How to hire your first employees | Hacker News Reader

How to hire your first employees

blog.lob.com

47 pointsharryzhang30 comments

This is pretty messed up. You make the potential employee do a one week trial run and then you make an offer?

Maybe I'm missing something but if you quit your job to do a one week trial run you've lost a great deal of your negotiating power.

Its also been pointed out many times that many employment agreements would forbid this work with another company while employed meaning that you'd have to quit to do the trial period.

Please, please,

1) never do a one week trial run unless you are really desperate for a job. I won't tell someone never to do something as individual situations are always different.

2) if you do a trial run, make sure the employment agreement is finalized before you do it. If you negotiate salary and benefits after you quite your previous job then you've got a much better chance of losing this negotiation.

A question to pose to companies that do this.

I've said a few times now that this type of policy means that you won't be hiring the top 10-20% of developers as I don't believe that they'd put up with this type of behaviour.

Do you disagree?? or do you agree and realize that your company doesn't need the very best developers but you want to make sure you are dead right on the developers that you do hire?

I've phrased the above to sound as neutral as I could, I'm trying to get some honest feedback not start a flame war:)

> As such, we make sure to let them know where we stand in terms of funding, cash, revenue, and other important metrics.

This on the other hand impresses me a great deal. To me transparency is the sign of good management.

Trial runs are fine if you get paid for that week regardless. I'd never give up a week for free.

> > Its also been pointed out many times that many employment agreements would forbid this work with another company while employed meaning that you'd have to quit to do the trial period.

> Trial runs are fine if you get paid for that week regardless. I'd never give up a week for free.

But you would violate an employment agreement (and possibly state/local law, but the whole "doing something that violates an explicit agreement I've made with my current employer" part is what grabs me) ?

Well, if you are a consultant or freelancer, you can do this one week trial run in case it's paid. You can always decline job offer afterwards if it doesn't meet your rates for a long term project.

And for the vast majority of the programming world that is neither, well, we didn't want to hire them anyway?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6698444

Hi all - sorry it was unclear. Our trial runs are not necessarily one week. In most cases candidates have full time jobs and can't commit that much time. It's usually 2 days (over weekend) or late afternoon for a couple hours.

Post has been updated to reflect this. Most our candidates actually appreciate the personal experience and we don't just bring anybody into a trial run unless we're already mostly sure we're ready to make an offer. I think that everyone who has gone through the process thus far can speak positively on it. It isn't just a one sided street, candidates can get a sense for whether THEY will like the job, team, and culture at the company as well.

Other people have done similar things (longer timeframes even) with good success. See David w/Weebly: http://www.sequoiacap.com/grove/posts/akzj/trial-week-our-hi...

How do you handle IP issues with candidates that already have full-time jobs? If it were me, for example, I don't mind hacking on something for a weekend (it's frequently what I do anyway), but Google owns any code I write. If you try to incorporate that into a real project you are in for a hell of a legal mess.

Why would you agree to such an unequal arrangement? If that is true, the entire output of your brain is literally owned by a corporation.

(You probably have a "own time/own materials" exception if you're in California or if they are non-pathological in their employment agreements.)

Because the entire input to my brain is owned by me, once it's recombined with all the stuff that's already there. And that input is significantly higher than it would be if I were contracting or working for a small startup. There is value in working in a really big pond, with some of the best in the world, on a variety of projects that are all pushing the cutting edge of what's possible in their fields. If I ever leave Google, I'll have this toolbox of techniques that'll make me much more effective than the other folks in the startup melting pot. Think of it as a very practical grad school education where they pay me a bunch of money and I get hands-on experience instead of boring classwork.

I do have a "own time/own materials/not along the lines of business" exception, but the problem is that Google is in so many lines of business that that could be construed to apply to everything.

It would be cool if any in Lob could answer how they deal with these kind of situations, cause I guess they have already experienced some of them.

I think if the project is contributed to open source and is independent of what both company does then this can work out.

A one-week trial run seems like a very bad idea to me. I wouldn't even consider going through such a long interview process. It's basically a low-pass filter on your candidate pool - maybe that's the goal?

a low-pass filter? it attenuates high frequencies from the candidate pool?

i.e. people that are desperate enough to submit to it aren't going to be your "rockstars".

The idea of a "trial week" can probably upset some applicants, but that's not necessarily always the case. An applicant who feels confident about the culture fit and his/her skills may very well think that there's little to no downside risk starting through a trial.

In addition, the trial week also works the other way around, where applicants can determine if their initial gut feeling about the company is right. If not, there's an easy way out, and the worst case scenario is a loss of a vacation week - not unemployment.

Sure it's reasonable in one instance. But what if every company started instituting these trial week scenarios? Then it quickly becomes untenable. There's just no rational basis for an applicant to "feel confident" in anything that isn't in writing. This scenario is designed specifically to give the employer even more power and leverage in a hiring transaction. The only people who would be willing to jump through such hoops are kids fresh out of college or otherwise desperate folks. It certainly isn't going to bias your hiring process towards "rockstars".

"Rockstars" probably aren't going through traditional hiring funnels anyway, so don't worry about that.

A negotiated trial period is typically good for both sides and probationary fire-at-will periods are often much longer anyway. A one-week trial could be better for the employee if they can go back to their existing job.

However, it should be negotiated on both sides, I agree with that.

I guess that was obscure - I meant it selects for the candidates with few other options, i.e. a weak resume.

from the companies I know that work with trials, they have ~66% hire rate

That's great for the both of 'em, what about the other guy who quit his job and was not hired? He's now out at least 1 month salary as he needs to start from scratch.

> As such, we make sure to let them know where we stand in terms of funding, cash, revenue, and other important metrics.

As someone who has interviewed with a number of companies in recent days I really appreciate this. One company I interviewed with went as far as to tell me how much runway they have in an initial phone screen. That's taking things pretty far, but for an early stage (ie pre-series A) company everyone knows your runway is measured in months anyway (unless you have significant revenue) so it's nice to know how soon the company is going to be getting into fundraising.

Considering the company is run by first time founders with virtually no hiring experience, I don't understand why they were compelled to write a post on how to hire.

I can't speak about the other guys, but Leore is not a first time founder. We've hired interns, contractors and employees at our last company together. [1]

[1] Leore and I were co-founders together at hangtrend/dress.me

It's an increasingly popular form of advertising for startups that would otherwise not be very relevant to HN, they were compelled by the easy traffic, the tiny sliver of 'growth' and the backlinks.

Harry, do you pay the prospective employees during the trial run? The blog post implies that it's a week long, ("We’ve been able to spot problems during the week..."). While the information gained by both parties during a week of working together is no doubt very valuable for them both, a week is a long time to work for no pay.

EDIT: Oh, I see your edit, these trials runs typically aren't a full week long. But in any case, if someone is going to give up a substantial amount of time, I hope you pay them for it.

got it, you are hiring.

Young hackers love Lob. These guys will have no problem hiring.

> The first 2 employees we hired were people that we have previously lived/worked with

lived with

at this moment, this early, I can predict I'm reading "wise" career/entrepreneurial advice by a 20-something, at best, most likely

I stop reading

Good stuff. I'm going to try these.

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