What It Takes to Hire 10 Employees in San Francisco

Most of them are so-so, but the great ones are great and can find amazing candidates in a matter of days.

You are basically paying to hire someone whose only job is to keep in touch with great people.

The so-so recruiters go through LinkedIn, the best recruiter I ever worked with, when I told her the type of person I was looking for, had someone immediately in mind and got back to me the next day with a phone number.

Thing is, a lot of companies open the doors to a number of recruiters and get swamped.

Note that finding a good recruiter is hard, especially as a very early-stage startup. We spent a long time digging through mediocre resumes until we happened upon some good recruiters. It seems mostly trial and error so I'd recommend re-rolling a few times before making a judgement on recruiters as a general strategy. The benefit of the commission model is that you pay nothing if you make no hires, so that makes it lower risk to try a few interviews from a new recruiter.

Maybe one day I’ll meet a recruiter who has actual value

Of course, that means from a recruiter's perspective, when you are cold-messaging you need to be able to differentiate from the other cold-messages people are receiving, get their attention, seem like some place they would want to work, and be attractive enough that people are willing to quit their current job for you. That's hard if you're not a recognizable name and, with all due respect, not working on something really sexy. Otherwise you are just noise.

Anecdota, but still data: I know close to a dozen people "1st degree network contacts" (i.e., former co-workers) who found new jobs through LinkedIn...without needing to go through a recruiter. I used a recruiter to find my current position...but I found the recruiter through LinkedIn.

(To clarify: this weren't just "last two jobs in the past 4 months while I was job hopping aggressively", but rather, 1 job that allowed me to from a low-income country to a high-income country, and another where I've significantly progressed in the past 4 years and have no intention of leaving it anytime soon as I expect the progress to continue.)

Avoid at all costs.

I’ve never experienced a bad recruiter or the level of spam I hear about from software engineers. About 3-5 approach me per year, and they tend to be very legitimate and well connected/informed.

Also, a much better predictor than school, of how well someone will do at a job, is how they get along with their team. If they have a great degree from an amazing school, but they don't get along with their teammates, they will perform very poorly.

At the same time, I do a lot of SDE1 level hiring and have found that while there are good bootcamp grads, it is just so much more work to sort through / screen the bootcamp grads. Some of them have been some of the worst interviews I've ever conducted (no idea what a class is), my guess is due to the variation in quality of bootcamp.

In the end I'd (selfishly) rather have my fresh grad pipeline coming through college rather than bootcamp just because I'll be able to get someone more quickly and with less effort. Not that there aren't good people out of both pipelines.

I'm fully "self educated" like in not even bootcamps, just jumped straight into taking client work from zero programming experience (well, I did hack on some research/side projects while in med school before abandoning that), and having been ob both sides of the hiring process I'd say that hiring CS grads is 100% worth it you can hire the top 10%, probably not worth it after that. People who learn on their own tend to be passionate and motivated, people getting into CS at a good uni have a variety of motivations - they might be smart and capable, and if you're a big corporation you'll always find room for smart and capable people that can play by the rules... but not necessarily what you want. OK, maybe for US ivy-league or whatever that 10% might go to 25%-40%, but a fresh company might still not afford that...

And really, be honest with yourself, having a CS/EE university degree, would you really hire anyone but the top 10% of your classmates?! You know how it is, the 10% are there to study, the rest are there to study 10% of the time (and paaaaarty the rest ;)...) And... would you have any chance to afford to hire those top 10%?

We had a little luck tapping YC and YC alums early on though to some extent, and posting job reqs here on HN definitely helped.

I understand the benefits of having a fully co-located team, however in this article they did not address fulltime remote employees.

I currently work as a fulltime remote employee for a startup with a similar team size, and we are able to iterate rapidly on product.

It's not like they are hiring people straight out of Stanford. They're getting people from bootcamps!

Joking obviously! I now a great dev under 30s! Not me...

Indeed, hiring a fulltime offsite employee is very different from outsourcing to a 3rd party.

One model that I would like to see more of is a type of co-op, maybe even part time. This allows you to defer payment in lieu of equity, at the obvious cost of not having people's attention as fulltime employees, and slower iteration time. The benefit is that you can actually get FAANG caliber engineers to work with you since you are paying entirely in equity

https://www.kapwing.com/blog/postering-san-francisco/

And it ends with this quote : "By the end of our 8-hour workday, we had: - Put up 352 posters - Spent $96.16 ($31.08 for tape + $65.08 for printing) - Taken 25,497 steps - Walked 11.2 miles - Used over 400 ft of tape"

Nowhere in there does it say anything about the cost of paying the people to do that work.

They're very clearly and plainly stating that they do not put any value on the time of their employees.

But a good engineer already has a job. What makes your job's value proposition attractive enough that this gainfully employed engineer should engage with you?

One easy way to set yourself apart is to tell people what salary range you're working with up front. A good senior engineer is probably already getting paid well, so if your salary range is attractive, they're much more likely to respond. If they're not getting paid what they're worth, you may get their attention immediately. If your salary range is too low, your response rates will reflect that.

Beyond salary, find a way to communicate the most attractive and unique features of the job up front. Don't start with, "we have PTO, health insurance, 401k, etc." because almost everyone offers that. What sets your company apart? What about the work is compelling and interesting?

This is the most unintentionally depressing post I have read in a long, long time. I really don't think I can keep working in tech much longer.

That's literally the next sentence of the article after “We spent less than $1,000 on hiring." The article explicitly acknowledges this issue.

>We’ve spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates. Measured by hours, recruiting is one of our largest investments

Reads as: “we committed a small amount of resource X, BUT we spent a lot of resource Y.”

They didn’t miss the fact that they were burning resources. They stated it explicitly.

Not affiliated with the company in the article, but this isn't necessarily a symptom of ageism.

Early-stage startups generally pay toward the lower end of the SF engineer pay scale (<$150k). At that salary, it can be hard to find local experienced candidates. For $150k/year it's impossible to buy a house and put down roots, so people at a stage in life that value that (which is a significant percentage of the over-30 demographic) will often move out of the Bay Area. You'll make a bit less money in Denver, Austin, Boise or Salt Lake City, but you'll be able to buy a house with a yard and raise a family if that's your thing.

Of course, there are still experienced engineers around, but they're disproportionately making $300k+, which can still buy you a decent quality of life in the Bay Area.

Just being humorous here. Let's say he spent $999 and spoke to 200 candidates. The previous statement is not against the claim of the author.

Does that mean, he spent ~$4.99 for coffee or breakfast per candidate? Is it possible to have coffee or breakfast for 2 people in SFO for that money? Or, he could have either bought coffee for only the candidate and stared at him/her while he/she drank the said coffee or asked the candidate to pay for his/her own coffee. Yikes! :-P

I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of their applications were younger than 30. Their landing page is marketed toward meme generation. Most older folks won't make it past the landing page before seeking opportunity elsewhere.

Not that I don't agree that age discrimination exists in tech, but this could just be an artifact of startups in the Bay Area.

North of 30 is when people tend to settle down and start a family. That's enormously expensive in San Francisco. My guess is that most over-30s in tech either A) decamp to a lower cost of living metro, B) have very high-paying FANG jobs that startups can't compete with, or C) are independently wealthy from prior ventures.

Either way they're not showing up to a relatively low-paying, very high-risk, low-security startup job based on the outside chance of their stock options hitting it big. Lottery tickets don't pay the mortgage or pre-school tuition.

I think the underlying issue isn't so much age chauvinism as geographic chauvinism. Why do blank-slate companies continuously insist on basing themselves in the Bay Area? There's no shortage of talented engineers in Columbus, Philadelphia, Huntsville, Dubuque or Boise. Certainly enough for a dozen-employee seed-round.

"We’ve spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates. Measured by hours, recruiting is one of our largest investments"

You quoted that extremely disingenuously.

This article was not intended to say our hiring process is perfect. It definitely is not. Just wanted to offer our experience for other first-time founders.