How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
thisisgoingtobebig.com
thisisgoingtobebig.com
As a company gets larger (~series A) there comes a sudden crunch wherein you need 10 developers, yesterday. At that moment, if you haven't laid down the ground work for a successful recruiting/hiring strategy you can experience a very lossy hiring process. You'll miss out on great opportunities to companies who have spent the time, money and effort to make their process efficient.
To the articles recommendations, I would add the following:
- For top tier talent, recruiting is more like sales: you need to sell your company to the recruit, not vice versa.
- For each requisition do the following: decide what the relevant skills/requirements for the position, decide who on the interview team will assess each of those skills, train your interviewers to spend 1/2 their time selling the company and why they love working there and 1/2 their time grilling the applicant on their focus area. This forces you to think critically about what you're looking for (forces understanding of the org chart) and gives each person agency in the process (I'm in charge of sussing out algorithmic ability).
- Corollary to the above: train your interviewers. Make sure they know what they're looking for both culturally and technically, and make sure they have the ability to assess those properties (or lack thereof). Interviewers are your company's brand emissaries (and the source of many candidates) if they can't communicate well the recruits will come away with a bad experience.
- Track things: I think of recruiting like sales. If a VC asked you how your sales was going you wouldn't say something like "OK", you'd have numbers, metrics, graphs, funnels, pipelines, etc etc. Though this can feel a bit overkill in the beginning, getting in the habit of monitoring your candidate pipeline is extremely important as you scale. Small inefficiencies become enshrined as 'best practice' and as you scale they can turn into huge holes for your organization. This is exactly the type of problem we're trying to mitigate/measure by bringing the traditional applicant tracking system into the inbox at www.foundryhiring.com.
Thanks for the feedback on pricing. We are going to add a tier below enterprise and compete in the JobVite territory. In the mean time we offer 30 day free trial on all plans and a 75% off coupon for early beta users: HN75PCT.
Our initial beta customers have been working really close with me and the rest of the team to shape the product. So, the benefits have been around automating parts of the process that are annoying and manual right now. An example: most of our customers have one centralized person (out of 10-40 in the company) that does all the scheduling, sourcing, coordinating with recruiters. We looked at her process (done in google docs) and tried to automate as much as possible. The result: you can now schedule interviews directly from our gmail widget, select a person from your org, a candidate, and a time and we book the meeting on the respective calendar, notify the interviewer about the interview, send them the resume/coverletter and evaluation form and then bug them every 24 hours after the interview to ensure the feedback is logged. The estimate was that by simplifying this process to 3-4 clicks we save her ~ 20 hours of annoying work per week.
The tool has been built around simplifying work flows like this. We're still hashing out all of them, but our central thesis is: 99% of recruiting time is done through the inbox so why doesn't your ATS/CRM live there with you. Over the next couple weeks we're moving the functionality from the web app into the gmail inbox, when that is done we'll officially launch.
Honestly, I think the main benefits of Foundry are as follows:
- We've studied workflows across dozens of companies from Palantir to Facebook to small companies and built the tool around optimizing workflow and collecting data.
- When you come to us we have an out of the box process that works well (we'll show you data) that is somewhat customizeable to your particular company's process. So you start with a good base and the tool reinforces good behavior. This is the part of the tool we're building on the most: how to convey/reinforce best practices in the hiring process.
- Everything is in your inbox: no context switching/learning a new system.
- In the early stage I work closely with all our customers and as we learn new best practices/tips we pass those on to you.
- Lastly, I honestly think that using something like Foundry forces you to think critically about your process (as opposed to winging it), by giving you a framework you end up with a process that works more efficiently.
Our hope is that once we get more data around hiring we can push that knowledge out to everyone, so that company's stop losing hires due to the problems listed above. If you have any questions about your process or want some friendly advice about what you're doing well/poorly I'd be happy to chat, email in my signature.
This one is important. Recruitment leaves impressions on the candidates. You better make sure the impressions are positive ones, because they matter a lot.
The world is small. An unsuccessful candidate might get successful elsewhere. Their opinion about your company might soon affect its future. Other candidates passing on your offer because they heard your process sucks is just the most obvious and immediate way, obviously there are others.
Palantir is another company that does this well at Stanford. Those track jackets/t-shirts they wear are cultural symbols that give interns/employees status and spark conversations about the company. These 'little' things carry a lot of weight especially in the tight-packed network of university dorms.
In contrast, I was able to join a start-up within three weeks of beginning my search in 2010 in Beijing... and that was before I had any professional experience. They made the decision on the basis of a couple of interviews and a couple of retro flash games I'd done as a hobby project.
Incidentally, if anyone in SF is looking for someone who can code and a proven record of hustle, my contact info is on my profile page.
The thing is, the GP is only about hiring the magic people super fast - as soon you see them, yeah! Which isn't going to make more magic people.
The hire-ers might just think about making their process a bit wider rather than chasing the same things over and over again. Give more people a chance to show some ability rather than passing the same mantra about A-players back and forth.
Of course this requires time and training, which some start-ups feel they can't afford. In the end I think it's worth it to focus on finding talent that can learn quickly rather than emerge from Zeus's brain fully-formed.
The last place I worked for (government) was maddening in this respect. We'd find a great candidate and HR would delay or otherwise jerk them around, and then have the gall to be shocked when the person accepted another offer.
In my recent job search the company I joined had a written offer to me within a day or two. Others contacted me weeks later with offers, even after I told them I was considering multiple offers at the time.
I don't think most candidates will tell you that, but that's likely the case. You snooze, you lose. There aren't many reasons you can't make an offer within a week after an interview.
What's still just as difficult is building the right team - my personal pain point is university recruiting, but it's bad across the board. If you're a startup that's expanding beyond the second or third round of technical hires the ability to draw on your network becomes increasingly limited as you've likely tapped out all your personal connections at this point, and your team's calendar still resembles one of the world's worst games of Tetris [1].
Traditional recruiting agencies are poor at matching technical hires with opportunities that are interesting to them because most recruiters are non-technical. GitHub profiles are worthless if the hiring manager (Read: /founders?/) have no time to read them, and dealing with phone screens and in-person interviews and arranging travel for candidates is a huge distraction from what they should be focusing on, building their business [2]. There's a huge potential for upset in the space, and I look forward to seeing a managed hiring provider that manages the scheduling, very initial matching of candidates, and once a hire is made follows-through with assistance on all of the ensuing paperwork and documentation.
[1] http://media.edge-online.com/files/imagecache/article/tetris...
[2] Hiring is one component of building a company, one of the most important even, but it is a distraction. In an idyllic world perfect employees seek you out and apply ;)
The bright hope for me is darwinian: if enough startups refuse to use these pay and sprayers then they will die off, leaving only the higher quality recruiters. Will that happen? Not any time soon.
In my personal experience, smaller, tech-heavy focus startups are quick to make an offer for technical candidates.
However business roles take much longer, partly because its not clear if the company needs a full-time person running marketing, sales or business development, and because the new hire can add to "product-market" fit noise.
It's the difference between companies who really know what they're looking for, and those who the "best" person but aren't quite sure what that is.
The former will hire as soon as they meet somebody who can do the job.
The latter will dither until they have a few possibles. Then dither some more weighing up the various pros and cons... by which time their best candidate has gone.
In the worst cases they then reject all their other candidates (since they're "worse" than the best candidate they've just lost) and start the whole process again!
It astounds me how hard many organizations can find it to answer that ?, though. Even if you set up a company that espoused a "we'll hire as many smart people as we can get" policy, you could still say "Immediately, we need someone to work on the performance of our frobnosticator, so they'll need to know Java classloaders REALLY well." That's specific enough that you can know "we found our engineer" when they show up, and doesn't use a lame proxy for knowledge like years of experience (there are certainly Java developers out there with 15 years of experience who know nothing about classloaders).
For smaller companies, they most likely don't have the resources to keep in touch with everyone. For me, this is the main value of an Applicant Tracking System: making sure no one falls through the cracks. That being said, most small companies don't have them, so they are relying on their memory + spreadsheet to carry them through.
If you're working through an external recruiter: talk to them, they have every incentive to push you through the pipeline and have a direct read on the process.
If you have a contact in the company or you met with someone in person: send them a quick follow up email is enough to move the pipeline usually.
If you've blind applied: then I would suggest sending them a quick note to get back onto their priority queue. Whomever is in charge of the process WANTS to respond to everyone, but if they don't see a fresh email sitting in their inbox, they quite possibly have forgotten that you're in the pipeline.
Also as mentioned below, pursuing many job opportunities in parallel is good for you and can be a great forcing-function/bargaining chip in late-stage hiring processes.
Also, keep looking. A successful interview, even with reassurances from your contacts that things are moving along, isn't worth very much. If you get another offer in this period, you have a lot more options.
This communicates you have options, and that they are going slower than you'd like. Clearly this only works in certain situations and can be dangerous if executed poorly.