Startup advice: cold recruiting
stripe.com
stripe.com
I got an email a few days ago from the CEO of a startup in SF. In the email, he followed all of the rules in this email, including trying to get face-to-face chat by offering to get coffee. I'm not really looking for a job but I am open to new opportunities, so I replied and agreed to get coffee.
The response comes from a recruiter.
What? The CEO sends me an email and then hands my response off to a recruiter? Or did the recruiter send the email on behalf of the CEO? I'm not even sure what's going on, but it's incredibly misleading. And then when I respond and politely decline to proceed further, the recruiter tries to set me up with a phone call with yet another person that isn't the original CEO.
What part of this makes sense? What happened to the original, informal face-to-face chat?
You totally blew it, dude. YOU contacted me, not the other way around. You have the burden of proof of attracting me to your company. You should be the one jumping through hoops, not me.
Would you do this bait-and-switch to your biggest customer? If the answer is yes, you probably don't need to be CEO. And if not, then why would you treat a potential team member worse than you would treat your best customer? C'mon. Be smart about this recruiting thing.
I got an recruitment email that looked to be from the CTO of a startup. From their site, it appeared to be a ~50-150-person operation, so not a case of "everyone does everything".
I was planning to respond something like, "Whoa, you're the CTO and you're recruiting people yourself? That's pretty hardcore!" (Or something less goofy, I don't know.)
I didn't, but based on your experience, it was probably some kind of trick like that.
This email from "the CEO" was well written and actually took into account my most recent activity. The combination of appearing that it came from the CEO and that they actually did some research suggested that they actually wanted me, and weren't just flooding everyone with recruitment letters. But then there was the whole bait-and-switch thing, so... I'm really frustrated right now.
This cold recruiting shit is hard. There's a really amazing opportunity here that I can't seem to sell. Guess that's why I'm the CTO, not the CEO.
If you are interested in a serious, post-seed, pre-A startup opportunity please contact me at dan.miller at orgstars.com
And if that doesn't work, we can still discuss the (intellectually dishonest) libertarian arguments against the carbon tax. I actually care about stuff like that.
Argh.
Yes.
I get contacted by a headhunter that says they know of a company looking for engineers. I go on an interview and someone at the company asks me very officiously, "Why do you want to work for this company?" I respond, "I don't know that I do want to work here. I have a job. The headhunter called me and told me there was an opportunity here so I came to check it out". The interviewer didn't say anything, but their expression was slightly shocked. I guess I was supposed to launch into a pitch about how it was always my dream to work at that company.
I think you put your finger on it. They present it to you as the CEO begging you to come work at the company. Then you start finding out it is a bait and switch, they want you to play the role of a desperate job seeker, begging some low-level manager for an opportunity to work at the company.
It's a power thing. We see CEO's here and in the tech news complain that they can't find good technical talent. Yet every part of the job process is designed to demonstrate they have the power in the relationship from the offset. They want references - before you have a job offer often, they want you to ask a favor from two to three people to sing your praises to them. If you tell them you won't give them references until it's the last step before a job offer they look surprised. Or they just hand you a form to fill out, which will be incomplete if you don't put references. They want you to come interview for hours in the middle of your work day. Often you get there and they tell you some important person who has to interview you to get the job is not there, and you have to come back again. You also have to go through the indignity of not being candid - if you want the job offer. When they ask you why you left your last company, that your boss was a jerk is not an acceptable answer. If they ask you about unit tests at your current job, and you say you have asked management to allow time for putting in unit tests but they refused - it becomes your fault that your management told you no. And on and on and on. That I have to ask for a favor from 2-3 former coworkers or bosses that they give me a reference every time I apply for a job is probably the most annoying part.
Who wants to go through all of this? It's why a lot of my jobs are at companies my friends work for. At least I know the score before I go in.
To overgeneralize, though not by much, SF startups suck ass at recruiting; the standard assumption is the whole world is chomping at the bit to work there, and it's a privilege to do so. (Though I do wonder how they get that worldview to comport with endless bitching about the lack of engineers.)
And you hit the nail on the head with the lack of consideration of recruitees' time. Take linkedin. I interviewed there a couple years ago when I was living in sf. They wanted me to come in 10 - 3, so basically an entire day of vacation (read ~$300-$400 I won't get paid out when I quit.) So I had a nontrivial amount of skin in the game. I also had to borrow a car to drive there, since I didn't own one. The interviews went really well, and they where pushy about continuing -- I was privileged to be able to come in a second day between 10 and 1, ie a second 1/2 day of vacation and go rent a car again! Fuck that; I bounced. But no doubt they're telling congress they just can't hire locally and need more h1b allotment.
Anyway, yeah, I agree with you completely.
(And by the way, keep pushing on the unit test thing. It's something worth arguing for. Or next time, build in unit tests into the project estimate instead of setting it aside as a separate project. Good luck.)
This issue was discussed quite a lot on HN over past couple of years. Not sure what those so called CEOs are thinking but it's their lose.
There must be some significant personal benefit for me, above money, that I would consider an offer like that. Influential position in a startup working in an area which I find exciting and proof that founders know what they are doing? Yeah something like that.
But you're right. If he'd made me CTO or some other personal benefit, I would have taken the offer in a heartbeat. For a regular dev salary with regular dev equity, it just wasn't enough. Plus, I already get equity at my current publicly-traded company, which means my equity is worth actual cash. I dunno. The whole thing annoyed me.
I don't have much faith that they'll do well, but I'm not a VC for a reason, so.. :)
I rather see it differently. As you said, you have a job and the head hunter told you that this company had opportunities. So common sense dictates that you check briefly what they have to offer before going to the interview. Is it a better pay (you could tell the recruiter "I am currently making X, what would they be willing to offer?"), the chance to use a technology you don't use at your current work place, or you really like what the company is doing - if it's Planetary Resources or Khan Academy that would be understandable.
So if I was the interviewer, I would be surprised about that guy who comes to the interview without bothering to check what's on the table. Apart from that, I agree with you that the recruiting process of many companies is partly designed to show who is the boss, and it's a sad thing IMHO.
My colleague Bob was impressed by your [personalised details]. I've asked Bob to look for people with X and our stack is based entirely on Y which I understand you're very familiar with. If you're interested in working on Z in future perhaps you and Bob could grab a quick coffee, and if that works out I'd love to have the chance to learn more about [personalised detail] for myself at some point.
I had the complete opposite thing happen. There is a dude I went to school with, I know him personally. We are connections on linkedin. He started a company a few years back. I get an email from a recruiter telling me the founders at Company X (his company) felt that I would be a good fit for their team. I am convinced that she just searched for some skill sets and made this form letter up just to make it sound fancy.
It can feel rather insulting.
Is it really too much to ask for 15 minutes of your time if you genuinely find me so important?
Most of the time, I get emails from recruiters for things that are nowhere close to my areas of expertise or what I've publicly talked about, and they could've saved both of us the time if they did just spend 5 minutes looking me up. It boggles my mind sometimes how they thought I'd be interested or even qualified. I used to reply back to those recruiters as well asking how they came across me, and usually received nothing back.
So it may just be a gimmicky tactic, but it's one that works, at least with people like me. I should be so lucky to have every recruiting email demonstrating some knowledge about me or what I've done.
But if they are under instructions to do so, then it's not a reliable signal of anything except that they are following instructions and those instructions are slightly more modern than. But now that I'm thinking about it more, I suppose that is a reasonable positive signal, simply because that means their recruiters must be spending a lot more time (maybe 5 minutes vs. 1 minute) per candidate. At the bare minimum, that tells you that they were willing and able to dedicate more resources to finding candidates.
* Overtesting. I have received multiple emails from different people at the same company with the exact same subject line ("Hey Evan, let's chat"). I am sure this subject works better than the other ones that they tried, but a little variation would make me feel like I am more than a conversion goal.
* Being vague about the purpose of "chatting". If an engineer emails me and saying he or she "would love to hear more about X", where X is something I've done, it's not immediately apparent that they actually don't give a shit about X unless they can hire me. Don't be bashful, just say your company is hiring. At least when a recruiter (or founder) emails, I know what page we're on.
While I haven't received this (yet), I strongly agree. Everyone knows a guy who messages you after years of not being in touch, asking how are you doing and all that crap while we both know he doesn't care and it's just a foreplay before asking for some favour. I won't say yes just because of that, so let's stop wasting time and looking silly.
It is completely plausible that the person both cares (genuinely) about how you have been the past few years, AND is hiring and thinks you'd be a great fit. These are not mutually exclusive. Not all founders are completely self-serving.
I would expect that most of the people they are approaching have heard of Stripe and are familiar with their high calibre team. If the same people are approached by a company/startup they have never heard of, the response rate will be very different.
It's still a fantastic approach and arguably the best approach regardless of how well or little known your company is.
The difference came at the end of the email, where instead of outreaching for me directly, the CEO was looking for my help in filling two engineering positions they have. It wasn't couched as "we're interested in you and possibly someone else if you know anyone," it was "I'm looking for your help in filling these positions." I had a slight negative reaction to this - why should I help you with your recruiting, when I'm not involved in what you're doing? (I should point out that I'm not really the target audience for the type of person they're looking for, either) I wish this company all the best, but I don't feel like I need to help with their recruiting. I haven't replied back to the guy and probably won't do anything else with it. (although he'll see this post, which I'm obviously ok with)
The other wrinkle was (and this is really minor), in the 'proof-of-work' section, he mentioned seeing a post of mine about OCaml. This threw me for a minute, as I haven't written anything on HN specifically about OCaml and I'm not even an OCaml programmer or involved in that community. Closest I could find was a post I made about type theory, on a story about OCaml, where I said "well, this isn't OCaml, but..." It probably impacted my overall feeling about the cold email in a negative way.
edit: I will say that I did get a cold email once from a Google recruiter, and he pretty much followed Stripe's guide. He got a positive response from me, including a good follow-up phone conversation. I wasn't willing to move to California though so that ended things pretty quickly, but I did appreciate the guy's effort.
Or something along those lines. Don't work for for-profit companies for free (and for not-for-profits, look at how much the top people are getting paid).
I have made thousands of posts on Hacker News, Twitter, and my own blog. Every time someone emails me about one of my posts and tells me about how it affected them or reminded them of something, it makes my day. So thank you!
I'm not interested in working for anyone I don't already know. But no worries, I'm an easy person to get to know and with all this great technology, you don't even have to meet me in real life. I don't have time for coffee, but I'd welcome the opportunity to talk about our common interests and build (another) new friendship on-line. Who knows where that can lead us.
I encourage you to get to know me and others like me. I discourage you from using quick tips and tricks and showing others how to do the same. I embrace sincerity and reject !sincerity.
Thanks for the insightful post. Looking forward to talking to you on-line again soon.
- edw519
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
This certainly isn't intended to promote insincerity: the most important point is a proof-of-work. People tend to be pretty discerning, and can tell if you're just fishing for a throwaway comment because a blog post told you, or if you have something genuinely thoughtful to say. The purpose of these emails generally is pretty transparent, and it's certainly fine if people simply don't reply.
I certainly agree with you that very often, "looking for a job" isn't a binary thing for people — they like getting to know other people in tech with a view to there being any of a number of ways to work together over time. These emails are often a good way to kick that off while being pretty upfront about your intent.
- gdb :)
1. People are more interested in themselves than anything else. 2. People can detect insincerity very easily.
So the trick to "win friends and influence people" is, basically, be sincerely interested in other people.
The worst are the ones that present themselves as a golden, once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity.
The Google comparison is a poor one, since Google is extraordinarily well known, and most start-ups aren't. And even they do describe the team each position is on, at least on its job postings.
If I were getting enough cold emails that I wanted to filter some of them out, I'd be likely to avoid emails that made me do work to research what a company does. A brief sentence about what they do, and why the recruiter/CEO/etc. thinks I'm a good match, would go a long way toward getting that coffee date.
This is why in-person networking is so important for most startups. To make the most of it, everybody in the organization should understand that networking is an opportunity (to meet potential customers, partners and employees) and they should be prepared to articulate a compelling description of what the company does. It's a gentle version of "always be closing."
Unfortunately, you don't need to go to many events to discover that a lot of startup founders and employees aren't effective at communicating what their companies do and why the person they're talking to should be interested in learning more. And then they wonder why they have a hard time attracting talent.
Hey gdb, I just read your blog post about Open Source Retreat and love how Stripe is supporting the community. I'm a senior engineer with KNOWN COMPANY on the KNOWN PRODUCT team. Would you be interested in getting together for a cup of coffee to talk about what it's like to work for Stripe?
But, this is something I really want to do. I wouldn't go in asking for a job, but just a "I want to know what you do and how you do it (and what sort of jobs exist at your place)". I suspect it's great for networking as well, if they do have a job come up, they might think of me...
The best approach, as you mention, probably doesn't include asking for a job right away. Build some interest first.
* A Facebook recruiter does a copy-paste on an email to an unknown number of iOS developers (including me). This is rapidly determined on Twitter, and the poor person is summarily mocked. A fairly senior FB person reaches out to me personally, apologizes, and asks if I'd be interested in chatting with them. I say "sure," of course. Personal engagement is worth a lot. A recruiter who copy-pastes an email to me and hundreds or thousands of others is worth less than nothing to me.
* An Apple recruiter reached out to me a couple months ago and asked if I'd be interested in an engineering position on their camera/photo team. I declined since I have absolutely no interest in relocating from Seattle to the South Bay, but he obviously had done some research on me to know that—were I to join any team at Apple—this would be my first choice. I was impressed, and replied to give my regrets that I have no interest in living down there.
I get calls and Linkedin invites from recruiters several times per week. At this point, I just reject any phone call I get from unrecognized numbers, and delete any email I get from Linkedin. These people are obviously trying to play a numbers game, which will simply never work with me.
Before starting https://www.mightyspring.com, which reduces the need for this tactical dance all together, I was a full-time technical recruiter. Often I found that if it was especially important to get ahold of a particular person, I could increase my chances by removing my email signature (which contained my title). Same logic, of course.
Traditional recruiting (cold calls/emails) has jumped the shark. Signal-to-noise ratios are poor, causing prospective recruits to assume messages are spam/trash.
It's not that these people aren't interested in new opportunities — they are! — but only opportunities that match their specific, mostly unspoken, criteria. As someone on the sending side of a cold email, you're generally not privy to this criteria.
People should have a truly safe way to tell the world, "I want to hear about opportunities from Stripe", without risking their current job in any way. We make this possible at Mighty Spring and call it "Passive Job Search".
You are thinking about the above average recruiters. My resume and linkedin have a clear "note to recruiters" at the top where I try to articulate the criteria and explain why. For example I say small companies/startups. Yet 95% of the recruiter emails I get show they haven't looked at the note at all. Fortunately having such a note makes it easy for me determine if the recruiter has done any work.
eg. I know you're busy, but we'd be willing to pay you a consulting rate of x/hr to discuss how your experience may help us achieve what we are aiming for.
Still going to be orders of magnitude cheaper than going through a recruiter, and potential recruits have something invested in making sure the meeting is worthwhile.
Arguably, hiring is the most important thing that you can do, with firing being a close runner up. This should be the thing that the CEO is most engaged with, especially if the CEO is doing his job as "culture minister." Now this doesn't mean that a CEO is the only person who talks to a new hire, but it does mean that the CEO should be the lead face that interacts with the possible hire from first contact.
This also doesn't mean that the CEO is only doing recruiting. Ideally the recruiting team would offer to the CEO a top ten list of candidates for a position and then the CEO makes the decision to contact and woo the possible hire until he/she is confident that this person is a good fit and has the skills necessary.
Nothing is more important than the people in your company, so treat them that way and you don't have to fuck around with A/B testing emails.
It's a corollary to what patio11 said elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917255), but more than that, if you build a relationship ahead of time, all of the sudden you don't have to do all the bullshit interview stuff that comes later.
You already know what the candidate's like. You already know their technical skill level.
Then it just becomes about fit.
No whiteboards, no brain teasers, no bullshit.
The proof of work is important. I get lots of automated emails from headhunters, for jobs or contracts which have nothing to do with my skillset, that are low paying three month contracts halfway across the US.
It is fine if the email comes from a recruiter, as long as they're internal to the company.
As best I can tell, the majority of contacts I've had along this pattern came from someone's clever 'growth hacker'. It makes sense, a more typical message is going straight to the trash while a feigned recruitment has a decent chance of getting me to visit your website.
Though, I think my typical work makes me a big target for this - social proof is paramount in the public sector and listing a marquee agency as a customer is a key to the city.
But if I get an email from someone, anyone, at a company who wants to 'grab lunch' and talk about me working for company XYZ, I'll pass.
I mean, he says this is what has been the most effective for them, so I can't argue that point.
But the reality is I personally wouldn't ever take anyone up on this.
Actually, now that I think about it, I would probably only respond if it was an email actually from the dev manager or exec who wanted to talk to me about working on his team.
I'm not sure I fully follow your comment — what's the distinction you're drawing between managers/execs wanting to talk about their team, and someone wanting to talk about working at the company? Is it the specificity of them wanting you for their particular team?
I don't want to work for a company that makes it's developers go out and have lunch as a headhunter. I know I wouldn't want to have to reach out to people I didn't know and 'have lunch' with them just to see if they would be good people to work with.
This sounds really useful. I would love a way to subscribe to these advice posts (RSS, Twitter, email are all fine) without subscribing to the rest of the Stripe blog!
Super simple, super effective for this kind of thing.
It solves the issue of finding someone whos vision is aligned to yours.
A random note for coffee doesnt work that well for me tbh.
This is Every Sales Occupation Ever 101, but engineers seem to have a cultural block against doing it, as if sending an acquaintance "Hey, saw your startup just raised a round / you got a new job / you had a baby. Congratulations!" is anti-social behavior if there is ever the possibility that that relationship would result in money changing hands in the future.
Be concise, include proof-of-work & say the bare minimum required to get a face-to-face chat.
:)
New idea for a recruiting cryptocurrency - prove you're serious by hashing my profile a couple billion times.
Personally, I always click spam on that kind of thing unless I've shown somewhere that I'm actively searching.
But this is true.
Also the advice about including a specific actionable time to make the next step is golden. Telling people exactly what you want converts best in most scenarios.
Case in point, a few months ago Udacity sent me an e-mail which went in some detail about a blog post I'd written, some of my Stack Overflow answers...it was pretty clear the person writing had actually taken the time to read some of my stuff, so even though I wasn't looking at the time I wrote back to thank them.
As other people have pointed out, this also works the other way round. I actually 'reverse cold-recruited' an interview out of Stripe a year ago using the same methods, just applied from the perspective of the job hunter rather than the recruiter.
If you're gonna be fishing for developers you need better bait than that.