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!

 

An Awkward First Date Shot Through Google Glass

side note to recruiting – this is bad and good at the same time. as soon as they have google contact lenses we are all in trouble!

First few hires…

1)      Utilize your mentors, VC’s and your network to get referrals – referrals are still by far the best way to recruit.

2)      Are you listed on angel list – if so, post your job. You will get applications, a lot from junior candidates, but a few gems come your way. You will get a clear indication whether someone is actively looking or not but again it may not be the best talent pool. There is a search facility here, the search terms need a little work on.

3)      Trial out recruiting software and try and wangle 2 weeks trial for niche sourcing and recruiting software. Bearing in mind that most aggregated job boards and job vs resume matching sites will produce poor results for tech/engineering roles.

4)      Social recruiting has now become easier and quicker than ever. People aggregators do the job of about 5 sourcers who’s primary job is to scour the internet, create custom search engines, find candidates that aren’t readily visible or have a low internet profile, or those not wishing to be on linkedin. Ideally this should be used in conjunction with other methods of sourcing

5)      If you need Ruby, Python, Ios Mob developers, UI/UX – bite the bullet advertise on niche sites, and use a people aggregator. Meetup boards are dodgy to post jobs on and rarely will people respond unless you are the CEO/Founder and it’s a personalized message.

6)      Don’t rely on just one source and be surprised if you wade through a load of candidates and maybe one or two you can interview and declined offers – you are looking in the wrong place. Supplement your sources of candidates from at least 4-5 different sources.

7)      The double edged sword for any fledgling startup is that you want the best talent, those at linkedin, google, Heroku, square and so on, can you really attract this type of talent – well most startups in this state struggle with this, so you have to set your sights on a more realistic level – which group of developers are you able to attract. If you are seed funded startup and you have your eye on a great developer at a different company – however they received series A or series B funding – are they going to want to move, probably not.

8)      Aim high – there’s no point procrastinating about who to contact, whether they may or may not respond, whether you have formed an opinion and convinced they don’t want to move so you don’t approach them – this is a big mistake. Don’t approach them with a direct opportunity now, talk to them, build a solid relationship with them, they need to get to know you and you them. This is a long term plan to attract better talent in the future

9)      Be very clear in your job description – whats in it for them, what will their career progression be, what will they spear head, how is the opportunity better than the one they are in now – don’t get stuck on salary too much.

10)   Use google docs to track your applicants and be strict with it!

11)   Whatever you do don’t use an inexperienced recruiter/office manager to reach out to developers in SF bay area!

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How Facebook and Twitter built the best employee training programs in Silicon Valley

i’m hating the hire and fire culture, training and investment into your employees gives employees to actually grow in their career not keep them stagnant. Doesn’t show the company has a lot of skin in the game apart from a pay check

Recruiting Challenges: Hiring Developers Pt 2

Hiring developers is a whole chapter and probably the largest chapter from a recruiting perspective. I’m going to break it down into parts and at least start covering some base points to which you can start from.

1) sourcing developers – Sourcing techniques; internet, database, meetup sites, meetups/hackathons , social media – including linkedin recruiter, company website, from job postings

2) Job descriptions – what and what not to put

3) recruiting developers – hiring and retention, keeping the talent interested in your company first

4) talking to developers – the initial phone screen, what if you’re not a developer

1.   Sourcing Developers

Strategy

Create a strategy first – don’t shotgun it, advertise everywhere, all over linkedin, don’t go posting it on the ruby meetup site and hope for the best!

If you are starting from scratch ie this is your first bunch of hires for the initial engineering team, I am not going to lie, i am not going to sell you the secret to hiring developers because there isn’t a secret formula. There’s a huge amount of work you need to do to get this first team in place especially if you do not have an engineering network.  I thought i’d start from this point – how do you become your company’s best engineering recruiter?

The first thing I would do if being asked to look for a team of developers is to make sure everybody is clear on the timing for this, set realistic expectations, if this is your first round of official hires and you don’t get a lot of inbound resumes the process will probably take from 4-6 months

Talk to the developers you already have – talk to the model developer employee there’s always one! Go get them coffee/lunch and get their feedback and opinion on who should be hired, what skills do they think are important, get help with terminology and some basic screening questions, how did they get hired, how did they find their current job, where else were they looking, why did they choose this start up, get a feel of personality type that will fit the team, ask their opinion on the best internet sources for finding active developers working on peer projects on google projects or github. Look up your own developers, where do you see their internet presence. Finally having a say into who joins the new team is a huge factor and is also a critical one.  Its actually better to have less skills and a better work personality than be toxic and have awesome coding skills – the latter can have bad consequences and put projects back by months, have people leaving and you starting to hire a new team again! Get them on board and ask them to share the position on their social media and other sites, presuming you have little budget to incentivize, starbucks gift cards can go a long way, your own developers inhouse see you making a real effort in getting the right team especially when you’ve made the effort to include them – internal referrals are the quickest and the best way to hire your team.

If your startup is VC backed, talk to you CEO about resources your VC might have to aid you in hiring your team. Many VC’s already have a talent acquisition director who will outline a strategic hiring plan and plop in an engineering recruiter to execute the plan. Your competition are these ex google, ex facebook engineering recruiters with solid networks – but it doesn’t take long to get there with a lot of focus. When you talk to your CEO/founder ask if they are aware if their funding company has any resources with respect to hiring, ie maybe there is a board member or advisor who specializes in hiring and recruitment. If you are the founder or CEO talk to your backing companies about hiring strategy and execution, not only do they have access to business  and other resources to grow your startup but will also have access to resources on hiring. (this is actually what i do and there are a few of us floating about Silicon Valley)

Your company may already be working with a consulting company such as Carbon5. If you have a consulting team that you are working side by side with you can do the same thing here, try and get as much info as possible, find out about their career paths, how they landed their job – was it through referrals, a specific site, where they would recommend you hire people from. Get the developers perspective, so that you start to think like a developer and how they look for their next career move. Remember you are highly unlikely to be able to hire these crucial employees through any jobsites, even linkedin recruiter is unlikely to yield good response rates in the current climate.

This is where having a research background can really help, you are getting as much info as you possibly need to put a concrete strategy in place.

Now you are armed with the following: Where your current developers came from, what sites they are active on, links with their developer buddies with similar skills, job sites they would actually use, sneaky ways to find developers on the internet that the manual didn’t tell you about!

Now go cost this out, github and stackoverflow charge to post, linkedin recruiter cost a few hundred dollars per month, what is your company doing with twitter – leverage what you have for getting postings out there, have your internal team send it out to their social networks. Work out how much time it will take to do each part of the research process, this will give you a rough idea on how long it will take you to start seeing applicants either through referrals or through responses and a rough time for how long it will take you to hire your first team member.

As soon as you get a name, email and phone number call immediately!!! i cant stress enough, you could put off a call by a couple of days and another company already interviewed them and made an offer.

There are many sourcing strategies that can spawn off what I have discussed – if you are looking for more in depth steps on internet sourcing, fill in the contact form below and i’ll send you a sourcing for developers guide(cheat sheet!)

Getting the names is only the start, advertising your position correctly is another step in sourcing and must be done correctly to produce the highest inbound resumes received, and is the subject of the next blog.

Feel free to ask me any recruiting challenges you are facing and if you want some info on a specific sourcing technique I am happy to send you material to help. mynetsol.inc@gmail.com or call 510 239 7829

Connect with me on linkedin and follow my tweets @rubybhattachary

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