Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time
blog.tutorspree.com
blog.tutorspree.com
They said the best source of people initially were the friends of the founders and the first employees (which is one reason it's helpful to have gone to a good CS school) and that as soon as you've exhausted this source you should start hiring recruiters.
Is this package consistent with your advice? Does it generally work out well for the companies in question?
Sometimes, very talented technical people are assuming extra risk due to opportunity cost; perhaps some other startup is offering comparable equity but has a longer runway and/or more traction. If those people are good at negotiating, they get better equity grants.
A few factors play in to the gulf between founder and early employee equity:
* Founders have by definition committed to the idea before it had any traction at all. More risk.
* Founders have spent more time at the company than employees. Each day spent at the startup, in addition to accruing compensable effort, carries opportunity cost (not to hop ship to some other company) and thus more risk.
* Founders have often worked, at least for a time, at zero salary. More risk.
* Founders that can get their companies funded, accepted into YC, or bootstrapped to market traction can presumably do that again somewhere else --- again implying they're accepting the opportunity cost of committing to one startup instead of starting another. Most employees, regardless of ability, can't say that.
It's important to remember that founding teams have drastically different compensation packages than employees do; it's almost an apples/oranges comparison. You want to remember this not to empathize with the founders but to keep in mind how different their incentives are from yours.
My best guess is that early-employee startupping is an investment in one's network and skills: The company, like all startups, is likely to fail. Your equity has a low chance of paying off. On the upside, you're getting startup-tier technical experience that would be dramatically harder to come by in a BigCo job. And best of all, you're gaining entry into the professional networking world of startup founders and the extended YC family.
I don't mean to imply that early employees are getting shafted or that they are inherently owed large equity stakes, I'm just working my way to an understanding of exactly what the value proposition is for someone in this position.
Please don't take my observations upthread as dismissive or authoritative. I certainly don't have the startup experience to make such claims. I have no reason to mistrust pg (or you for that matter) and I'm genuinely hoping for digestible explanations. Perhaps I shouldn't have asked on HN but rather through a private channel.
* The working culture is almost always superior to that of better compensated big company jobs
* The career experience at a startup is often more valuable at a startup than a bigco job; at a BigCo, you're unlikely to be able to even use a good language, whereas at a startup you might own a whole product
* Early employees might not want to lock themselves down to a single company for a long time, and if you're aiming to work at lots of different places, the startup career track is more amenable to it than the bigco career track (where "job hopping" is stigmatized)
* The equity upside of a startup is extremely easy to overestimate
* Early employees have a good shot at becoming key employees, and key employees get better comp later on
* If you truly believe in a startup's offering, a 3% stake in it can still be reasonably valued at "life changing". A 2% stake in the second startup I joined was extraordinarily lucrative, well beyond "excellent bonus for every year I worked there"
* Over the long term, early employees might themselves want to found startups, and a good path to doing that is succeeding in an employee role in a smart startup (for the track record, the education, and the networking).
* Finally, most people satisfice. They'll quickly accept a good job rather than expending months of effort trying to find the optimal job.
As an employee at an early startup, you can still get significant upside exposure (eg make millions or tens of millions in a success scenario) while being able to "just code", have a much more normal work-life balance, and having much less exposure to risk.
If you're decently good at picking good startups to join, it is probably also an easier way to get seven-to-eight digits rich than starting your own company, since a lot of the risk is already removed.
So basically, its a gamble and hopefully people do their research before taking a leap into the startup world.
Also, many startups these days do pay market rates. Weebly certainly does. The startups that don't pay market are generally sub-10 people and you get an even higher equity grant for that.
Regardless, joining a startup is obviously a gamble and very far from a sure thing, but at the end of the day, so is starting your own startup.
Once the company has a product, funding and some traction, the business' value is now likely at least a few million to tens of millions. 1-2% of that is also in the hundred thousand dollars range.
Yes, the founders' stake is now significantly more, but it wasn't when it was granted. They built the company's value and their stock value appreciated.
When you join a startup, you have the ability to do exactly the same thing!
Did they present any evidence to support this position, or does "should" in this case just mean that this is what they did?
There have been a few times when I've talked to technical people at startups and come away thinking "if it weren't for Tarsnap, I'd totally go work for them". In contrast, every time I talk to a recruiter, I come away thinking "if this is the sort of people they have at X, there's no way in hell I'd ever want to work there".
I'm not sure what the best solution is here, but it seems that recruiters are far from perfect.
Recruiting is a special form of sales/marketing, and most businesses wouldn't expect randomly calling people on the phone to be their best early sales strategy. But that doesn't mean they don't do sales; they just execute on an early sales strategy.
Jeff Cox's _Selling The Wheel_ is a good, if somewhat patronizing, summary of the different sales strategies companies use at different stages of the adoption curve for their offerings. The same insight applies to recruiting.
If you look at some of the most attractive companies such as Google & Facebook, they all have their own internal recruitment team and they rarely engage outside recruiters simply because their own team is immensley talented.
On that note, if anyone wants to capitalise on pg's insight and wants to hire a talented recruiter, I am really keen to shift to in-house recruitment!
Presumably the quality of the first recruiter you hire will have a significant impact if they are going to be bringing in other recruiters as well. So how do you hire a good recruiter?
Him: Hello, I need to speak to the person who manages your servers.
Me: Uh, who is this?
Him: I need to report an issue with your servers. Are you the person who manages the servers?
Me: What kind of issue?
Him: Do you manage the servers?
Me: I manage the office. What's the issue you need to report?
Him: Oh! I'm calling because I understand that it's very hard to find good Linux and Ruby on Rails people in Chicago and-
Me: You're a recruiter?
Him: Yes, and-
Click.
Our current recruiter policy, at least in the Chicago office: $50 to the person in the office who can keep a recruiter on the phone the longest using only Emacs Eliza.
In terms of actually recruiting people:
* It's one of the key jobs for the management team; for instance, it is the thing I spend the most time on after billable work.
* We do increasingly generous referral bonuses for good candidates.
* We're doing a number of outreach programs (free classes and the like) to meet candidates.
Ultimately, like SEO consultants and direct sales people, the problem with recruiters is adverse selection. There are good recruiters out there, but they can more or less print money; they aren't cold-calling you. Anyone who is cold-calling isn't a good recruiter. There aren't many good recruiters. The most useful shorthand is "all recruiters are terrible".
I think you should take it to the next level and use the zippy quotes from psychoanalyze-pinhead.
I completely disagree. The most successful recruiters always need to generate new business in order to stay successful and whilst it's great to pick up business from recommendations, often you are left with no option but to pick up the phone and start introducing yourself to people.
Other common lies are "I'm a personal friend of Mr Anderson" (Mr Anderson doesn't exist, we made him up and listed him in a couple of places as our resources/personnel manager) or "I was talking to <some person> earlier today" (that one is particularly fun when they state they were just this minute talking to someone I has been sat opposite me talking to nobody for the last hour or few).
I've stopped being nice to them. I don't even make an effort to be professional.
Some companies will call repeatedly, day after day, sometimes several times a day. The only way to get rid of them I've found is immediately asking to talk to their boss to discuss being taken off their lists and demanding to talk to their boss until you get to or then hang up. And if that fails find the company's address and send them a letter by registered post stating that we do not want to deal with them, will not give them any more of of our time for free, and that any further calls will result in them being invoiced for our time at our consulting rates (we've gone as far as that twice, both times we heard nothing else from the company in question afterwards).
I am fucking astonished at how inept most recruiters are. I mean, just awful and useless at their "jobs."
If we concede the point that, especially in the Valley, technical talent is in high demand, it stands to reason that any overture to such talent needs to be persuasive, informative and intriguing. It should explain the role in reasonable detail, while making a sane case for how cool the company and opportunity will be.
Ideally, it should demonstrate that the recruiter has a basic understanding of a given prospect's skills and career trajectory. Super bonus points if it doesn't seem like a form letter.
Instead, what I get is stuff like
"Hey, I'm looking for developers for a role I'm filling. You need to be this, this, and this. Oh, and this is a plus. Mmkay, lemme know!"
Well. Congratulations?
Hey, I have a job. And it doesn't involve proving to a random recruiter that I'm skilled at it. And from such pitches, how would I know that I'd even care? I know nothing about the company and only have the vaguest notion of what I'd be wanted for.
Recruiters are a waste of time, though mostly their own. A founder out being social has a much better chance, I think, at successfully recruiting limited talent. Not that they have time, I know.
And don't get me started on the pitch that opened with "I'm looking for some iOS studs!" I had a friend at the company they were pitching. They weren't impressed when they heard about this one, especially since they had no formal relationship with the bozo.
I take unsolicited recruitment approaches with a grain of salt, but I make an honest effort to go through my mental Rolodex to see if there's anyone I know who might benefit from making the connection. When I respond to a cold call it's either politely or not at all.
Just tracking the volume and content of these approaches is valuable information that I can use to better manage my own career in the years ahead, not to mention the goodwill I can engender by making the occasional introduction.
Gave this some thought for awhile.
But no. Everyone I know worth their salt in iOS has solid gigs – way better than a lot of the turds recruiters are offering, anyway.
How you can you tell what's an awesome job? Well, for starters they don't need desperate huckster/telemarketers to shill for them, by and large.
They're salespeople, not talent.
Regards, TDL
I kept asking him why I should be interested in such a role, of course, he couldn't tell me. The sheer desperation in his voice was almost enjoyable.
Three months later he contacts me about the same C++ positions, with the same language. After me telling him exactly how to do his job. This time I was a little more explicit, and asked him to keep contacting me so I could make fun of him and his company to my engineering buddies. :P
Probably a bridge burned, but one I'll never use, and I don' t make a habit of this.
I had a similar experience, and because I had multiple people from their office call me about different positions in the same time period, I became convinced that recruiters are just allotted a concrete list of positions that _they_ are responsible for. (think of it like randomly handing out a different list of target customers to each member of your sales team)
Even if you aren't a good fit for a given position, they'll call you about that position and not the one you're a better fit for, because well, it's not _their_ job to fill the other role.
Sometimes those "cold call" type (almost want to use the word drones) just phase out the after they hear no.
Maybe having burned a bridge with someone he needs to impress will make him pay more attention next time.
The first time I sent my resume out to recruiters, my phone rang nearly continuously for two days. I complained about it once to my wife. She said I should never be ungrateful for a recruiter calling. He father went through a few periods of unemployment and in her eyes a call from a recruiter was a cause for celebration. From that point on, I've always been patient with recruiters, even the dull ones.
I've been around long enough now to have the tables turn. In 2002-2003, calls from recruiters almost completely dried up. I had a job at the time, but I was looking to leave for greener pastures and became very grateful for any calls I received. Now I'm back to getting lots of unsolicited emails and calls, but I just politely decline and maintain a contact, because if the table do turn again, I'll have a wide net already cast to pull in my next gig.
Now, the tables have turned, we developers consider recruiters as dirt bags. I have no doubt that the tide will turn again. We just don't know when.
I talked with one recruiter about a job that paid about 1/3rd what I made just 2 years before. I said "has it really gotten that bad?" He opened up about the situation as he really didn't expect me to go after the job as it paid far less than what I was making, even back then. IIRC, it was the only job he had open at the time and rates had hit bottom, so he couldn't even find anyone willing to take it. Fortunately, things turned around for both of us.
Contract programmers often switch jobs once a year. That's driven my duration limits set by companies, layoffs and the wanderlust that contractors often have. Big companies don't seem to want to be bothered with in-house recruiters, so they pay third-party companies to do the work. In the midst of that shuffle, a job requirement is handed from a hiring manager (who may not know how to code) to a company HR rep (who may edit it) to the recruiter. What you end up with looks like this:
Req: JAVA Developer
REQUIRED:
- 5-7 Years Java Experience
- 3-5 Years J2EE Experience
- 1 Year JDBC
- 3-5 Years Oracle
- MUST HAVE WEBLOGIC 10.3.5
PLUSSES:
- C/C++
- Perl
So, the recruiter goes around spamming folks, and manages to find someone who's just hit their 12-month limit at BigCo and is open to find another position. The recruiter gets paid, the contractor may or may not like the position (but gets paid, anyway), and the hiring manager gets bagels brought in, courtesy of the recruiter's firm. Everyone wins, so to speak. That's why the cycle persists.
I'm describing this as someone who played that game successfully for many years. To someone who's working in startup circles it may seem like madness, and it would be if applied to startups. But it's how Fortune 500 companies, for better or worse, find talent.
To put it in startup terms, the third-party recruiter model seems to work well for companies who've found their business model and need people to execute it. For companies who are in a race to iterate and find a product-market fit, it's the kiss of death. Skip the free bagels, delete the emails and find people on your own or with internal recruiters who really know your company well.
Big companies have a specific reason for going with contract employees. It gives them (the company) a legal separation from the person who would otherwise have been an employee. That person can be unceremoniously dumped out onto the street if things aren't working out, and the company is willing to pay extra for that option.
Startups can't afford to pay a 30% premium on technical help just so it's less risky to fire the bad apples. And anyway they aren't big fat targets for lawyers like big companies are - good luck finding a lawyer to take your case on contingency when you're suing a company that's having trouble making payroll.
It's early days, but if you're interested in what a MightyCV looks like then take a look at mine:
http://robeastham.mightycv.com
Hope you like the look of it, if so then feel free to sign up for the private beta on the main homepage.
It seems that this is indeed what startups are looking for. It also seems that they are generally unwilling to pay market salary. And startups don't seem willing to part with enough equity to make up the difference in the slightest if you weigh in how unlikely it is for employees to see any return on equity.
There may be a reason why these jobs are hard to fill.
I'm personally interested in this because I know first hand about the bottom of EV-comp curve: I personally enjoy working at really early-stage companies, have little in the way of expenses (27yo DINK), but don't have enough saved to start my own thing (payed off 50k in student loans last year).
It feels somewhat akin to working at game companies: Working in the industry is glamorized, so young and energetic people flock to it and get relatively shafted on the margins. My job is nowhere near as bad as working at somewhere like EA, but it's not unlike it either.
I won't be doing this for much longer though, as the market isn't changing fast enough. Next time it's co-founder or series C+. In-between I always feel like I'm being had, to a degree.
Regards, TDL
1. They email or call me, and I send my resume and short summary of what I want.
2. They send me streams of awesome jobs. (Two have sent bad jobs, but gmail has
a hotkey for that :D )
3. I say I want to talk to XYZ at one of these times, and they hustle to make it
happen.
4. They tell me little nuggets like "The last guy I placed here made $X"
It's probably worth putting up a blog post somewhere about it :-)
That really is asking for everything. I hope you have figured out a way to explain your value proposition to these dream candidates.
Does networking work better (than hiring a recruiter) when recruiting for startups? Do you come to places like HN to build relationships?
It seems you'd have to win people over 1-to-1 -- get them to believe in your vision and culture enough that they'd join you, in spite of all the risk -- which takes time and energy (both worth it) as well as a keen understanding of where to go to find dream talent (tough).
Shameless Plug which is why we built Meeteor.com - our aim is to get you warm introductions into the companies you're interested in, through your friends.
Are there people who really want to work at all hours? Maybe eager students right out of college.
Personally, I'm at the point where if I'm going to be working at all hours, I'd better be one of the primary beneficiaries of that work.
Too introverted to be really aware of their market value and have a life and smart enough that they're going to be obsessed with the work and work at it all the time.
Considering I'm having a hard time finding "reasonably competent" Rails devs, I can't imagine how you might hire for that kind of position.
There were many people drawn by the allure of finance back in 2006-2008 and are now thinking of leaving. Generally people have enough money to carry themselves for some time on a low salary, have the risk tolerance (after all, they can cover themeselves), and can work at all hours.
I directed her to adobe.com so she could see the correct spelling. She went oh crap, I've been throwing away all the resumes with ColdFusion because the employer spelled it Cold Fusion.
No wonder the client is complaining to me about the low quality of candidates that I am sending them. She promised to get me an interview with them but never called back.
I've considered putting together a training course for tech recruiters - something like a one day bootcamp to familiarize them with specific tech, so they know the diff between java and javascript, for example. but... need to find the time to do that on top of everything else!
Also, there are a ton of bad recruiters, just like there are a ton of bad engineers. There are awesome recruiters out there and the sample of those who have cold called you rather than going through trusted channels is likely strongly biased towards the bad.
Searching for work at a startup has been a protracted, fruitless process. They have no problem conversing with you and checking out your background over coffee, lunch, whatever. After a few conversations and a technical interview, you find out there isn't a good fit.
Rinse and repeat for any number of tech startups, and you'll be waving goodbye to a month or two of your life.
Has anyone else had this experience? To me, the whole recruiting process is f'kd on both sides.
If you keep getting contacted by companies for interviews, but fail to get past that stage, I would recommend two things. 1. Make absolutely sure that your resume is accurate. If, in the interview, it looks like you 'embellished' your qualifications on your resume a bit too much, it is guaranteed to get you tossed into the 'no' pile. 2. Work on your interview skills. It is surprising how bad some people interview. It took me a couple practice tries before I really became comfortable with the process.
To understand why, think about what we hope to happen. If we do things right, then anybody we hire today will be a de-facto leader two years from now, because they're one of the people who's been around since the early days. Any code they write will be in core parts of the system. And they're going to have a big effect on who we can hire next, because potential hires are going to judge our company partly by them.
We definitely try not to waste anybody's time. But we also don't want to miss a good candidate; some really solid programmers don't interview well. But as soon as we're sure, we politely stop the process and thank them for their time.
If you keep getting passed over, however, I can see how that starts to really mount up.
I regret not saying anything. The company's idea was to disregard experience in favor of people who put in long hours. Unsurprisingly, the people in charge were young and inexperienced. The company no longer exists.
Thanks for the tough love--I'm going to focus on getting that experience.
They just keyword search resumes.
Then again, that's a one-time experience. But my time with the recruiter was as wasteful as time spent posting my resume on Monster and other job sites.
That is a double-edged sword, though, so be careful with it.
The recruiter (or any mediator) is a valuable tool to help the weaker side of a negotiation close a deal. Know which side you are.
But it took a lot of contacts with different recruiters to land each of those jobs. Among my favorite experiences was the guy who asked me, "Have you ever heard of x, inc?
"Uh, I worked for x, inc. and it is listed on my resume."
I have a couple of conclusions.
1. All it takes is no regular job, a cellphone, a computer, and an account on a resume board to be a recruiter - and it shows.
2. The vast majority of recruiters stand between you and the job because they have no relationship with the company hiring and therefor you are more expensive to hire and more of a PITA to hire because the recruiter is trying to get his cut (and if she doesn't get it, you will get the "company isn't interested" phone call from the recruiter).
3. Really good recruiters are a valuable resource, know their industry and players, and won't put just any warm body forward in hopes of a score - they will screen the hell out of you.
I learned the first question to ask a recruiter is about their contract with the employer - the good one's have no hesitation describing their relationship. The bad one's waffle.
Or at least they do in my idealized fantasy world, where the role of HR is to acquire, foster, encourage, and compensate talent.
It's particularly useful to use recruiters to find freelancers (mileage varies a lot of course).
There has to be a better way to do tech recruiting.
I have been honored to survive this tough economical climate in the confines of a corporate recruiting gig for a technically forward high frequency trading firm in my hometown of Houston. Over the last few years I know more recruiters who have lost their jobs than I can count, some have lost their homes and their families. Does this sound familiar to anyone, maybe say the days of 2001 for the tech set?
If the stories I have heard our true (I got into the biz in '04) developers making 150/hr one day are banging on recruiters doors begging for interviews the next.
So ya, I get it, some recruiters have zero technical skills, know little to nothing about the job/client but at their core they are human beings. And just maybe, the client doesn't have a lot to sell at the moment, maybe they are still working out the kinks to their "value proposition" but they know they are onto something.
So ignore the calls, politely say you aren't interested but remember, the tides can turn…quickly. The recruiter who doesn't know squat about server level architectural may be next door neighbors to someone who has enough funding to throw you a bone.
I'm sure it gets annoying when they frequently receive emails about "Technically Forward High Frequency Trading Firms" from recruiters who happened to find them through playing buzzword bingo.
These recruiters tout that this new "opportunity" will give more money, benefits, responsibility, good looks, and sexual prowess, but never do the due diligence to make sure that their client is actually a good fit.
It's the shotgun approach that most recruiters use that turns good developers off.
Maybe once these recruiters treat developers with more respect, so will they.
I suppose I am interested in a solution oriented debate. I hear how you don't like be contacted, how can we do it better?
Oh, and a technically forward HFT means that we are using decently cutting edge stuff, HPC, low latency code, etc. As for offering you better looks and sexual prowess I think I have to opt out on that one. If you find that job, let me know I will send it to a few ex boyfriends. :)
Imagine if someone called you everyday to help you find a local gas station and then charged the gas station 20% of all gas you bought from them in 1 year. You already know about all the gas stations within a 1 mile radius from your house and you're not interested in any gas stations outside of that.
Like the article said once you start looking at larger companies and more entry level developers the market gets much larger and could use the help of recruiters to increase efficiency.
As a recruiter myself, understanding the what it is like to be a developer and connecting on the "what makes them tick" level is important. Going to meetups and getting immersed in the startup scene is great, but going the extra mile will have long lasting impact. I am a non technical guy, but over the years, I have tried my best to learn code myself. HTML, CSS, Ruby. Just leveraging the vast amount of learning tools on the internet makes this possible. Although I might never be an employable programmer, I have had a lot of great chats with developers on my own experiences and that breaks the ice and creates trust immediately.
I'm a Tech Recruiter in London and I work hard to keep myself in that 10% bracket and I blog regularly about the horrible state of the recruitment industry. Most of the arguments on this page are valid and the large brush we've been painted with is deserved.
She then asked me to explain what Ruby on Rails was, how it related to other technologies and was it popular because a lot of people seemed to be asking for it.
Of course I explained the best I could, to make the world a better place and all that, but it seems (as other commenters have pointed out) that there could be a real niche for techies to run a recruiting firm that know what they're talking about.
I'd love to do that. What would such a company look like?
A recruiter is completely incapable of determining who is a good fit or of asssessing talent, and traditional compensation models (x% of annual salary, paid on hire) are not aligned with succession outcomes for business.
Recruiters are superior to staff at one thing: maintaineding a Rolodex. They have no ability to choose competently from that Rolodex, though.
If you have good PR and a good jobs page, you don't need a generic recruiter.
But at the end of the day, a recruiter that is in tune with the market, cold calling should really make up less than 20% of their "deal" flow. Great hires are made through referrals, and great recruiters gets constant networking referrals to keep their pipelines full and their days busy. If the recruiter is doing their job, either they are getting warm leads from their networks when jobs are broadcasted, or their networks is referring strong talent to them.
Like a lawyer or accountant that desires to create a reputable brand in a particular marketplace, recruiters needs to see themselves as resources within this marketplace and not view recruiting as purely a transactional game. From my experience, just because I don't collect a fee does not make a relationship unsuccessful. Providing great customer service and building strong relationships will usually evolve into mutually beneficial interactions in subsequent years.
Recruiter "I have a great role for you as a Ruby developer!"
Me: "Do you have a copy of my CV?"
Recruiter: "Yes indeed, I have it on my screen right now!"
The word "Ruby" does not appear on my CV, at all. This has happened to me more times than I can remember; with Ruby, C++, C# and a whole bunch of other things not mentioned anywhere on my CV.
You don't even need to have heard of a technology (never-mind understand it) to narrow candidates down more than this.
Then again, since wherever resumes of mine that are still floating around are so old, a shot in the dark like this has a higher chance of working than your situation, where I assume your resume is reasonably up to date.
I guess this is slightly better than what you're seeing since they're at least in the ballpark, but still horribly annoying. It just gets marked as spam for me.
If I were you, I might change the title of your post to be more specific on the type of recruiters you are referring to.
You either do the recruitment in-house and absorb all the risk to your business, which means lots of extra interviews, staff looking through high volumes of paperwork, etc. Or you hand it over to a third party, pay them nothing for the process (i.e. they take on the risk) but then pay highly for results.
And with out sourcing product, unlike annoying recruiters - we send very little but high quality candidates that are pre-screened.
The bottom line: you're right. There are a LOT of "bad apples" out there spoiling the names of the decent Recruiters. One person here said they've never had a call from a good Recruiter; that's because we know better. I don't call people for jobs they're not suited for. In fact, I rarely call Techies at all; you don't answer your phones.
Anyway, it's NOT always the Recruiter that sucks, as I demonstrated here: http://bit.ly/pokYV1
Loved this discussion though. Thank you all for solidifying so many of my beliefs.
I'd be interested in wow do other companies hire without a recruiter.
The problem also lies in the fact that many recruitment agents get paid a woeful base salary, the rest being topped up by commission payments based on successful candidates they pass on. So it's in their interest to ring as many people as possible and put forward as many people as they can because there's a good chance they'll get a "bite" somewhere down the line
- listening - industry knowledge - politeness
Now, a new recruiter might not have much industry knowledge, but you can pick up listening skills and politeness (for any given culture) in a myriad of jobs. Why don't they have these valuable skills?
Recruiters aren't very good at recognizing people who would be good recruiters...
I've had great experiences with experienced recruiters at a startup, to help us find candidates, while at the same time getting pounded by unethical, moronic agencies.
The recruiter helped us wade through hundreds of CV's, and eventually found an awesome Stanford CS MS that we ended up hiring. And this was while the recruiter worked for us as a contractor, so no 30% salary fee.
So a great recruiter is worth their weight in gold, because they can potentially find that perfectly fitting candidate, giving a boost to a fledgling startup. Unfortunately, such recruiters a far and few between.
Opposed to that, I got daily calls from agencies, that weaseled their way past our operators to talk to me directly, being super aggressive and downright rude when I politely told them to stop calling. This all, of course, because of the 30% fee salary fee when they place someone.
or individuals? I'm horrendous at selling myself and (now that I've been unemployed for >6 months) would gladly pay a ridiculous amount for someone to coach me through getting a job. I keep telling people that I'd like an agent. Everyone takes it as a joke :/
It'll cost far less than a recruiter, and I'll refund you if you don't find someone.
I've got enough designers (about 250) compared to the number of job offers currently on the site, so I've decided to close sign-ups for now.
For what it's worth, I agree wholeheartedly with the majority of the article. Recruiters who focus on start-ups are wasting their own time as well as the start-up's time. Yes there are a huge number of start-ups hiring and yes some will engage recruiters but the vast majority don't have the budget.
I would happily wager a months salary on the fact that 99.9% of recruiters don't understand how a tech start-up works and even if they make the effort to learn, every start-up is different with their own individual challenges and quirks and it requires an immense amount of time and effort to truly understand what these companies need. No recruiter will invest that level of time. Instead they will throw a few CV's at the role and hope something sticks.
I'm giving a talk at Hacker News London tomorrow night and the topic is 'Recruiting for start-ups'. It's a brief talk on how to improve your chances of finding the right people for your start-up and how to keep them. At no point do I even attempt to suggest they engage a recruiter, in fact I strongly encourage them not to.
Maybe sponsor a relevant meeting by buying the pizza/beer for it. This buys you the opportunity to give a company introduction and let people know you're hiring. Very cheap advertising.
meetup.com is probably the generic place to look for these types of meetings, but every city probably has its own, better site. In Seattle, among others, we have http://www.seattletechcalendar.com/ and http://www.seattle20.com/ among probably others.
Sitting in your office waiting for resumes/cover letters is the absolute worst way to try to get people. It also leaves you with only an interview to get to know the potential hire, while at the meeting you may find out all sorts of desirable or undesirable characteristics about them. Additionally you may get input from that person's peers.
An onsite interview is 4-hour sell meeting: sell your coworkers on the candidate, and sell the candidate on the coworkers and office and etc.
If you aren't pretty confident in a hire before the onsite, the onsite won't help.
Zappos has built a great brand that attracts candidates. I've known people who've read Tony Hsieh's book, then wanted to join them.
There are lots of startups that not only have some good buzz in the press, but also have outspoken founders & employees that - whether they've consciously thought about this or not - have crafted a desirable impression of their company. What attracts you doesn't necessary attract someone else, but I've heard colleagues saying they'd love to work for Justin.tv, Hipmunk, AirBnB, Quora, Codecademy, DuckDuckGo, etc.
Some of that is because they personally love & use those products. And some of that is because they love & follow the cofounders.
Share with the world your thoughts, your culture, and how your product is making the world (or at least, your industry) a better place, and you'll have a better shot at attracting great people.
Interview confirms that your resume wasn't full of BS: 10-20 pts
You can perform skills A,B,C on a whiteboard or laptop interview session: 20-50 pts
1 year of seeing you exhibiting skills A,B, and C under real world conditions and interacting with other people: 100-300 pts
No matter how unfair this seems, if you have the same skills as someone in my network, they have an almost impossible to overcome advantage in my hiring equations.
Yes you might lose someone who could be a star, but no system is perfect.
Hiring someone just because you know them is simply wrong, but giving them a chance because they've shown you an aptitude relevant to the position should not be seen as unfair IMO.
I managed to convince them to hire me, but for a mediocre salary (for me, I was still earning in some cases twice what my fellow graduate friends were) and spent 14 months trying to get that raised (pointless at the time, but I was naive, needed a job and ultimately I loved the work and the people were cool)
My boss there landed a job with another company running the department and asked me to come on as CTO-of-sorts of the department and I got the money I had wanted, no interview (I met with the CEO) and all the autonomy I had wanted/needed.
I've hired a couple dozen top engineers since then and been part of two acquisitions (as the acquirer) and I can tell you that you don't _really_ know what someone's like until they work. What I'm looking for is character + intelligence. Smart and get things done. Whatever you want to call it. The Get Things Done part is the bit that's so bloody difficult to tell.
I've seen people who I did not expect to be rock stars come in and just kill it. They were never put in a position to succeed before and suddenly they've gotten the ball and they're just running with it. There's one guy in particular I'm thinking of who worked for a BigCo and his technical acumen was good (not brilliant or exceptional, just good). I didn't hire him, but he just got it. He does what it takes to get the job done (and then some) and figures out what he needs along the way. I've had guys with excellent references (some from people I know) come in and do mediocre. I've seen candidates that were brilliant end up being a menace around the office.
Saying that it's unfair that you're not being given a shot is not recognising what is happening at the other side of the table - a complete imprecise science of judging people's ability to be brilliant (or even good) based on interview scenarios. You need to do things to increase your value and remove as much of the unknown quantity as possible (network, volunteering, meetups, hacker weekends, open source code, portfolios - whatever is relevant to you).
As a startup - I would take a KNOWN quantity each and every time. You are unknown in this situation. If you are good, in the future the tables will be turned and you will be known. The difference is you cannot manufacture these situations easily, no more than you can manufacture who you will marry. Espouse your best qualities, do great work (which isn't just limited to the code you write, servers you maintain, designs you produce etc.) and you will be a known quantity to people in the future.
You sound like you're young (at least job experience wise), not that I'm particularly old - business is people. People are business. Reputation is everything in your circles and if you're good, you'll start to build a rep and that will become extremely valuable and open doors for you.