This will be a Software Engineer, beeing a dev myself i've started to explore my network without much luck. How do you find talented people?
You should be laser focused om what this person needs to do for you not what shape they might come in or where to find them. For example, you may say "we need someone to do everything tech" which I would frame as laser focused on a generalist and then write down the attributes of someone that would fit that and start sharing it.
We used angel list jobs at the time and I posted here on the monthly "who's hiring" thread.
It is going to take a lot of time to interview. Be prepared to spend money on a recruiter ($30k and up per hire) or 50% of your week (or more) talking to folks.
As you grow your team follow the "hire when it hurts" advice and make sure you know what you are bringing another body in for because it is gonna add to communication overhead. I also recommend explaining to your team why you are hiring and what you need as you grow and dont just show up with surprise hires.
Once you get your posting out there you will get good candidates.
If you are ready to pay for great talent then I can also recommend reaching out to Recurse Center for candidates. https://recurse.com
My gmail is my username (noted in my profile) if you wanna chat.
This is great advise, thank you so much this this! I'll ping you so that you can educate me more!
If that's met, just do some advertising - I've found LinkedIn is useless, indeed.com gave better candidates, I'd try other "real" job sites like that.
Depending on your needs, consider part time as well which may be more attractive to some people.
One thing I did that worked was call my former university professors, they may know good fresh grades, postdocs etc.
I'm trying LinkedIn and i'm impressed by the amount of application I've received so far
What's your mental model about identifying / fostering commitment?
One traditional way to buy commitment is via equity. But since you also have investors, that might be a tough balancing act. I'm curious what other approaches could work.
Also, is there a viable path forward even without high commitment? E.g., can the work be structured in a manner that's resilient to occasional churn in this role?
Early stage software development is tricky, but not unique.
I think someone who’s done the role before would be more valuable than someone smart.
They are also easier to find and screen.
I'm actually the type of person that you'd want, but I'm not looking for work.
You want someone that can deliver product, and that type of person does not grow on trees. Experience will be the main factor. Maybe not as old as I am, but I have known a lot of folks in their late thirties and early forties, that have the requisite experience. These folks are the ones that are finding themselves frozen out of the job market, these days, and would probably be open to the relatively unstructured environment of an early startup (when, previously, they were not, but mortgage payments have a way of opening us up to compromise).
Unless, of course, your "product" is the company, itself. In that case, someone that plays to investor preconceptions may be more along the lines of what you want.
Where do you usually look for this kind of ppl?
After that, your usual sources should be fine. If you need help with ops, find someone that has done it before.
I would be very specific in your job application.
Don't say, "We are looking for an ops expert." Say, "We are looking for an ops engineer with experience deploying .NET core web applications to azure." From there, you should be able to verify if they have done it.
1. Hard tech: - Go to tech events in major cities (or local if you can't afford that), look out for good speakers who talk about something tricky / obscure
2. Not super hard tech: - Go to startupper events and look for the 2-3 developers among the sea of business people
In general when hiring software engineers:
Try to avoid professional employees like the plague, especially the coasters who did FANG work or anyone involved in some form of activism. You need people who gets stuff done, not talk politics (whether in the company or in the real world).
If you are going for employees, look for the ones who worked in early startups: no matter how small the startup, they must have solved the problems you'll face and hopefully they haven't been brainwashed with useless corporate crap.
When I hired for my startup employee n1 was incredibly talented - and he definitely changed the course of the startup, so pick carefully. He came from my network but it fit the startupper profile who already launched a few online businesses before.
I'm indeed looking for that attitude that you are describing. Most of my dev friends don't have it tho and i'm a bit out of idea.
I tend to avoid startup events because they are almost always full of startup gurus and very few builders, but maybe I need to actively look for the hidden gems.
Thank you so much!
Another thing you can do is go to the hackernews algolia and search of posts in your industry/domain. Find some of the smart answers with people who understand the domain deeply etc. Go to their profile see if they have some link to their twitter or something and connect with them. Again not super helpful if you are short on time. But leaving it here, for those who might like me want to find someone not in their network for some future collaboration.
You could try looking for related projects in GitHub if that makes sense for your project. Or going to local meetups. But it can be hard to find people that are open to switching jobs unless you have a very attractive offer. It's more efficient to explicitly target people looking for a job: again mostly through LinkedIn.
There's plenty of recruiting firms out there that can help if you have the budget, and some SaaS-like databases of pre-filtered candidates, often for remote work, depends on the region.
At the end of the day, recruiting is not much different from sales. You need a proper pipeline of leads and interview many people so you have real options to choose from. It's a numbers game, there is no real substitute for a proper multi-stage interview process. You can get recommendations from your network, but it's not very scalable or objective.
Plenty of smart people out there, and plenty of talented people. Sometimes those go together. You should put together a description of the product or service, specifically, and describe the person you think would contribute to your goals. Remember that frameworks and languages don't describe skills or talents -- they describe tools. Then you advertise and try to find someone you can work with and take a chance, like every other employer looking for people.
Since you wrote "employee" and not "cofounder" I assume you have a paying job available.
Lots of people looking for work right now who got through vetting at companies with some difficult hiring filters, perhaps start there. HN has a regular "who's hiring" thread.
From the being-hired side, I was hired by Chess.com when the CEO found my chess app on GitHub. I think that was one of his main hiring strategies - look for chess-related projects and get in touch with the authors.
I'm trying some platforms but usually the quality of the applicants is low, as in not the right fit for joining so early.
Thank you so much for sharing this resources!
Thank you so much for all the insights! I'll leave my contacts here in case you'd like to stay in touch. We are building a marketplace for sport communities. Our initial GTM is in BJJ/Martial Arts, if you'd like to know more ping me here: stefano[at]joinmaat.com
Although if you're dealing with out-of-network candidates, you probably have the daunting issue of effective screening.
Exactly how I'm feeling right now, i've started to job posts in some slack/discords for devs and LinkedIn, but it's very difficult to screen as we don't really have a process in place or anything structured.
We are looking for someone which is interested in our mission and would love to build it with us for $ and equity
But in your case, you can make someone an equal partner.
Working with you versus working for you might be an important difference for people in your existing network.
That's important because based on the lack of interest from people you know, the idea of working for you doesn't seem to hold much appeal.
Is your job to make yourself rich?
Or is it to make everyone rich?
All the work is ahead. Pick someone you want to make rich. If your network still balks, you've learned something important about how you've treated people. If someone jumps, you've also learned something important...in addition to what you have already learned.
And again, all the work is ahead. What you have done is sunk cost. You need another person to get the work ahead done. The best person has the same motivation as you.
Besides if you go unicorn, you will probably get rich enough slicing the money pie one more time.
Finally, your ability to identify smart is probably fallible. If you think most other people are stupid it surely is. Good luck.