When is the right time to hire a technical recruiter?

This post has been prompted by one of 3 founders of a b2b startup, well funded and just finalizing series A funding.

Snapshot:

15 employees, 3 founders, 1 technical. Cross functional teams in sales, engineering, ops.

Currently using a database that one of the funding VC’s provided and still using their network. They all want to keep their hands in recruiting but want to focus on improving by introducing metrics into their recruiting, finding the best sources, ways to find each pipeline of candidate. They do not want to offshore development or any other functions.

 

The technical co-founders question was “when is the right time for us to hire a technical recruiter?”

I posed the question back – when was it the right time for you to hire your lead developer? As soon as he no longer had time to code and it affected development of their product.

I use the same terms back when discussing when and if to hire a recruiter. When you and your team can no longer manage on top of your workload and when it is hindering growth of your company and product.

A scattered recruiting approach that uses your network and has resumes stored in everyones email and personal folders, using google docs to track (if that!) – will get you so far, then you will fall behind, recruiting will take months and months rather than weeks.

Yes now is the time to hire a technical recruiter.

So where do you go to hire a tech recruiter

1) ask your network

2) ask your funding VC’s if they can recommend anyone they have worked with

3) you could put an ad out on craigslist, indeed, monster, linkedin. you are likely to get a huge response to your posting

How do you know if they are any good

1) get a track record, look for references and other startups the recruiter has worked at

2) ask for stats, fill ratio, how long it took them to ramp up and whether it was in the time frame

3) ask them about requirements gathering and working with the internal team – so they have the ability to not only recruit, but to improve on processes, assess recruiting software and tools and be able to suggest the best ROI tools for your company

4) do they have a network of candidates

5) can they build up candidate pipelines.

6) what other abilities do they have on top of heads down recruiting. As a start up as much as you’d like a developer to wear multiple hats, you’ll want a recruiter who can do the same. Recruit for non tech positions, be able to work in a leadership capacity and provide push back to management so that they get the job done.

Hiring an unqualified recruiter will be a total waste of money and they won’t know or be able to improve

My biggest piece of advise is take some time here. Hire the best, even if its on contract – most independent recruiters will totally accept a contract or contract to hire position.

The key here is you want an expert as your first lead recruiter, no different to hiring your first lead developer. After key processes, tools and best practices are put in place you can go on to hire more junior recruiters to do a lot of the grunt work.

This question sparked me to do some research to see if there are actually any resources or agencies where you could hire a technical recruiter – as i suspected there aren’t any, which surprised me.

For me hiring a tech recruiter or salesperson are probably the easiest jobs i could fill, so why am i not connecting the two, would it be useful for startups to be able to go and hire a technical recruiter from a very reliable resource where they already come with the tools, processes, and software they need to do the job from day one. This was a great idea for the company i mentioned above. His concern is that he didn’t know whether the position would be fulltime, he thought he needed to hire 15 employees in 8 months but what if they wanted to stop at 5 then what. I suggested getting in a contract recruiter, and i’ve suggested doing the recruitment analysis, proposing tools and software, hiring the tech recruiter and putting them onsite for a contract length with weekly updates. With a small add-on, I offered him use of the recruiting software licenses that I buy yearly – linkedin recruiter is under $10K thats a lot to shell out if you don’t know you’ll have someone using it all year round, so I thought why don’t I get extra licences from my own subscriptions and mitigate the costs. In essence you get a less senior recruiter, for a contracted time, you don’t have to fork out $20-30K on recruiting software and you can rapidly hire as you go into series A. The recruiter is the execution piece. It turned out to be a highly cost effective solution.

If you have any suggestions or ideas please post. I’m interested in feedback  – this may be a great stop gap for many startups in the same situation.

Till next time. Hope you all had a glorious memorial day weekend, I took time off after a very long time and spend the weekend on my partners boat, not sure i’m back in the swing of things today – but getting there!

 

How to hire if you’re not Google or Facebook, don’t hire from google or facebook

Google announced recently how much investment they put into recruiting – how they handled their talent. If there’s anything to take away from that its that you have to work on your own startups branding in 3 ways:

1) founder story

2) compelling story

3) A job description that talks 90% about what you can offer your potential new employee not what skills you are demanding. Include a particularly challenging problem the person is likely to deal with, these guys want something to stick their teeth into. Talk about new tech they could be using and get exposure for.

Above all in these times, be flexible – you aren’t going to be able to poach someone awesome in a few weeks that will take months, even a year in some cases before they are willing to seriously talk about a career change. In the meantime don’t sit around and wait.

Not having a lead developer can hinder the chances of taking on some awesome newbies, out of school, out of bootcamps.

Startups with the resources are hiring a certain segment of dev bootcampers out of the gate – who are they picking?

1) Folks who have already been programming and have experience

2) folks who were say in more traditional roles such as regular engineering or a different vertical sector and took a career change and continued to code on their own, worked on side projects, wrote blogs on their experience. – these guys are being snapped up as interns by some big names, not all dev bootcampers were ex teachers, or accountants attempting to take a drastic career change. The most promising are those who go to expand their knowledge and you can see it as an educational and career progression not this leap into the unknown. The profiles look very difficult. I’ve often seen them return and also go further into entrepreneurial bootcamps. Great thing with these guys is to acknowledge and be ok that they may want to start their own company so why not learn on the job.

Im hiring right now for Ruby devs(which is actually constant – but differs from client to client, and i’ve got the toughest job because it is an immediate need and I have to juggle building a pipeline for the company as well as try and reactive recruit ruby which is fairly impossible. I don’t have a huge budget for this one.

What i’m going to do is push for a lead to be taken on, then thrown in some really bright, intelligent hard working and quick learning developers even with javascript, who have expressed a clear interest in working with Rails. I just have to rigorously check that they really are up for the challenge –  this is a vertical learning curve. (and i have to run it past the founder – BUT be strong and confident and make them listen – otherwise that req is going to still be open in 6 months.

Its a great chance to shape the employees you have and grab them before they simply ignore any recruiting emails.

Last comment – don’t poo poo dev bootcamp just make your criteria selective, dev experience, contributions, blogs, dev bootcamp followed by side projects, and they are already in tech.

The trend is that if you have a lead, its likely to be that hiring experienced boot camp grads (if sourced properly) with the right background  will still allow production deadlines to be met, they learn on the job and are shaped by you. Take 2 for the job of one – it’ll get done in time. They will want to work for you because few places can offer any training at all. I’ve noticed that once they’ve had 6 months interning, they end up getting snapped up by the big boys in series B and C – so this is a trend worth paying attention to

How do i find Talent when we’re hustling for funding?

This is relevant to all early stage, bootstrapped startups and those who are lucky enough to be accepted into an accelerator program such as Y-Combinator, 500startups (where I mentor).

Based on a lot of sessions with founders who have needed to hire when they are still fund raising, have little or no money to pay someone, including an engineer who’s hungry and building your product in his mothers basement for nothing but a hope of an awesome career.. This may seem absolutely impossible and also please bear in mind, this is only ok if you are truly bootstrapped, i would not advise getting into a salary war once you grow and have funding, this is should only be a temporary measure don’t push salaries down if you can afford it.

 

I talked to two guys this last week that impressed me so much. One of the companies had just been accepted into 500startups, a founder, 1 engineer and another co-founder. The founder i met with wanted to hire engineers, his remit was that he wanted someone young, hungry and willing to learn and work hard. He didn’t believe in hiring someone with a CS degree and felt like a self taught individual would work well for his startup. His ideas way surpassed my own advice to him. When you are bootstrapped you have to be creative. So this is the guy who convinced a 21 yr old to work on building his product for 6 months where he lived in his mothers basement and wasn’t paid apart from some nominal costs. So how did he do it, can this repeated in a process. I thought about this – and it can’t, because its the human aspect, however there are qualities that these type of founders possess that make it more likely that they will always hire creatively and the best. I’ll call him Lucas for now. He’s charming, charasmatic, has a great style, calm and confident rolled into one.  He’s a born hustler, but nice about it. I’m like a broken record with this “create a compelling story” Its as much about selling yourself. He could’ve convinced me to work for nothing!

 

The other founder, I’ll call him Adam hired a developer and just paid his rent and living costs – he also was charming, charasmatic and a born socialiser  – he will never have trouble hiring. he was applying to accelerator progams and had no outside funding.

 

Luckily those of you reading this may have not had to deal with working in a corporate environment. When you interview for job, the key things that any good employee will look for is qualities of the person you are going to be working for. The best employees are ones that have a huge respect for you, like and admire you, want to be like you one day. If you can sell that you have the abillity to convince a potential engineer to work for you then start being creative. They are also more likely to have loyalty to you which is rare in the tech workspace these days.

 

I just hired an employee, he’s 26 yrs old – I pay him $500/month to work on my social media, scheduling, appt making, dealing with phone calls, researching articles, dealing with tech issues, basically everything else but not getting me coffee, actually he does and organizes my work life so its smooth and i can focus on core business issues without him i would not have enough time in the day- how did i get him to work for so little. Well i’m sales person at heart. I’m very transparent as a Founder. The reason he works for me and still is – becuase i did create a compelling story, he sees the potential of the business, and I talked to him extensively about what he wants out of his career. As time goes on i introduce further aspects of the business that are more crucial. He’s a complete tech nut now – finding out that he has ambitions to grow and eventually have the ability to be a Senior Advisor who then takes over my role of hiring and training new employees – he wants to be the boss, and i’d like to take a step back. I find empowering individuals goes a long way and if you are bootstrapped its the only way to go.

Now i have a developer who is working on a recruiting product for me – her comments to me were i’ll work for you for as much as you can pay. this is music to my ears, i will reward all my employees and they know it.

You know you have a great product, you see the potential, you have ambitions to grow the company and hopefully one day go IPO – get that excitement going.

 

If that isn’t an option or doesn’t work, not everyone can do that, its a personality thing. My suggestions are to contact your own alumni, contact school careers who can for no cost provide really strong young developers who will be eager to learn.

 

When The VC Asks: About Your Hiring Plan

When The VC Asks: About Your Hiring Plan.

An Awkward First Date Shot Through Google Glass

side note to recruiting – this is bad and good at the same time. as soon as they have google contact lenses we are all in trouble!

Little or no budget quality hiring

A few blogs ago I wrote about recruiting on a budget, I mentor 500startups portfolio of companies and the first batch all have the same issues as any startup in the tech space. Hiring engineering talent to a small startup with no brand awareness.

I gave a talk to about 20 startups in SF. All these startups are on a 3 month accelerator program, by the second month they should be fixing up funding and looking to make their first few hires.

I did a quick survey to see what various startups were doing to hire, and these were the answers that were hollered at me;

1)      Linkedin

2)      Angel list

3)      Craigslist

4)      Website

5)      Current network

So a show of hands proved what I already knew, everyone of these companies was using the same resources to hire the same type of people. I wrote a blog about this a few months back, “everyones looking for the same thing”. What does that mean, well all these companies are contacting the same small pool of people, so anyone who actually proves qualified has already been called a dozen times and then some (from agencies and outside 3^rd party recruiters). Speed is of the essence if you don’t call them first someone else will nab them.

I asked for a show of hands of people who would apply for their own company jobs via the current job description and method of advertising. There was a little light laughter of recognition that went round the room. They wouldn’t – why because more often than not, a job descriotion at this stage may comprise of a few lines and the rest is in the CTO’s or lead engineers head, or you have a job description but half of it is full of demands for the candidate, a laundry list of skills but not a lot about the job, the company or the founders, why would the top talent even look at you when your job description looks like the other 20 that landed in their inbox today.

I usually keep the skills to a minimum and list these along with benefits at the bottom. At this stage in your startup – salary is not what’s going to sell and it isn’t all about money its whether someone can say “I built that”

If you don’t have much money for hiring, advertising, holding events or man power then you have 3 strong selling points that will increase the effectiveness of the methods above

1)      Founders story/bio

2)      Company ethos, why it came about, you plan to have a full development team in the US, you’re a software house, initiatives they are likely to be a big part of

3)      A compelling story about your product

These 3 key points are unique to each and every company – a job description will look the same, a startup sounds like any other startup, but the 3 points are where you can sell your uniqueness and attract talent and increase response rate.

When I mentioned these things, immediately the light bulb went on. “so it’s the same as when we are trying to find investors and customers?” – da ding! Yes its exactly the same – you are already using these methods and skills, use them in recruiting. Its cold calls, selling your company, developing relationships with top talent, keeping a track of your candidates, follow up calls and discussions.

I advise to whittle down a small list of very qualified talent you want on your team – call it a fantasy development league. Find out everything about them. Yes you know they work at Youtube or twitter and you assume they wouldn’t dream of working at your company. COMPELLING STORY and a job description that reads like a dating profile – what you have to offer them. Career growth, opportunities, work they will get involved with, technology changes you are likely to make, developments in the company, future company plans, how they can fit in. Plans for the development team, what they are likely to build and own. BUT don’t have your first interaction offering them an awesome opportunity at your awesome startup. Instead engage with them on their interests, check out stuff they are working on, some side tech interests they have, anything where you can start an informal conversation admiring their work. Take plenty of notes, make this really personal and make sure the founder is the one who is seen to be following them and most interested in engaging with them. Whoever in the company is best at selling the company – the guy who does the successful pitches!

Do this alongside your current methods, there really are very few free or inexpensive recruiting tools or methods however re-engineering your job description or creating from scratch, going to meetups/hackathons to talk to candidates in a different setting and often very informal. If you want to meet specific people who are influencers in the community, follow them and go to their next event, speaking engagement, whatever it is and find them. Networking events aren’t as casual and easy as one likes (I hate them personally) . This way you go with a purpose and a couple of people you really need to meet, rather than randomly walking around the room hoping to bump into the right person.

Try these simple techniques with your current methods and if you get it right, this should increase the number of qualified candidates that are applying, reduce the number of unqualified candidates and will speed up the current method.

This blog is purely intended for little or no money hiring. Making the most of what you have.

First few hires…

1)      Utilize your mentors, VC’s and your network to get referrals – referrals are still by far the best way to recruit.

2)      Are you listed on angel list – if so, post your job. You will get applications, a lot from junior candidates, but a few gems come your way. You will get a clear indication whether someone is actively looking or not but again it may not be the best talent pool. There is a search facility here, the search terms need a little work on.

3)      Trial out recruiting software and try and wangle 2 weeks trial for niche sourcing and recruiting software. Bearing in mind that most aggregated job boards and job vs resume matching sites will produce poor results for tech/engineering roles.

4)      Social recruiting has now become easier and quicker than ever. People aggregators do the job of about 5 sourcers who’s primary job is to scour the internet, create custom search engines, find candidates that aren’t readily visible or have a low internet profile, or those not wishing to be on linkedin. Ideally this should be used in conjunction with other methods of sourcing

5)      If you need Ruby, Python, Ios Mob developers, UI/UX – bite the bullet advertise on niche sites, and use a people aggregator. Meetup boards are dodgy to post jobs on and rarely will people respond unless you are the CEO/Founder and it’s a personalized message.

6)      Don’t rely on just one source and be surprised if you wade through a load of candidates and maybe one or two you can interview and declined offers – you are looking in the wrong place. Supplement your sources of candidates from at least 4-5 different sources.

7)      The double edged sword for any fledgling startup is that you want the best talent, those at linkedin, google, Heroku, square and so on, can you really attract this type of talent – well most startups in this state struggle with this, so you have to set your sights on a more realistic level – which group of developers are you able to attract. If you are seed funded startup and you have your eye on a great developer at a different company – however they received series A or series B funding – are they going to want to move, probably not.

8)      Aim high – there’s no point procrastinating about who to contact, whether they may or may not respond, whether you have formed an opinion and convinced they don’t want to move so you don’t approach them – this is a big mistake. Don’t approach them with a direct opportunity now, talk to them, build a solid relationship with them, they need to get to know you and you them. This is a long term plan to attract better talent in the future

9)      Be very clear in your job description – whats in it for them, what will their career progression be, what will they spear head, how is the opportunity better than the one they are in now – don’t get stuck on salary too much.

10)   Use google docs to track your applicants and be strict with it!

11)   Whatever you do don’t use an inexperienced recruiter/office manager to reach out to developers in SF bay area!

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Message from Tae Lee – ZEFR

I’m reading an article about Tae Lee of ZEFR, he talks about how they’ve have grown 2000% in headcount in the last 2 years. I’m sitting here thinking about this and seeing how quickly everythings changing, it’s totally crazy. When I transferred from the UK to work as a Recruiter/Business Development Manager at Modis in SF, the .com boom was literally recovering. I heard stories of those heady days when VC’s were throwing money about, kids in flash cars. That all died, when I came everyone was burnt from the startup bubble and nightmare that most tech workers post 2003 went through. People wanted security, a steady job with a firm that has some history to it, trading publicly etc etc…its funny now when i look back that engineers then were looking for stability – but that was another time another era, and thats the point. What this guy is having to do is unimaginable and no doubt hopefully most of you will face the same issues.

Scaling – everything right? they’ve grown that quickly, that fast. I can’t answer for any area other than recruiting. When i talk to founders about hiring initial teams and growth,i insist that they keep their hands in it, from that initial reach out in an email or even linkedin or through a discussion group or whatever format it is, I talk about pitching to engineers like you pitch to your investors. A lot of you instinctively do this especially if you’re good at hustling, also if you are Joe Blow CEO co-founder of the internet.com backed by “xxxxVenture Parnters” and i get an email from you I am highly likey to open it, if you are Cindy Smith recruiter at awesome startup in SF, i’m less likely to want to engage in a conversation with you. Don’t say it, and I know some of you are thinking it, that quite frankly (that is if you spoke with an English accent) you don’t really have the time and would rather just build your product or fund raise, cant anyone just do it and get a really awesome person. The answer is no and don’t take my word for this is what Tae did and at that headcount he still gets involved!  

“Hiring is STILL my most important job.

In terms of hiring, the only difference between when we were 20 employees versus 200 is that I spend more time recruiting than ever before. It’s not that your managers can’t hire good people, but there are many reasons why you need to be involved. One, as the C-level executive of the company, you may be able to attract talent that your managers cannot. Two, the difference between the ‘A’ level players and ‘B’ players is unquantifiable. One right hire can completely change the dynamics of your business. It might even change what your company will be selling in a few years. You don’t want to completely leave that up to someone else’s hands, do you? Lastly, nobody in your organization has a better sense of cultural fit than you. The newer and further the manager is to you, the sense of culture is diluted – which brings me to…culture is not organic. You must define it and protect it ruthlessly as you grow.” Tae Lee ZEFR

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140325164746-11347909-navigating-through-the-maturity-of-a-startup?trk=nus-cha-roll-art-title

Due to feedback, I am going to update my wordpress site so that you can follow my blogs, this will literally be in the next 4 weeks bear with!

in the meantime – email me with your name_blog in the subject line

hiregrind@gmail.com apologies for the inconvenience – i know it looks totally crappy.

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How Facebook and Twitter built the best employee training programs in Silicon Valley

i’m hating the hire and fire culture, training and investment into your employees gives employees to actually grow in their career not keep them stagnant. Doesn’t show the company has a lot of skin in the game apart from a pay check

Recruiting Challenges: Hiring Developers Pt 2

Hiring developers is a whole chapter and probably the largest chapter from a recruiting perspective. I’m going to break it down into parts and at least start covering some base points to which you can start from.

1) sourcing developers – Sourcing techniques; internet, database, meetup sites, meetups/hackathons , social media – including linkedin recruiter, company website, from job postings

2) Job descriptions – what and what not to put

3) recruiting developers – hiring and retention, keeping the talent interested in your company first

4) talking to developers – the initial phone screen, what if you’re not a developer

1.   Sourcing Developers

Strategy

Create a strategy first – don’t shotgun it, advertise everywhere, all over linkedin, don’t go posting it on the ruby meetup site and hope for the best!

If you are starting from scratch ie this is your first bunch of hires for the initial engineering team, I am not going to lie, i am not going to sell you the secret to hiring developers because there isn’t a secret formula. There’s a huge amount of work you need to do to get this first team in place especially if you do not have an engineering network.  I thought i’d start from this point – how do you become your company’s best engineering recruiter?

The first thing I would do if being asked to look for a team of developers is to make sure everybody is clear on the timing for this, set realistic expectations, if this is your first round of official hires and you don’t get a lot of inbound resumes the process will probably take from 4-6 months

Talk to the developers you already have – talk to the model developer employee there’s always one! Go get them coffee/lunch and get their feedback and opinion on who should be hired, what skills do they think are important, get help with terminology and some basic screening questions, how did they get hired, how did they find their current job, where else were they looking, why did they choose this start up, get a feel of personality type that will fit the team, ask their opinion on the best internet sources for finding active developers working on peer projects on google projects or github. Look up your own developers, where do you see their internet presence. Finally having a say into who joins the new team is a huge factor and is also a critical one.  Its actually better to have less skills and a better work personality than be toxic and have awesome coding skills – the latter can have bad consequences and put projects back by months, have people leaving and you starting to hire a new team again! Get them on board and ask them to share the position on their social media and other sites, presuming you have little budget to incentivize, starbucks gift cards can go a long way, your own developers inhouse see you making a real effort in getting the right team especially when you’ve made the effort to include them – internal referrals are the quickest and the best way to hire your team.

If your startup is VC backed, talk to you CEO about resources your VC might have to aid you in hiring your team. Many VC’s already have a talent acquisition director who will outline a strategic hiring plan and plop in an engineering recruiter to execute the plan. Your competition are these ex google, ex facebook engineering recruiters with solid networks – but it doesn’t take long to get there with a lot of focus. When you talk to your CEO/founder ask if they are aware if their funding company has any resources with respect to hiring, ie maybe there is a board member or advisor who specializes in hiring and recruitment. If you are the founder or CEO talk to your backing companies about hiring strategy and execution, not only do they have access to business  and other resources to grow your startup but will also have access to resources on hiring. (this is actually what i do and there are a few of us floating about Silicon Valley)

Your company may already be working with a consulting company such as Carbon5. If you have a consulting team that you are working side by side with you can do the same thing here, try and get as much info as possible, find out about their career paths, how they landed their job – was it through referrals, a specific site, where they would recommend you hire people from. Get the developers perspective, so that you start to think like a developer and how they look for their next career move. Remember you are highly unlikely to be able to hire these crucial employees through any jobsites, even linkedin recruiter is unlikely to yield good response rates in the current climate.

This is where having a research background can really help, you are getting as much info as you possibly need to put a concrete strategy in place.

Now you are armed with the following: Where your current developers came from, what sites they are active on, links with their developer buddies with similar skills, job sites they would actually use, sneaky ways to find developers on the internet that the manual didn’t tell you about!

Now go cost this out, github and stackoverflow charge to post, linkedin recruiter cost a few hundred dollars per month, what is your company doing with twitter – leverage what you have for getting postings out there, have your internal team send it out to their social networks. Work out how much time it will take to do each part of the research process, this will give you a rough idea on how long it will take you to start seeing applicants either through referrals or through responses and a rough time for how long it will take you to hire your first team member.

As soon as you get a name, email and phone number call immediately!!! i cant stress enough, you could put off a call by a couple of days and another company already interviewed them and made an offer.

There are many sourcing strategies that can spawn off what I have discussed – if you are looking for more in depth steps on internet sourcing, fill in the contact form below and i’ll send you a sourcing for developers guide(cheat sheet!)

Getting the names is only the start, advertising your position correctly is another step in sourcing and must be done correctly to produce the highest inbound resumes received, and is the subject of the next blog.

Feel free to ask me any recruiting challenges you are facing and if you want some info on a specific sourcing technique I am happy to send you material to help. mynetsol.inc@gmail.com or call 510 239 7829

Connect with me on linkedin and follow my tweets @rubybhattachary

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