When is the right time to hire a technical recruiter?

This post has been prompted by one of 3 founders of a b2b startup, well funded and just finalizing series A funding.

Snapshot:

15 employees, 3 founders, 1 technical. Cross functional teams in sales, engineering, ops.

Currently using a database that one of the funding VC’s provided and still using their network. They all want to keep their hands in recruiting but want to focus on improving by introducing metrics into their recruiting, finding the best sources, ways to find each pipeline of candidate. They do not want to offshore development or any other functions.

 

The technical co-founders question was “when is the right time for us to hire a technical recruiter?”

I posed the question back – when was it the right time for you to hire your lead developer? As soon as he no longer had time to code and it affected development of their product.

I use the same terms back when discussing when and if to hire a recruiter. When you and your team can no longer manage on top of your workload and when it is hindering growth of your company and product.

A scattered recruiting approach that uses your network and has resumes stored in everyones email and personal folders, using google docs to track (if that!) – will get you so far, then you will fall behind, recruiting will take months and months rather than weeks.

Yes now is the time to hire a technical recruiter.

So where do you go to hire a tech recruiter

1) ask your network

2) ask your funding VC’s if they can recommend anyone they have worked with

3) you could put an ad out on craigslist, indeed, monster, linkedin. you are likely to get a huge response to your posting

How do you know if they are any good

1) get a track record, look for references and other startups the recruiter has worked at

2) ask for stats, fill ratio, how long it took them to ramp up and whether it was in the time frame

3) ask them about requirements gathering and working with the internal team – so they have the ability to not only recruit, but to improve on processes, assess recruiting software and tools and be able to suggest the best ROI tools for your company

4) do they have a network of candidates

5) can they build up candidate pipelines.

6) what other abilities do they have on top of heads down recruiting. As a start up as much as you’d like a developer to wear multiple hats, you’ll want a recruiter who can do the same. Recruit for non tech positions, be able to work in a leadership capacity and provide push back to management so that they get the job done.

Hiring an unqualified recruiter will be a total waste of money and they won’t know or be able to improve

My biggest piece of advise is take some time here. Hire the best, even if its on contract – most independent recruiters will totally accept a contract or contract to hire position.

The key here is you want an expert as your first lead recruiter, no different to hiring your first lead developer. After key processes, tools and best practices are put in place you can go on to hire more junior recruiters to do a lot of the grunt work.

This question sparked me to do some research to see if there are actually any resources or agencies where you could hire a technical recruiter – as i suspected there aren’t any, which surprised me.

For me hiring a tech recruiter or salesperson are probably the easiest jobs i could fill, so why am i not connecting the two, would it be useful for startups to be able to go and hire a technical recruiter from a very reliable resource where they already come with the tools, processes, and software they need to do the job from day one. This was a great idea for the company i mentioned above. His concern is that he didn’t know whether the position would be fulltime, he thought he needed to hire 15 employees in 8 months but what if they wanted to stop at 5 then what. I suggested getting in a contract recruiter, and i’ve suggested doing the recruitment analysis, proposing tools and software, hiring the tech recruiter and putting them onsite for a contract length with weekly updates. With a small add-on, I offered him use of the recruiting software licenses that I buy yearly – linkedin recruiter is under $10K thats a lot to shell out if you don’t know you’ll have someone using it all year round, so I thought why don’t I get extra licences from my own subscriptions and mitigate the costs. In essence you get a less senior recruiter, for a contracted time, you don’t have to fork out $20-30K on recruiting software and you can rapidly hire as you go into series A. The recruiter is the execution piece. It turned out to be a highly cost effective solution.

If you have any suggestions or ideas please post. I’m interested in feedback  – this may be a great stop gap for many startups in the same situation.

Till next time. Hope you all had a glorious memorial day weekend, I took time off after a very long time and spend the weekend on my partners boat, not sure i’m back in the swing of things today – but getting there!

 

How to hire if you’re not Google or Facebook, don’t hire from google or facebook

Google announced recently how much investment they put into recruiting – how they handled their talent. If there’s anything to take away from that its that you have to work on your own startups branding in 3 ways:

1) founder story

2) compelling story

3) A job description that talks 90% about what you can offer your potential new employee not what skills you are demanding. Include a particularly challenging problem the person is likely to deal with, these guys want something to stick their teeth into. Talk about new tech they could be using and get exposure for.

Above all in these times, be flexible – you aren’t going to be able to poach someone awesome in a few weeks that will take months, even a year in some cases before they are willing to seriously talk about a career change. In the meantime don’t sit around and wait.

Not having a lead developer can hinder the chances of taking on some awesome newbies, out of school, out of bootcamps.

Startups with the resources are hiring a certain segment of dev bootcampers out of the gate – who are they picking?

1) Folks who have already been programming and have experience

2) folks who were say in more traditional roles such as regular engineering or a different vertical sector and took a career change and continued to code on their own, worked on side projects, wrote blogs on their experience. – these guys are being snapped up as interns by some big names, not all dev bootcampers were ex teachers, or accountants attempting to take a drastic career change. The most promising are those who go to expand their knowledge and you can see it as an educational and career progression not this leap into the unknown. The profiles look very difficult. I’ve often seen them return and also go further into entrepreneurial bootcamps. Great thing with these guys is to acknowledge and be ok that they may want to start their own company so why not learn on the job.

Im hiring right now for Ruby devs(which is actually constant – but differs from client to client, and i’ve got the toughest job because it is an immediate need and I have to juggle building a pipeline for the company as well as try and reactive recruit ruby which is fairly impossible. I don’t have a huge budget for this one.

What i’m going to do is push for a lead to be taken on, then thrown in some really bright, intelligent hard working and quick learning developers even with javascript, who have expressed a clear interest in working with Rails. I just have to rigorously check that they really are up for the challenge –  this is a vertical learning curve. (and i have to run it past the founder – BUT be strong and confident and make them listen – otherwise that req is going to still be open in 6 months.

Its a great chance to shape the employees you have and grab them before they simply ignore any recruiting emails.

Last comment – don’t poo poo dev bootcamp just make your criteria selective, dev experience, contributions, blogs, dev bootcamp followed by side projects, and they are already in tech.

The trend is that if you have a lead, its likely to be that hiring experienced boot camp grads (if sourced properly) with the right background  will still allow production deadlines to be met, they learn on the job and are shaped by you. Take 2 for the job of one – it’ll get done in time. They will want to work for you because few places can offer any training at all. I’ve noticed that once they’ve had 6 months interning, they end up getting snapped up by the big boys in series B and C – so this is a trend worth paying attention to

How do i find Talent when we’re hustling for funding?

This is relevant to all early stage, bootstrapped startups and those who are lucky enough to be accepted into an accelerator program such as Y-Combinator, 500startups (where I mentor).

Based on a lot of sessions with founders who have needed to hire when they are still fund raising, have little or no money to pay someone, including an engineer who’s hungry and building your product in his mothers basement for nothing but a hope of an awesome career.. This may seem absolutely impossible and also please bear in mind, this is only ok if you are truly bootstrapped, i would not advise getting into a salary war once you grow and have funding, this is should only be a temporary measure don’t push salaries down if you can afford it.

 

I talked to two guys this last week that impressed me so much. One of the companies had just been accepted into 500startups, a founder, 1 engineer and another co-founder. The founder i met with wanted to hire engineers, his remit was that he wanted someone young, hungry and willing to learn and work hard. He didn’t believe in hiring someone with a CS degree and felt like a self taught individual would work well for his startup. His ideas way surpassed my own advice to him. When you are bootstrapped you have to be creative. So this is the guy who convinced a 21 yr old to work on building his product for 6 months where he lived in his mothers basement and wasn’t paid apart from some nominal costs. So how did he do it, can this repeated in a process. I thought about this – and it can’t, because its the human aspect, however there are qualities that these type of founders possess that make it more likely that they will always hire creatively and the best. I’ll call him Lucas for now. He’s charming, charasmatic, has a great style, calm and confident rolled into one.  He’s a born hustler, but nice about it. I’m like a broken record with this “create a compelling story” Its as much about selling yourself. He could’ve convinced me to work for nothing!

 

The other founder, I’ll call him Adam hired a developer and just paid his rent and living costs – he also was charming, charasmatic and a born socialiser  – he will never have trouble hiring. he was applying to accelerator progams and had no outside funding.

 

Luckily those of you reading this may have not had to deal with working in a corporate environment. When you interview for job, the key things that any good employee will look for is qualities of the person you are going to be working for. The best employees are ones that have a huge respect for you, like and admire you, want to be like you one day. If you can sell that you have the abillity to convince a potential engineer to work for you then start being creative. They are also more likely to have loyalty to you which is rare in the tech workspace these days.

 

I just hired an employee, he’s 26 yrs old – I pay him $500/month to work on my social media, scheduling, appt making, dealing with phone calls, researching articles, dealing with tech issues, basically everything else but not getting me coffee, actually he does and organizes my work life so its smooth and i can focus on core business issues without him i would not have enough time in the day- how did i get him to work for so little. Well i’m sales person at heart. I’m very transparent as a Founder. The reason he works for me and still is – becuase i did create a compelling story, he sees the potential of the business, and I talked to him extensively about what he wants out of his career. As time goes on i introduce further aspects of the business that are more crucial. He’s a complete tech nut now – finding out that he has ambitions to grow and eventually have the ability to be a Senior Advisor who then takes over my role of hiring and training new employees – he wants to be the boss, and i’d like to take a step back. I find empowering individuals goes a long way and if you are bootstrapped its the only way to go.

Now i have a developer who is working on a recruiting product for me – her comments to me were i’ll work for you for as much as you can pay. this is music to my ears, i will reward all my employees and they know it.

You know you have a great product, you see the potential, you have ambitions to grow the company and hopefully one day go IPO – get that excitement going.

 

If that isn’t an option or doesn’t work, not everyone can do that, its a personality thing. My suggestions are to contact your own alumni, contact school careers who can for no cost provide really strong young developers who will be eager to learn.

 

Message from Tae Lee – ZEFR

I’m reading an article about Tae Lee of ZEFR, he talks about how they’ve have grown 2000% in headcount in the last 2 years. I’m sitting here thinking about this and seeing how quickly everythings changing, it’s totally crazy. When I transferred from the UK to work as a Recruiter/Business Development Manager at Modis in SF, the .com boom was literally recovering. I heard stories of those heady days when VC’s were throwing money about, kids in flash cars. That all died, when I came everyone was burnt from the startup bubble and nightmare that most tech workers post 2003 went through. People wanted security, a steady job with a firm that has some history to it, trading publicly etc etc…its funny now when i look back that engineers then were looking for stability – but that was another time another era, and thats the point. What this guy is having to do is unimaginable and no doubt hopefully most of you will face the same issues.

Scaling – everything right? they’ve grown that quickly, that fast. I can’t answer for any area other than recruiting. When i talk to founders about hiring initial teams and growth,i insist that they keep their hands in it, from that initial reach out in an email or even linkedin or through a discussion group or whatever format it is, I talk about pitching to engineers like you pitch to your investors. A lot of you instinctively do this especially if you’re good at hustling, also if you are Joe Blow CEO co-founder of the internet.com backed by “xxxxVenture Parnters” and i get an email from you I am highly likey to open it, if you are Cindy Smith recruiter at awesome startup in SF, i’m less likely to want to engage in a conversation with you. Don’t say it, and I know some of you are thinking it, that quite frankly (that is if you spoke with an English accent) you don’t really have the time and would rather just build your product or fund raise, cant anyone just do it and get a really awesome person. The answer is no and don’t take my word for this is what Tae did and at that headcount he still gets involved!  

“Hiring is STILL my most important job.

In terms of hiring, the only difference between when we were 20 employees versus 200 is that I spend more time recruiting than ever before. It’s not that your managers can’t hire good people, but there are many reasons why you need to be involved. One, as the C-level executive of the company, you may be able to attract talent that your managers cannot. Two, the difference between the ‘A’ level players and ‘B’ players is unquantifiable. One right hire can completely change the dynamics of your business. It might even change what your company will be selling in a few years. You don’t want to completely leave that up to someone else’s hands, do you? Lastly, nobody in your organization has a better sense of cultural fit than you. The newer and further the manager is to you, the sense of culture is diluted – which brings me to…culture is not organic. You must define it and protect it ruthlessly as you grow.” Tae Lee ZEFR

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140325164746-11347909-navigating-through-the-maturity-of-a-startup?trk=nus-cha-roll-art-title

Due to feedback, I am going to update my wordpress site so that you can follow my blogs, this will literally be in the next 4 weeks bear with!

in the meantime – email me with your name_blog in the subject line

hiregrind@gmail.com apologies for the inconvenience – i know it looks totally crappy.

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