe...
pdfcollect 13y ago
And why does Stripe need top developers? To make a REST API for payments? What am I missing?
- natebrennand 13y ago
  I suspect it's to do with the 100% uptime they should be aiming for. They might have some other interesting stuff they're working on as well.
- grinich 13y ago
  You are missing an understanding of the complexities of the credit card payments industry.
- beat 13y ago
  Payments is an extremely hard problem. Try picking up a NACHA rulebook. Makes a great doorstop, it's the size of an old-school phone book. Don't know what NACHA is? Consider the possibility that you don't actually understand the problem space, then.
- nswanberg 13y ago
  Nope, you nailed it. There is nothing in payments that requires more dev work than could fit in an Excel function. Patrick admitted as much with this screenshot of the complete Stripe codebase earlier this week: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/381779690567913472 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/381779690567913472 That said, the pingpong tables aren't going to play themselves...
tom_b 13y ago
“Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.) Scary statement for me to read. I'm getting older and worry that the above thinking will eventually cut off cool and even just new opportunities for me. Also hard to audition for longer periods as suggested, but I'm definitely in favor of building a strong professional network and having a good portfolio of work.
- bcrescimanno 13y ago
  Ageism should scare you--and it should scare the author of this post. The inevitable forward progress of time means that literally every, single one of us will be on the wrong end of this equation at some point. The (possible) saving grace is that a lot of people who came up in the 2000s tech scene are now on the "other side of 30" and becoming quite "experienced" themselves. Hopefully, that group's attitude will change these biases. Too often though, you can read between the lines and discover what they're really talking about is: "You can't convince experienced people to take less money to work obscene hours--especially when their perception is likely that much of their job will cleaning up for all the 'inexperienced' folks you hired." The idea that "great companies are not usually created by experienced people" strikes me as exceptionally hyperbolic and based more on the publicity of Wall Street Darlings than any evidence that highly experienced people can't (or don't) build something great. [edit: Just thought that I'd add that I agree with just about every other point made in this post and focusing on one issue generally isn't constructive so I apologize for going down the rant hole without first acknowledging that the post, overall, is quite spot on.]
  - beat 13y ago
    On the flip side, as an old friend once said, "Do you have ten years of experience, or one year of experience ten times?" Highly experienced people can be priceless because they have dealt with similar situations before (and it's not the technology, it's the situations). But if they didn't learn from their experiences, it doesn't help. And imho a majority of the old hands are still doing things wrong - sometimes due to management interference, sometimes due to ignorance, but mostly due to simply not making the effort to do better. One of my own interviewing mantras is, "I don't care so much what you know how to do, as how you deal with what you don't know how to do." But honestly, this mantra taken to its logical extreme massively favors raw intelligence and flexibility over experience. That's not always a Good Thing.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
CraigJPerry 13y ago
I'd love if more companies adopted auditioning over the traditional interview process. It was counter intuitive to me at first but it's potentially a cheaper way to hire. There's less downtime for the hiring team - everyone can more or less continue what they're working on. It's a better quality of interview too - candidates have a more realistic platform to show their worth.
- mkramlich 13y ago
  "touchable" portfolios, a public interaction trail, and realistic paid short audition contracts are a killer combo and I hope the future for software development hiring. I'm doing my part to promote it.
- Scorponok 13y ago
  For candidates who already have jobs, how would "auditioning" work? Is it assumed that they'd take time off from their current job to do it?
  - mkramlich 13y ago
    An audition can be a small paid contract that you can work on in your otherwise free time hours, here and there, on your own premises, then just do whatever interaction or delivery is necessary to show results and demonstrate value. And you get paid for it. It doesn't have to be a MF/office-day/on-site thing. The goal is just to test out two-way fit under as realistic of circumstances as possible, testing for the things you care about most, and, really, have it be reciprocal: the applicant/candidate gets paid. The details are choosable by both parties and should be mutually agreeable. Sprinkle to taste. And you can iterate.
- anmalhot 13y ago
  Auditioning sounds great, atleast from a college graduate's perspective. Make the new graduates work on problems. A percentage of new generation of coders end up learning that whiteboard tests work perfectly fine and are the de facto standard.
- mason55 13y ago
tptacek 13y ago
So much interesting stuff here. For the past couple years, this has been most of my (non-billable) role at Matasano, and we've gotten steadily better at this stuff. So, my thoughts: ›››››› Spend more time ›››››› Have a mission ›››››› Always be recruiting These three are of a kind for me. I recommend that you think about hiring the way Patrick McKenzie things about conversion optimization: as a form of marketing that is amenable to engineering. In particular: start tracking it as soon as you possibly can, so you'll have data to pull trends out of. Every effective hiring organization I've talked to has a process for this. "Have a mission" sounds fuzzy but I don't think that it is. What we've learned is to think a lot about what's good for the candidate about the roles we hire for. We've gotten good enough at this that people on our team can write snappy job descriptions for us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640441 --- Sean's a good writer, which helps, but there's also a notion across the team of what we think is great about the work. Having this "through line" for all your recruiting conversations makes it easier not just to sell the job to candidates but also, like any serious sales effort, to qualify prospects. Being serious about qualifying also gives you another piece of data to track: how well your qualifiers predict how far people get into the funnel. That's been helpful for us too. ›››››› Don't hire ›››››› Get your hands dirty This times 1000; I think this is the most important piece of advice he has. Jason Fried has been talking about this for years with "The Importance of Hiring Late"; the 37signals motto was "don't hire until you've done the job yourself". ›››››› Focus on the right way to source candidates I agree in general with the idea here. I think in particular that "blind" job ads of any sort do poorly. Every venue for ads that has significant visibility is both oversold and also low signal/noise ratio. We don't take job ads seriously anymore. There's a lot to think about w/r/t poaching employees, particularly from peers. It's important to remember that the ethics of poaching from another company have to be weighed against the best interests of candidates; refusing to talk to someone because they work for a friend's company is probably a fraught decision. On the other hand, remember that you're likely to be at a different company in 2 years, and your long-term relationships with people are important; I wouldn't use inside information I have from peers to poach employees. I wouldn't work with a recruiter. They also irritate candidates and set up weird incentives. ›››››› Don't compromise ›››››› Look for red flags This is some of the oldest hiring advice in the industry, for a reason. Be careful with the "default-to-no" posture if your hiring signals come from employee-driven interviews. Your whole team is rarely on the same exact page about what you're hiring for. I take specific issue with the "red flag" of people being title-conscious, because there are good reasons some people think about titles: they are (sensibly) concerned about their own career trajectory. The absolute cheapest benefit you can offer an employee is their title, and if they have a rational reason for wanting a better title, why on earth would you refuse to give up some title to get a good candidate on board? ›››››› Have a set of cultural values you hire for This scares me because I think people don't have a good idea of what a "cultural value" really is, or have aspirational cultural values, like "we'll work as hard as it takes to make our milestones!". You discover real cultural values bottom-up, by observing what is good and effective about your team. You don't have the value until you've established it in your existing team. It's obviously important that you build your team out of people who will work well with your team. But it's equally important not to cast too small a net. Among other reasons: it can make you especially susceptible to drama, in a monocultural kind of way. ›››››› Hire people you like Don't try to do this. You will be surprised by what you end up liking about people who didn't seem like an immediate "hang out on weekends" fit with your social culture. When you hire, try to make sure you're hiring on objectively important criteria. Don't kid yourself about how much it matters that a candidate wants to go bar hopping with you after work. ›››››› Fire fast This is so hard to do. If you haven't actually run a "fire-fast" culture at size yet, I recommend you not assume you'll have this capability. Hire as if it's the life-or-death decision it probably is. ›››››› Put a little bit of rigor around the hiring process. Put a lot of rigor around the hiring process. We've steadily standardized every part of our recruiting process and to date we've never looked back at something we standardized or measured and said "you know, this wasn't worth the effort or the cost in flexibility". We have a funnel with specific objectives at each stage of the funnel. For instance, in 2013, I think it's impossible to interview with us without knowing what our whole hiring process is, and without having the phone number of a company principal to call with questions. It is remarkable how often we hear how much better our process is than the typical company's process, because the things that make us outwardly easier to talk to are so easy. And yet, until a couple years ago, we weren't doing them either. ›››››› Have people audition for roles instead of interviewing for them. There's nothing I can say about this that hasn't already been said a million times, but I'll make the simplest point against it that I can: the best candidates generally aren't available to "audition" for you, because they're already working full time jobs.
Michael_Murray 13y ago
Great thoughts in this one, but missing what I think is the biggest key to hiring correctly in the startups I've been part of is what Paul DePodesta said in Moneyball - ""What gets me really excited about a guy is when he has warts... and the warts just don't matter." I've always thought that hiring in a startup is really like what the A's had to do in Moneyball - you don't have the advantages in terms of money, facilities, and even equity value of some of your much better funded competition for talent. In that situation, you have really only three levers to pull - 1) give up more than you want (which is what I've seen too many people do); 2) sell the benefits of the startup life and your mission; and 3) find talent that can perform at a similar level that's undervalued. The place that I've seen startup hiring really add value is when someone can be incredibly effective at #2 (which the author talks about) and they can develop a process that effectively hires for #3. I've built my last couple of companies in the information security space and #3 is especially important, because there's a significant premium paid for high-value talent in our space. So, finding talent who can perform at an extremely high level whose "warts" don't matter has been a life-or-death matter for creating a company that can compete with those in the space that have more money (either through funding or scale).
- AlwaysBCoding 13y ago
  This is great insight. Really like the moneyball quote.
- lawnchair_larry 13y ago
  I disagree. InfoSec has these companies who hire #3, thinking they can underpay, and it's given the whole industry a bad name because of the shoddy work and dubious claims they make. They go in and play pass the hash, charge a lot, and the company is really no better off. No offense, but do you think the fact that you have made multiple attempts and not yet created a company that has become a prominent name in the industry means that your approach may not be working?
  - Michael_Murray 13y ago
    I entirely agree on the large number of companies who do crappy work in the infosec industry... there's a lot of them, especially in the penetration testing realm. We're not one of them. Nor were any of my previous teams whether they were at my companies or at companies I worked for (whose names you definitely know). "Prominent name" is a marketing thing as much as anything... I'd be willing to put the accomplishments of our teams up against most. Hitting $10M in revenue in under 3 years building a security firm with no investment and no debt isn't something I'm going to feel too bad about, even if we don't spend a lot of time making a big deal about that. You're making the classic mistake of thinking that a company that makes a lot of noise is the same as a company that does great work.... those venn diagrams sometimes overlap. And sometimes they don't.
Michael_Murray 13y ago
Just re-read and saw this: ".... if I were going to jump into....recruiting startups, I would try to make it look as much like personal network hiring as possible..." Funny about that: I started exactly that with a friend at a Startup Weekend a while ago... we didn't go anywhere with it: http://www.findexpert.co/ http://www.findexpert.co/ We also found that these guys did the same thing: https://ooomf.com/ https://ooomf.com/
ohazi 13y ago
> Whenever possible (and it’s almost always possible), have someone do a day or two of work with you before you hire her; you can do this at night or on the weekends. No. Absolutely not. If a candidate really is as good as you think he/she is, they already likely has a full time job that they're perfectly happy with (as you already well know): > Often, to get great people, you have to poach. They’re never looking for jobs, so don’t limit your recruiting to people that are looking for jobs. They might have other compelling offers, and they'll certainly have personal projects, hobbies, and people that are more worthy of their time than this insulting little game. The developers who know what they're worth won't put up with this. Why are you trying to hire the ones who will? Hire fast / fire fast is fine, but seeing a founder do this is a big red flag for me. It screams indecisiveness, lack of confidence, and mediocrity. Does he try to pull this stunt with everyone he hires? What am I supposed to think of the rest of the team? Can I get behind someone whose hiring process is so driven by fear that he's willing to miss out on the best candidates? This tactic might help you hire a decent candidate over a mediocre or a terrible one, but you'll be missing out on (or even creating ill will toward) the great candidates. It's already hard enough to get them on board -- why would you make this harder on yourself?
- johnrob 13y ago
  The co-working trial is a two way street. Wouldn't a good developer want to make sure the new co-workers are also good?
  - ohazi 13y ago
    Hiring has always been a two way street, but in technology the scales are usually tipped against the hiring company. It's simply a numbers game -- there are far more mediocre and poor developers than good ones, and in the current environment, the good ones can basically get hired to work wherever they want. The co-working trial is an attempt to make the scale more favorable for the company. I can understand the desire for this, but in the current environment, it's almost guaranteed to backfire, as the best developers simply won't put up with it. No amount of wishful thinking on the part of the company is going to change this.
RougeFemme 13y ago
Overall, I thought this was a great post, but. . .I've always been kind of hesitant about the "hire someone you'd want to hang out with on Sunday" bit. Well, not when I first heard it. . .but over the years, I've come to believe that so many people hire or want to hire people just like them that it weeds out a lot of otherwise qualified people. Yes, I know you want people who share your company's cultural values. . .and that in a small group it's important that people like each other or least don't dislike each other. I guess it depends on how tightly you draw your box. . .and how "boxy" your box is. . .and the alignment between your comapany's values and your personal values.
nawitus 13y ago
Yet another article on hiring without empirical data. And as everyone knows, "gut feeling" doesn't actually turn out to be correct that often in recruiting (otherwise we would have solved the problem already).
- j_baker 13y ago
  Do you have any empirical data to back your point up? Or are you basing your thoughts about gut feelings on gut feelings?
  - nawitus 13y ago
    You don't need specific empirical data to back up the point of saying that claims without empirical data are not reliable enough. We have the scientific revolution to back that point up.
    - j_baker 13y ago
      I think it's worth noting the irony in that you seem to believe in solving everything rationally except for the value of rationality. One thing that scientific research has elucidated is that gut feelings aren't useless, and in fact can be very useful in evaluating people. The thing is that we take in so much data via our senses and the conscious mind is only capable of handling a very small amount of those signals. The unconscious mind picks up on these things and surfaces them as intuitions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_(psychology)#Studies_and_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_(psychology)#Studies...
RK 13y ago
Don’t limit your search to candidates in your area. This is especially true if you’re in the bay area; lots of people want to move here. At first I thought I misread this paragraph, because I'm so used to people advocating remote hires at this point. I was expecting it to say "Don’t limit your search...lots of people don't want to move here."
- badman_ting 13y ago
  No, the author explicitly recommends against remote work. It's with a caveat of "early on", but in most places that will harden into a general unwritten "no remote workers" policy, as the organization grows and people are afraid to try something different than what has worked so far. This post is pretty heavy on the "company culture" stuff -- more or less, the idea that you should want to go drinking with your co-workers. People who believe in this don't tend to believe in remote work. I should mention I completely disagree with all this, but I am biased.
rhc2104 13y ago
Is Sam saying that investors recommend that a first engineer gets 1.5% (and that he recommends 3%), or that he recommends 1.5%?
yannisp 13y ago
"The absolute cheapest benefit you can offer an employee is their title, and if they have a rational reason for wanting a better title, why on earth would you refuse to give up some title to get a good candidate on board?" If your role doesn't match your title, you may be in big trouble when/if your company gets acquired. Also it might seem like the cheapest in one sense but as the company grows you'll find yourself in an awkward situation when a manager makes more than a VP you just hired. It's a sensitive subject that should be approached more carefully than you'd expect.
megablast 13y ago
> Whenever possible (and it’s almost always possible), have someone do a day or two of work with you before you hire her; you can do this at night or on the weekends. Fuck off.
darrellsilver 13y ago
This maps extraordinarily closely with what we've seen at Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/ http://www.thinkful.com/) with both our hiring as a team and with the students we've helped get hired. Our biggest breakthrough actually came last month when we started simply hiring our students. Three of our last five hires have come from people taking one of our classes. It's a phenomenal way to get the voice of the user into our user experience, and each has proven a great cultural fit. We're not sure it'll work for every position, but perhaps when Thinkful starts offering CTO-classes!
cyplo 13y ago
Hi ! I agree on that investing time and just speaking with people is a right thing to do. And I cannot stress enough the need for real-life exercises during the interview and the need for just working with the people to be able to judge their abilities. I was so annoyed by 'traditional' recruitment that I wrote this post : http://blog.cyplo.net/2011/07/24/how-to-hire-people/ http://blog.cyplo.net/2011/07/24/how-to-hire-people/ ;)
velik_m 13y ago
I disagree with some of it agree on some of it, but i strongly disagree with section on cultural values. First of: "Spend a lot of time figuring out what you want your cultural values to be (there are some good examples on the Internet)." Do spend time figuring out what your cultural values are, but don't look for them on the Internet, or to put it another way: don't have cultural values for the sake of having cultural values. "Treat your values as articles of faith" - also don't do this. Don't take anything as article of faith, you should have a reason for each value. If you can't put a reason on value, how much value does it really have?
zeinology 13y ago
Using "she" when talking about developers to be politically correct is really getting old.
taude 13y ago
Can startups stop thinking that giving me some meager equity of a company that would be lucky to have a 10 million exit is worth paying me some -XYZ% of my market value? Especially when there's so many companies fishing in the limited talent sea? It might also be a Boston thing, but I've seen some companies in the startup scene here trying to offer like 60K for senior-level Python developers and such....
kfk 13y ago
People that have a great job and have done great projects will ask you for more and can easily leave you if they get bored. I think a great recruiter is someone that gives a chance to people that show other signs of "success" besides pure measurable performance. Especially, I think you are better off sometimes hiring people willing to learn and adapt. Of course, it is easy hiring the 1% when they are already in the 1%. Much more difficult, and much more valuable, is hiring them when they are in the average bucket or they are not even there yet (i.e. people looking to move into programming).

240 points by andygcook 13y ago

Recruiting is a very hot industry right now, but be warned - I've talked to companies that are hiring fast, and they get 20+ offers a day from recruiting startups trying to offer their services. Recruiting is needed because there is a signal vs noise for developers. But there is also a signal vs noise for recruiters - it's a very hard industry to crack into. (AngelList is one company doing a great job here - talking to companies, it seems like AngelList talent is a fantastic resource - also Naval has talked multiple times about hiring/recruiting being a far bigger market than crowd-investing.) Regarding the personal network hiring tool: I actually started working on this recently - it looks at Facebook connections currently, so that the person who is incentivized to be hiring can just allow an employee to Auth their FB profile, and then go and browse away. A friend of mine is working on 'Tinder for Startup Jobs' - he's very close to done (iOS app, meteor.js web app is also almost ready), so if you would like to be swiping companies left and right and want to know when he pushes that and when I push this hiring tool, I whipped up a Google Form (as is all the rage these days). [1] [1]: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xijiSr7QsQ0d-fcg_fXm9dLgOXebPhLu9mmIP7D2Nbc/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xijiSr7QsQ0d-fcg_fXm9dLgOXe...

pdfcollect 13y ago

And why does Stripe need top developers? To make a REST API for payments? What am I missing?

natebrennand 13y ago
I suspect it's to do with the 100% uptime they should be aiming for. They might have some other interesting stuff they're working on as well.
grinich 13y ago
You are missing an understanding of the complexities of the credit card payments industry.
beat 13y ago
Payments is an extremely hard problem. Try picking up a NACHA rulebook. Makes a great doorstop, it's the size of an old-school phone book. Don't know what NACHA is? Consider the possibility that you don't actually understand the problem space, then.
nswanberg 13y ago
Nope, you nailed it. There is nothing in payments that requires more dev work than could fit in an Excel function. Patrick admitted as much with this screenshot of the complete Stripe codebase earlier this week: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/381779690567913472 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/381779690567913472 That said, the pingpong tables aren't going to play themselves...

tom_b 13y ago

“Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.) Scary statement for me to read. I'm getting older and worry that the above thinking will eventually cut off cool and even just new opportunities for me. Also hard to audition for longer periods as suggested, but I'm definitely in favor of building a strong professional network and having a good portfolio of work.

bcrescimanno 13y ago
Ageism should scare you--and it should scare the author of this post. The inevitable forward progress of time means that literally every, single one of us will be on the wrong end of this equation at some point. The (possible) saving grace is that a lot of people who came up in the 2000s tech scene are now on the "other side of 30" and becoming quite "experienced" themselves. Hopefully, that group's attitude will change these biases. Too often though, you can read between the lines and discover what they're really talking about is: "You can't convince experienced people to take less money to work obscene hours--especially when their perception is likely that much of their job will cleaning up for all the 'inexperienced' folks you hired." The idea that "great companies are not usually created by experienced people" strikes me as exceptionally hyperbolic and based more on the publicity of Wall Street Darlings than any evidence that highly experienced people can't (or don't) build something great. [edit: Just thought that I'd add that I agree with just about every other point made in this post and focusing on one issue generally isn't constructive so I apologize for going down the rant hole without first acknowledging that the post, overall, is quite spot on.]
- beat 13y ago
  On the flip side, as an old friend once said, "Do you have ten years of experience, or one year of experience ten times?" Highly experienced people can be priceless because they have dealt with similar situations before (and it's not the technology, it's the situations). But if they didn't learn from their experiences, it doesn't help. And imho a majority of the old hands are still doing things wrong - sometimes due to management interference, sometimes due to ignorance, but mostly due to simply not making the effort to do better. One of my own interviewing mantras is, "I don't care so much what you know how to do, as how you deal with what you don't know how to do." But honestly, this mantra taken to its logical extreme massively favors raw intelligence and flexibility over experience. That's not always a Good Thing.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

CraigJPerry 13y ago

I'd love if more companies adopted auditioning over the traditional interview process. It was counter intuitive to me at first but it's potentially a cheaper way to hire. There's less downtime for the hiring team - everyone can more or less continue what they're working on. It's a better quality of interview too - candidates have a more realistic platform to show their worth.

mkramlich 13y ago
"touchable" portfolios, a public interaction trail, and realistic paid short audition contracts are a killer combo and I hope the future for software development hiring. I'm doing my part to promote it.
Scorponok 13y ago
For candidates who already have jobs, how would "auditioning" work? Is it assumed that they'd take time off from their current job to do it?
- mkramlich 13y ago
  An audition can be a small paid contract that you can work on in your otherwise free time hours, here and there, on your own premises, then just do whatever interaction or delivery is necessary to show results and demonstrate value. And you get paid for it. It doesn't have to be a MF/office-day/on-site thing. The goal is just to test out two-way fit under as realistic of circumstances as possible, testing for the things you care about most, and, really, have it be reciprocal: the applicant/candidate gets paid. The details are choosable by both parties and should be mutually agreeable. Sprinkle to taste. And you can iterate.
anmalhot 13y ago
Auditioning sounds great, atleast from a college graduate's perspective. Make the new graduates work on problems. A percentage of new generation of coders end up learning that whiteboard tests work perfectly fine and are the de facto standard.
mason55 13y ago

tptacek 13y ago

So much interesting stuff here. For the past couple years, this has been most of my (non-billable) role at Matasano, and we've gotten steadily better at this stuff. So, my thoughts: ›››››› Spend more time ›››››› Have a mission ›››››› Always be recruiting These three are of a kind for me. I recommend that you think about hiring the way Patrick McKenzie things about conversion optimization: as a form of marketing that is amenable to engineering. In particular: start tracking it as soon as you possibly can, so you'll have data to pull trends out of. Every effective hiring organization I've talked to has a process for this. "Have a mission" sounds fuzzy but I don't think that it is. What we've learned is to think a lot about what's good for the candidate about the roles we hire for. We've gotten good enough at this that people on our team can write snappy job descriptions for us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640441 --- Sean's a good writer, which helps, but there's also a notion across the team of what we think is great about the work. Having this "through line" for all your recruiting conversations makes it easier not just to sell the job to candidates but also, like any serious sales effort, to qualify prospects. Being serious about qualifying also gives you another piece of data to track: how well your qualifiers predict how far people get into the funnel. That's been helpful for us too. ›››››› Don't hire ›››››› Get your hands dirty This times 1000; I think this is the most important piece of advice he has. Jason Fried has been talking about this for years with "The Importance of Hiring Late"; the 37signals motto was "don't hire until you've done the job yourself". ›››››› Focus on the right way to source candidates I agree in general with the idea here. I think in particular that "blind" job ads of any sort do poorly. Every venue for ads that has significant visibility is both oversold and also low signal/noise ratio. We don't take job ads seriously anymore. There's a lot to think about w/r/t poaching employees, particularly from peers. It's important to remember that the ethics of poaching from another company have to be weighed against the best interests of candidates; refusing to talk to someone because they work for a friend's company is probably a fraught decision. On the other hand, remember that you're likely to be at a different company in 2 years, and your long-term relationships with people are important; I wouldn't use inside information I have from peers to poach employees. I wouldn't work with a recruiter. They also irritate candidates and set up weird incentives. ›››››› Don't compromise ›››››› Look for red flags This is some of the oldest hiring advice in the industry, for a reason. Be careful with the "default-to-no" posture if your hiring signals come from employee-driven interviews. Your whole team is rarely on the same exact page about what you're hiring for. I take specific issue with the "red flag" of people being title-conscious, because there are good reasons some people think about titles: they are (sensibly) concerned about their own career trajectory. The absolute cheapest benefit you can offer an employee is their title, and if they have a rational reason for wanting a better title, why on earth would you refuse to give up some title to get a good candidate on board? ›››››› Have a set of cultural values you hire for This scares me because I think people don't have a good idea of what a "cultural value" really is, or have aspirational cultural values, like "we'll work as hard as it takes to make our milestones!". You discover real cultural values bottom-up, by observing what is good and effective about your team. You don't have the value until you've established it in your existing team. It's obviously important that you build your team out of people who will work well with your team. But it's equally important not to cast too small a net. Among other reasons: it can make you especially susceptible to drama, in a monocultural kind of way. ›››››› Hire people you like Don't try to do this. You will be surprised by what you end up liking about people who didn't seem like an immediate "hang out on weekends" fit with your social culture. When you hire, try to make sure you're hiring on objectively important criteria. Don't kid yourself about how much it matters that a candidate wants to go bar hopping with you after work. ›››››› Fire fast This is so hard to do. If you haven't actually run a "fire-fast" culture at size yet, I recommend you not assume you'll have this capability. Hire as if it's the life-or-death decision it probably is. ›››››› Put a little bit of rigor around the hiring process. Put a lot of rigor around the hiring process. We've steadily standardized every part of our recruiting process and to date we've never looked back at something we standardized or measured and said "you know, this wasn't worth the effort or the cost in flexibility". We have a funnel with specific objectives at each stage of the funnel. For instance, in 2013, I think it's impossible to interview with us without knowing what our whole hiring process is, and without having the phone number of a company principal to call with questions. It is remarkable how often we hear how much better our process is than the typical company's process, because the things that make us outwardly easier to talk to are so easy. And yet, until a couple years ago, we weren't doing them either. ›››››› Have people audition for roles instead of interviewing for them. There's nothing I can say about this that hasn't already been said a million times, but I'll make the simplest point against it that I can: the best candidates generally aren't available to "audition" for you, because they're already working full time jobs.

Michael_Murray 13y ago

Great thoughts in this one, but missing what I think is the biggest key to hiring correctly in the startups I've been part of is what Paul DePodesta said in Moneyball - ""What gets me really excited about a guy is when he has warts... and the warts just don't matter." I've always thought that hiring in a startup is really like what the A's had to do in Moneyball - you don't have the advantages in terms of money, facilities, and even equity value of some of your much better funded competition for talent. In that situation, you have really only three levers to pull - 1) give up more than you want (which is what I've seen too many people do); 2) sell the benefits of the startup life and your mission; and 3) find talent that can perform at a similar level that's undervalued. The place that I've seen startup hiring really add value is when someone can be incredibly effective at #2 (which the author talks about) and they can develop a process that effectively hires for #3. I've built my last couple of companies in the information security space and #3 is especially important, because there's a significant premium paid for high-value talent in our space. So, finding talent who can perform at an extremely high level whose "warts" don't matter has been a life-or-death matter for creating a company that can compete with those in the space that have more money (either through funding or scale).

AlwaysBCoding 13y ago
This is great insight. Really like the moneyball quote.
lawnchair_larry 13y ago
I disagree. InfoSec has these companies who hire #3, thinking they can underpay, and it's given the whole industry a bad name because of the shoddy work and dubious claims they make. They go in and play pass the hash, charge a lot, and the company is really no better off. No offense, but do you think the fact that you have made multiple attempts and not yet created a company that has become a prominent name in the industry means that your approach may not be working?
- Michael_Murray 13y ago
  I entirely agree on the large number of companies who do crappy work in the infosec industry... there's a lot of them, especially in the penetration testing realm. We're not one of them. Nor were any of my previous teams whether they were at my companies or at companies I worked for (whose names you definitely know). "Prominent name" is a marketing thing as much as anything... I'd be willing to put the accomplishments of our teams up against most. Hitting $10M in revenue in under 3 years building a security firm with no investment and no debt isn't something I'm going to feel too bad about, even if we don't spend a lot of time making a big deal about that. You're making the classic mistake of thinking that a company that makes a lot of noise is the same as a company that does great work.... those venn diagrams sometimes overlap. And sometimes they don't.

Michael_Murray 13y ago

Just re-read and saw this: ".... if I were going to jump into....recruiting startups, I would try to make it look as much like personal network hiring as possible..." Funny about that: I started exactly that with a friend at a Startup Weekend a while ago... we didn't go anywhere with it: http://www.findexpert.co/ http://www.findexpert.co/ We also found that these guys did the same thing: https://ooomf.com/ https://ooomf.com/

ohazi 13y ago

> Whenever possible (and it’s almost always possible), have someone do a day or two of work with you before you hire her; you can do this at night or on the weekends. No. Absolutely not. If a candidate really is as good as you think he/she is, they already likely has a full time job that they're perfectly happy with (as you already well know): > Often, to get great people, you have to poach. They’re never looking for jobs, so don’t limit your recruiting to people that are looking for jobs. They might have other compelling offers, and they'll certainly have personal projects, hobbies, and people that are more worthy of their time than this insulting little game. The developers who know what they're worth won't put up with this. Why are you trying to hire the ones who will? Hire fast / fire fast is fine, but seeing a founder do this is a big red flag for me. It screams indecisiveness, lack of confidence, and mediocrity. Does he try to pull this stunt with everyone he hires? What am I supposed to think of the rest of the team? Can I get behind someone whose hiring process is so driven by fear that he's willing to miss out on the best candidates? This tactic might help you hire a decent candidate over a mediocre or a terrible one, but you'll be missing out on (or even creating ill will toward) the great candidates. It's already hard enough to get them on board -- why would you make this harder on yourself?

johnrob 13y ago
The co-working trial is a two way street. Wouldn't a good developer want to make sure the new co-workers are also good?
- ohazi 13y ago
  Hiring has always been a two way street, but in technology the scales are usually tipped against the hiring company. It's simply a numbers game -- there are far more mediocre and poor developers than good ones, and in the current environment, the good ones can basically get hired to work wherever they want. The co-working trial is an attempt to make the scale more favorable for the company. I can understand the desire for this, but in the current environment, it's almost guaranteed to backfire, as the best developers simply won't put up with it. No amount of wishful thinking on the part of the company is going to change this.

RougeFemme 13y ago

Overall, I thought this was a great post, but. . .I've always been kind of hesitant about the "hire someone you'd want to hang out with on Sunday" bit. Well, not when I first heard it. . .but over the years, I've come to believe that so many people hire or want to hire people just like them that it weeds out a lot of otherwise qualified people. Yes, I know you want people who share your company's cultural values. . .and that in a small group it's important that people like each other or least don't dislike each other. I guess it depends on how tightly you draw your box. . .and how "boxy" your box is. . .and the alignment between your comapany's values and your personal values.

nawitus 13y ago

Yet another article on hiring without empirical data. And as everyone knows, "gut feeling" doesn't actually turn out to be correct that often in recruiting (otherwise we would have solved the problem already).

j_baker 13y ago
Do you have any empirical data to back your point up? Or are you basing your thoughts about gut feelings on gut feelings?
- nawitus 13y ago
  You don't need specific empirical data to back up the point of saying that claims without empirical data are not reliable enough. We have the scientific revolution to back that point up.
  - j_baker 13y ago
    I think it's worth noting the irony in that you seem to believe in solving everything rationally except for the value of rationality. One thing that scientific research has elucidated is that gut feelings aren't useless, and in fact can be very useful in evaluating people. The thing is that we take in so much data via our senses and the conscious mind is only capable of handling a very small amount of those signals. The unconscious mind picks up on these things and surfaces them as intuitions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_(psychology)#Studies_and_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_(psychology)#Studies...

RK 13y ago

Don’t limit your search to candidates in your area. This is especially true if you’re in the bay area; lots of people want to move here. At first I thought I misread this paragraph, because I'm so used to people advocating remote hires at this point. I was expecting it to say "Don’t limit your search...lots of people don't want to move here."

badman_ting 13y ago
No, the author explicitly recommends against remote work. It's with a caveat of "early on", but in most places that will harden into a general unwritten "no remote workers" policy, as the organization grows and people are afraid to try something different than what has worked so far. This post is pretty heavy on the "company culture" stuff -- more or less, the idea that you should want to go drinking with your co-workers. People who believe in this don't tend to believe in remote work. I should mention I completely disagree with all this, but I am biased.

rhc2104 13y ago

Is Sam saying that investors recommend that a first engineer gets 1.5% (and that he recommends 3%), or that he recommends 1.5%?

yannisp 13y ago

"The absolute cheapest benefit you can offer an employee is their title, and if they have a rational reason for wanting a better title, why on earth would you refuse to give up some title to get a good candidate on board?" If your role doesn't match your title, you may be in big trouble when/if your company gets acquired. Also it might seem like the cheapest in one sense but as the company grows you'll find yourself in an awkward situation when a manager makes more than a VP you just hired. It's a sensitive subject that should be approached more carefully than you'd expect.

megablast 13y ago

> Whenever possible (and it’s almost always possible), have someone do a day or two of work with you before you hire her; you can do this at night or on the weekends. Fuck off.

darrellsilver 13y ago

This maps extraordinarily closely with what we've seen at Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/ http://www.thinkful.com/) with both our hiring as a team and with the students we've helped get hired. Our biggest breakthrough actually came last month when we started simply hiring our students. Three of our last five hires have come from people taking one of our classes. It's a phenomenal way to get the voice of the user into our user experience, and each has proven a great cultural fit. We're not sure it'll work for every position, but perhaps when Thinkful starts offering CTO-classes!

cyplo 13y ago

Hi ! I agree on that investing time and just speaking with people is a right thing to do. And I cannot stress enough the need for real-life exercises during the interview and the need for just working with the people to be able to judge their abilities. I was so annoyed by 'traditional' recruitment that I wrote this post : http://blog.cyplo.net/2011/07/24/how-to-hire-people/ http://blog.cyplo.net/2011/07/24/how-to-hire-people/ ;)

velik_m 13y ago

I disagree with some of it agree on some of it, but i strongly disagree with section on cultural values. First of: "Spend a lot of time figuring out what you want your cultural values to be (there are some good examples on the Internet)." Do spend time figuring out what your cultural values are, but don't look for them on the Internet, or to put it another way: don't have cultural values for the sake of having cultural values. "Treat your values as articles of faith" - also don't do this. Don't take anything as article of faith, you should have a reason for each value. If you can't put a reason on value, how much value does it really have?

zeinology 13y ago

Using "she" when talking about developers to be politically correct is really getting old.

taude 13y ago

Can startups stop thinking that giving me some meager equity of a company that would be lucky to have a 10 million exit is worth paying me some -XYZ% of my market value? Especially when there's so many companies fishing in the limited talent sea? It might also be a Boston thing, but I've seen some companies in the startup scene here trying to offer like 60K for senior-level Python developers and such....

kfk 13y ago

People that have a great job and have done great projects will ask you for more and can easily leave you if they get bored. I think a great recruiter is someone that gives a chance to people that show other signs of "success" besides pure measurable performance. Especially, I think you are better off sometimes hiring people willing to learn and adapt. Of course, it is easy hiring the 1% when they are already in the 1%. Much more difficult, and much more valuable, is hiring them when they are in the average bucket or they are not even there yet (i.e. people looking to move into programming).