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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Referrals - Referrals tend to be a really fantastic way to bring people in and should be the first place you go. If you leverage each of your first ten hires’ networks, chances are you’ll meet some excellent candidates. When done right, internal and external referrals can scale your company pretty efficiently. Sit down and get your engineers to physically list out the best and smartest people they’ve ever worked with and then go after them with crazy intensity. As an added bonus, referral candidates might be easier to close because a friend’s recommendation goes a long way.

Does anyone here (besides Stripe) do this? Systematically meet with team members to get lists of recruiting targets? What does "go after them with crazy intensity" mean?

This is Stripe's most successful recruiting channel so I'd definitely like to understand it better!

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The company I worked for in the past, its founder was good friends with a CS college professor. And I'm told the founder asked the prof. if there were any particular students who were "relentlessly good", and then the founder would go full-force to get them.

I got to work with one of the guys who was hired this way... ohh boy was he something. The most important lesson I got out of that was there are students in B-tier schools that easily are more capable than A-tier schools any day of the week -- I suspect the reason the founder of the company took this approach was that you'd get workers who're extremely capable, but would accept a lower salary than MIT grads are expected to (because, yes, at some point I asked the guy how much he was making and I remember my jaw just dropped on the floor at how little the amount he said was).

As a B-tier school student looking for a silicon valley internship, this is extremely comforting to hear.

That you'll make less money than people with the same skill set?

No, that our resumes aren't always thrown out.

I've never hired anyone nor been employed at a Silicon Valley company but this isn't banking so don't worry too much about people throwing out your resume because of where you went to school.

Yeah, a CS degree isn't judged the same way an MBA is.

As a C or D-tier school student, I'm jealous :p

Not aimed at you specifically, but in no particular order...

* Fill out your profile

* List your interesting projects

* Have interesting projects

* Expect to be asked in a job interview, "so, what's your username on hacker news/stack overflow/whatever else" and post accordingly. (statements that are dumb in retrospect are fine; being an asshole all the time isn't).

Again, in no way aimed at you specifically; but I'm constantly reading comments about job search and thinking, "I wonder what he/she is all about", click on their profile and... nothing.

I come from a no-tier satellite school, and I applied to two different startups in the valley. I did research and different internships, and had a github portfolio. I made it to a 4th and final interview, where they unfortunately decided I wasn't a good fit. Point is, they'll definitely look at you if you show them a decent portfolio.

I don't have a technical education so I'm not sure what differentiates here-- could I get some examples of A versus B tiered schools (besides the obvious A schools like MIT/Stanford)

Purdue, Duke, Vanderbilt and so on I would consider B-tier.

I went to a B-tier school. Interestingly, I recently learned that one of my smartest friends only applied to one school (Stanford) and got rejected, and afterward applied to the school I went to because it was only 10 miles away from where he lived.

While we're on the subject, one other thing --

There's a lot of Russians, Indians etc. who recently came here and have poor English, and so a lot of people just look past them. But a lot of them are the most persevering and focused folks you'll ever meet, and in my experiences they learn English quickly enough anyway (considering they got to America before they were 15 years old or so).

The way I'd define it in terms of engineering schools:

A-Tier: International reputation for engineering

B-Tier: The school is known internationally (or nationally in the U.S.) but not specifically for engineering

If you're at a B-Tier school you'll probably notice a lot of your professors did their PhD at an A-Tier school.

I say this with the caveat that obviously all manners of university ranking are highly contentious, fluid, and usually say more about the ranker than the ranked.

Purdue is B-tier? It's ranked top 10 in both undergrad and grad school (we're talking about engineering, of course).

Tiers are highly subjective. I know many will disagree with tiering. But Purdue is at the very least a tier below A. I'm speaking of undergrad.

We at least know it's not A tier (Harvard Princeton Stanford MIT, I think I'm missing a few). Or if you want to get even more resolution, it's not necessarily A- tier either (Berkeley, "lower" Ivies, etc.)

For Computer Science:

A-tier: MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU (in no particular order)

Purdue is B-tier?

Yes, without any doubt.

I like how you guys are arguing about A. vs B. when many of us went to schools that are in a tier so low that there aren't even enough letters to give the tier a letter-based rank. (Maybe that's why Unicode exists!)

Ehh.. don't worry about it. I don't think my grad school is in a tier either. What matters is what you do with yourself!

I'm in a same situation here.

Trust me going to a big school is as much about having rich parents, exposure and massive social/financial push from people around you as much it is about personal genius and hard work.

I would say big schools only act as a hub for smart people to gather learn from each other and become more smart.

Despite many people who go to big schools never make it big, and many people who go to small school make it big.

I worked with what i refer to as the "Croatian Coalition" at Lockheed Martin. DAMN smart people. One of my best friends is from this group and I am constantly bouncing ideas off him and seeking to find a way to work together again.

I would never underestimate the skills of anyone based on where they were from....

Also, don't overestimate the skills of someone either...

I think tiers are a bit silly. There are certainly a-tier schools like Stanford. That said, some very bright a-tier students I have met have nothing on b or c-tier school students that have a bit of life experience.

Not everyone can afford (or is willing to fork out the $$) places like Stanford.

"This year more than 3,400 of Stanford's 6,700 undergraduates [more than half] are receiving needs-based financial aid. Another 20 percent receive other types of financial aid from internal or external sources.

Stanford students from families with income below $60,000 pay no tuition, room or board. Those from families with incomes between $60,000 and $100,000 pay no tuition."

That may be true, but students at top schools still tend to come from more affluent backgrounds. Yes, there are "homeless to Harvard" stories out there, but generally speaking Harvard students were able to dedicate as much time as they wanted to school and extracurriculars and exploratory learning in high school because they weren't distracted by a difficult home life or forced to work just to help provide for their family.

I realize this isn't exactly what jmspring meant, but it is still true, in a certain sense, that not everyone can afford a top school. The difference is that the costs come before you even send out your applications.

This is exactly what I've done over the past several years with great results. I stayed in constant contact with my old college professor (we play a sport at the same club) at a school none of you have ever heard of in the Chicago suburbs. The top CS student(s) at small schools can have extremely high potential.

When you combine this with investing time in candidates via a good internship or apprenticeship program the results can be spectacular. When you are outside SV it doesn't take much to make your internship program stand out by letting your interns do full stack development on actual applications that ship.

You need to invest the time on training/mentoring/pairing to make it work though.

I think it's very normal for startups to do this with the founders and with the first few hires. I've seen several startups where there's an internal wiki or google doc created from meetings with founders/early engineers, identifying roles and "who would you suggest for these roles, and who knows them/how". Same thing done for "key initial clients" and listing who you know at each, and vendors/BD partners/distributors.

(The sad thing is when this was then passed on to a clueless HR/recruiting drone later, and the people were spammed.)

At bigger companies I've seen "recommend 2 friends" and all the standard bonuses (it's hilarious how some places offer $500 referral bonus but will pay a recruiter $25k; OTOH I know someone at Palantir who ended up making more on his $10-15k referral bonuses than he did in salary. One interesting fact is that giving an outside referrer a $500-1500 item, like an iPad or MacBook Air, is a lot more effective than the same small amount of cash. But, real ($5-25k) amounts of cash work best.)

> Does anyone here (besides Stripe) do this?

We did at Microsoft. Honestly, for very experienced and senior people in dev tools, "crazy intensity" were usually not needed. Great engineers tend to also have friends who are great engineers, who are being paid at/near the top of their current company, might have been there for the decade, and you might be the first person to contact them in a few years, since they also filter out all LinkedIn or blind recruiter mails.

YMMV outside of dev tools, of course. RoR folks are probably getting recruited for all sorts of random places, but there really aren't a lot of dev tools shops, particularly that are building large enough projects to challenge people (e.g. have their own compiler, as opposed to just IDE bits. No offense towards IDE bits intended).

I believe Patric Collison explains a little about this on this answer he gave on Quora[1]:

Most of the people who work directly on the user-facing parts of Stripe have managed products before, and enjoy the process of figuring out how they should work and what they should do. Before Stripe, Saikat and Sheena built Mockingbird. Alex built Taskforce and a number of open source projects. Amber had a long list of products under her belt. Ross founded 280 North, built 280 Slides, and co-created the Cappuccino web framework. Ludwig single-handedly designed and built Observer, a real-time web analytics tool. Ben started Kickoff. (As it happens, many people who don’t work directly on the user-facing parts of Stripe also have similar experience.)

[1] http://www.quora.com/Stripe-company/Does-Stripe-have-product...

Imagine the way some men go after a woman they're convinced is the right one. Not the sleazy "PUA" idiots. The ones who will learn her likes and dislikes, then make a concerted effort to be interesting and interested, and carefully work to avoid any faux pas. When I've seen it done well, it was elegant engineering. Find out what they're like, what they make now, what motivates them, and any mutual friends beyond the person that told you about them. Then make sure your sales pitch is "an offer they can't refuse."

When done by someone who understands people, it looks easy.

Have you done this, or seen it done well? What are some specific examples? I'm interested.

"an offer they can't refuse.". Are you sure about this?

We do (Big 4 team) - it's the only way I'll hire somebody for our team, if I have a say in it (which I normally do). I find it's FAR more effective than reading resumes sent in blindly.

We do bonus for new hires (a few $K), which helps get everybody more 'engaged' - but the main drive is to get to work with folks you respect on work you think is awesome. Our team is up to 8 new folks in the last year or so, and so far, everything has been working fantastic.

Google and Facebook both have entire teams devoted to collecting employee referrals for engineers and give bonuses to employees. I have worked with both of these teams and it is a really effective way to find people who already have the trust of someone you have on your team, which is basically the goal of interviews anyway.

The company I worked for did this, but I don't know how well formal referrals sessions performed versus referrals occurring in their natural habitat - pulling the best and brightest out of your old job is a natural inclination once you switch jobs. Also, if you were highly regarded by the people you work with, in the Valley they'll almost inevitably reach out to ask "how are things at X", so the high-quality referral traffic will happen regardless.

I've never somewhere that used that model aggressively, but at the startup I worked at during college, most of the engineering team was out of the personal networks of the founders and the head engineer. The founder expressed to me several times that he much preferred to hire people this way (and asked me to send him referrals even after I left).

I've worked at 3 startups that did this.

How did it work? Was there a formal meeting? Did it annoy people? How did the company respond once they had the list? What kind of outreach did they do? Did you get bonused for those people?

It was free form. There wasn't much to it other than on staff recruiter got the names of your bros and then harassed them with email. It annoyed people, but only as much as any other non engineering thing annoyed people. We were supposed to get bonuses but I don't think anyone did except the founder's girlfriend. We didn't actually get many people hired this way, so at least everyone was on the right track of only trying to hire those smarter than yourself.

Ok, so that's not really "going after them with crazy intensity"; it's punting the problem off to your employees. Have you ever seen this strategy done well?

It wasn't entirely pushing the burden on the employees. Each place had an ops guy or on-staff recruiter who just got the names from us and took it from there. I've not seen it done effectively first hand, but I've heard it's the way to go.

> How did it work? Was there a formal meeting? Did it annoy people?

Stripe making its workers write out a list of all the engineers they know seems a bit extreme -- I mean, generally you can just name the top 5 smartest people you know of without much thinking. That's how the company I worked for went about this. Interestingly, it made us talk to our friends, and let them know the company was looking for workers and to expect to hear from them soon, because 'I referred you to them'.

In my experience it's usually the heads offering a token amount, like $1000, for successful referrals.

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