Recruiting Challenges – hiring developers and creating a candidate pipeline

This post is aimed at startups <10

Candidate pipelines and candidate databases. Why and how?

If you have been tasked to recruit for your startup whether as an internal recruiter, office manager or part of the Product Manager’s role you really want to keep ahead of the game when it comes to recruiting. You know you are a Ruby shop, you know you’ll eventually need some full stack back end developers so what are you waiting for …..next round of funding? Don’t wait that late!

I used to have frequent conversations with a Product Manager who started working at a healthcare startup. He knew he would need Ruby Devs but insisted he didn’t want to look in case they didn’t receive the funding. The CEO was not a tech guy so didn’t really understand the difficulty in hiring in that area. Its a normal reaction to wait till funding and then start to look. I remember being called for a really quick meeting downtown San Francisco on a sunny May afternoon. “Yes finally we want to work with you – we need a Ruby Tech Lead and 5 mid level developers and yesterday” – well firstly i don’t talk about what my services are in my blog but i am not an agency and not an order taker either, my services and advice come in handy so this kind of thing does not happen. Some companies are open to being educated into the world of recruiting others aren’t – they were too far down the line. Consequences, HUGE agency fee to find the best Ruby guy, 6 months to fill the position – risk the person may leave before building the rest of the team, another 3-8 months to fill the developer positions, having to keep hold of the developers you’ve just hired so they don’t go anywhere else and before you know it, it adds up to almost 9-10 months to hire the whole team….THATS SO RUBBISH!!!

Its not as though this situation cannot be rectified. In this situation i recommended the following:

1) Use a targeted agency such as mirrorplacement www.mirrorplacement.com – they charge a 30% fee but believe they are well worth it – they are a team of developers themselves

2) Advertise on GitHub and StackOverflow, also try workingwithrails. You are likely to get some good level of responses.

3) If you are the CEO, founder or senior member of the core team, join the Ruby Meetup group start joining in on discussions, add to the discussions and make it be known who you are and your company, talk about some challenges you are having, how they could be rectified, create a buzz around your company. I would say then and only then craft a well written mail and send out to the group seeing if you can create interest. Don’t send out a job description, just make it simple get developers to engage with you. You can talk job descriptions later. If you are  charged with recruiting make sure you can have these emails crafted before hand by the CEO

4) Make sure you enter each candidate into some sort of database, google docs or excel spreadsheets work fine – keep tel no.s and emails – you are now starting to build a pipeline for future hiring.

Just don’t expect to fill this position quickly anything from 3-8 months taking into consideration that you don’t want to hire someone with great skills but is a complete a**

Building a Candidate Pipeline

As a CEO/founder of your fledgling startup, make the connections now, before you get funding, before you are ready to hire. Let the Ruby community know who you are and what you are about, create interest in working for your company early on. I’ve done this with my own business, before I even started my company i made sure I built solid contacts in the tech recruiter world, letting people  know about my services and how its so different to anything else, it meant by  the time i actually needed to hire and asap like yesterday, I just needed to make a couple of phone calls and i had someone. This is the best approach to take and do it from the beginning, you won’t have time when you are scrabbling around trying to raise funds or working on a trial or your first prototype. Add it in as part of your strategy.

1) Make contacts with developers early on before the project starts.

2) Collect as many email addresses and phone numbers

3) attend as many developer meetups that you can, get your card out there, and sell you and your company! collect as many cards as you can get

4) join the Ruby meetup group and on linkedin and contribute to discussions. This can’t be done half heartedly, if you are going to do it do it every week and carve out time to do it.

5) Use your buddies in the community to spread word using social media, linkedin, twitter, facebook, you’re trying to get people to look at your website here.

If you rigorously do this 4-6 months before you even need to hire, you are likely to have access to developers who already know you, know what you’re company is about and probably banging down your doors to work for you.

Last but not least – get every developer into a database, excel spreadsheet, google doc whatever your fancy, remember this is your personal list of developers who expressed interest to work with you. Treat this like gold dust.  This is now the beginnings of a candidate pipeline unique for your company. Next time you need to hire, you only need to make a few phone calls and the process will be significantly quicker than the “shotgun marriage” approach above.

If you have any challenges and you’ve hit a brickwall, email me mynetsol.inc@gmail.com or call me 510 239 7829. You can find me on linkedin.I’m here to offer advice.. Please fill in the contact form below for step by step process article on the  subject or any questions about MYNET Solutions Recruiting Solutions.

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

Tech recruiting biggest challenges

CEO’s, founders, internal tech recruiters for startups all have their set of challenges, but what are they in respect to the different roles and functions.
As an internal recruiter, staying on top of the game – meaning the recruiting game is absolutely paramount, using old, out dated techniques will have you running to the nearest agency, BUT don’t you want to prove that you can source, recruit and find the talent ahead of time.
Employer Branding is a hot topic right now, leveraging marketing to increase the number of resumes that come through BUT how do you convince your CFO/CEO that this is money well spent, a poor pitch won’t help.
There are several white papers, jobvite do quite a number on inbound recruiting and using marketing as a tool. Internet research is something to really look into. I found a great article written by Michelle De Rubeis of Stafflink.ca – she’s a boolean search ninja. Title is Boolean Search Secrets for becoming a master recruiter. HIghly recommended read!
So what are your biggest challenges? Fill in the contact form and let me know what your biggest issue is right now and i’m here to listen and be your startup recruiting agony aunt!

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

 

Internet Sourcing, Boolean Searches – Internal Tech Recruiters – Startups

This is a quick one and one that is really important for ALL internal recruiters tech or non tech. Job sites and resume databases are limited, the amount of good developers or IT talent that actually post on the typical sites such as DICE, Monster or any other generic sites is low and will yield poor results when you search and also poor results when you advertise. Linkedin recruiter is pretty good and gets you some great talent and totally spot on HOWEVER you have to get them to connect with you. Linkedin searches I always believe are good as long as you have some way of tracking them down.

Recruiting trends reports show that the use of job sites is on the decline, linkedin isn’t quite working for you. Specific sites for advertising Ruby or any other developer jobs such as using Github, Stackflow or Ruby job sites are very costly and you have no idea whether you’ll get people to respond.

Quick and easy, use techniques that top tech companies use and smart agency recruiters. Internet sourcing is not new but digging under google’s search engine allows you to use boolean search strings to search for resumes where you include skill sets, location and any other skill.

Firstly do a quick google search on google boolean search, you should find a tool bar you can download called Recruiting Bar – the sourcers Toolbar, you need to watch a you tube video or two but its easy to work out. There are also many postings and blogs that go into a huge amount of detail with how to enter search strings into the google search bar by adding various syntax before your search string. Check out this white paper by Michelle De Rubeis of Stafflink.ca – boolean search secrets for becoming a master recruiter

A recommendation here is to join one of the groups on Linkedin  – search under boolean  – you will find a few groups. These groups are great, all members truly help each other out. I have often asked for help with a particular search string to find candidates with really specific skill sets and members will share their search strings with you. Save your search strings as you will need them later.

So what results do you get, you get resumes that are not usually found if you simply put in the search in the usual google tool bar you find resumes that aren’t readily available or out there for the general public to see, it pulls up resumes from github and other sites. You get resumes with contact details on – you’re good to go!

Recruiting is not rocket science, a little research, playing around with search strings will bring you excellent results, candidates to add to your database and a whole list of new talent that other companies and many agencies don’t have – often agencies do not have the band width to hire and have on their staff a specific internet sourcer/researcher. You really don’t have to use agencies I swear – you can do this yourself.

I am not recommending this to be the only way you source its one of many ways, its another method to be used in conjunction with other sourcing techniques.

You can find me on linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ruby-bhattacharya/1/655/818/ , my website www.mynetsolinc.com

Fill in the contact form below to receive free whitepapers that focus only on tech recruiting for startups and shoot me any burning hiring challenges you may be having.

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

Technology recruitment startups – candidate care

I decided to  spend this afternoon getting my social media all squared up. Reading up on fellow bloggers concerned with the topic of recruiting tech for startups, reading about candidate experiences for internal and external recruiters. Now I think it is blatantly obvious from the amount of posts from blogs to meetup groups that recruiters are not on the Christmas card list for many tech job seekers, that isn’t a surprise.

More and more tech candidates will use search engines for their next job search or referrals. Which ever method, you have inbound resumes coming through your website which is brilliant! Ok now what?

Here’s some simple tips to make sure your company keeps a good reputation as a great place to work, a company that is highly responsive, where candidates have been so impressed that you end up with more referrals. This is ideal right? Customer Service!!!! This is the key. A few years back when I entered tech recruiting one of the first things I learned was to build candidate pipelines, talk to potential candidates, bring them in for interview – please note this was never under the guise of having a fake job! We built on this list, set call backs and kept in touch with everybody we spoke to or met on a 2mthly basis. Some agency practices that would be a huge plus to include as part of your daily routine as an internal recruiter.

1) Set up a way either via your website, or via bulk emailing or if you receive a manageable amount of resumes on a daily basis to contact each and every respondent. The biggest complaint for candidates is the “black hole” syndrome. It doesn’t feel good on the other side and puts a bad taste in their mouth. Does not encourage them to tell their fellow peers about your company.

2) If a person is rejected straight off the bat – make sure you email in a timely manner and explain some brief reasons why – I cannot begin to explain the benefits here, EVERYBODY appreciates honesty and not having false hopes.

3) If you are interested in speaking with someone, don’t wait!!!! Email and call immediately to state how much interest your company has in speaking with them and set up an informal chat or time to carry out a short phone screen. My recommendation is to bring these folks in yourself, take them to a coffee shop and do a semi informal interview to assess fit and skills. Do not wait for an agency or other startups to get in there before you, you could lose out on a valuable candidate. People appreciate quick feedback and turnaround, this creates an extremely positive impression for your company……….and the more people you do this with, the more buzz it will create. People always remember when a company treats them this way right from the start. Remember you are the front line to your company. If you have little to spend on the ever so trendy “employer branding” and very little marketing budget – this is really the best and easiest way to spread word.

4) Make sure you set up phone screens and interviews in a timely and professional manner

5) Ensure that if a person is rejected by the hiring manager that you don’t wait a week or more to inform them. When you take time out of your day to phone screen for an hour, its really important to get back to them as soon as you know. Don’t be afraid, make sure you get a solid underlying reason to why they were rejected so that the candidate has an understanding – this is still great customer service, you never know they may have a friend who is better suited and are much more likely to refer them if you are nice to them.

6) The same goes for face:face interviews. Anyone having to take half or full day off work to go through a 2+Hr interview really is owed a quick response as soon as your hiring manager makes a decision. If you know that one particular hiring manager reviews resumes at midnight, gives you 2 lines of feedback, asks to interview and you can’t get feedback for a number of days because they may have flown out of the country on business or called to deal with a mission critical situation, keep the candidate informed, or set expectations prior to the interview.

7) Finally getting a phone call and speaking to a real live human is much better than an email. On the front lines this really engages a potential candidate and its really all about psychology.

Good agencies typically do this, because if they have identified good talent and they are really suited for a job, keeping them engaged can really create a huge amount of enthusiasm for your company(or the client in the case of agencies). Another reason is that a good candidate may not be a total fit for the role you are recruiting but you know there is a position down the line that they will be suitable for so you keep in touch. Here an email every few weeks or so would suffice. This keeps them open to the opportunity that they will be first on the list of potential interviews and they know they have something coming up down the road. If they are that good and you know they are interviewing, perhaps a word in the hiring managers ear would be a good idea.

Its not easy hiring the right talent with so much competition, some simple candidate care can make a world of difference. While it may seem like an arduous task, set aside half hour at the start or end of each day to fit this in, it will pay off.

You can find me on linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ruby-bhattacharya/1/655/818/ , my website www.mynetsolinc.com

Fill in the contact form below to receive free whitepapers that focus only on tech recruiting for startups and shoot me any burning hiring challenges you may be having.

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

New to Tech Recruiting at a start up?

Hi there all,

Sorry for the brief hiatus on the blogging front.

More often that not, a startup who has just received series A funding has a lot to prove, deadlines to meet, customers to satisfy, no longer in beta stage, or trialing, this time hiring is now top of the agenda. One of the key elements to the success of a startup are the employees hired, we all want the best engineering talent, we all want to develop using Ruby and RoR, we are all looking for Lead Python developers….Well if you are new to internal tech recruiting it seems fairly obvious at first. Use job boards, use social media and post your jobs there, post on linkedin, post on the company website…but now what. You have been asked to find the next Ruby Lead, or an IOS and web developer with skills you haven’t heard of, and worst of all you don’t get any responses, even worse if you do try and locate someone and call them, you could be received by a barrage of questions of who you really are, and whether you actually recruit for the company, are you there on contract and then you feel like you are the one being interviewed. Then the dreaded not interested and ‘click’. Don’t give yourself a hard time….the best recruiters can take from 2-5 years to overcome many of these issues dealing with candidates particularly in the SF Bay area. You probably have a list of hires you need to make and hopefully they have been prioritized, but now you hit a brick wall, you sadly look at the number of startups who are all offering work at the most exciting startup ever, now you may realize that the candidates are the one in the driving seat and can take or leave job opportunities, this is regardless of the increase in unemployment rate, that has little to do with IT. Maybe you have a small recruiting budget. Don’t fall down this trap……You WILL be contacted by dozens of agencies who all say they can fill your positions. This sounds brilliant, you can receive as many resumes as possible and you can sift through which ones are suitable – but how do you really know they are suitable, how knowledgeable are you on frameworks, platforms and emerging technologies and languages, what happens when the hiring manager rejects resume after resume, whats up with these agencies and why don’t i hear from them after a month or so….brick wall again. Does this sound like your situation? Next steps, you are probably being expected to put a process together that can be scaled, plenty of research into this area is needed. What is an applicant tracking system, how do i know if its anygood, how do i convince management to provide funds to implement this system, how can this help me in the long term. Creating a candidate pipeline from the hiring roadmap you have hopefully been privy to, if not get it! Look at which hires are needed when, try and get this as early as possible, look at the hires that haven’t been approved yet and segment into skills. Build those pipelines immediately, it takes on average 90 days to fill a position however in reality for the tough engineering positions it could take at least 8 months, but the CEO wants this person yesterday.

PBS – no not public broadcast service but PROCESS, BRANDING AND STRATEGY. You HAVE to sell your company, having employer branding across your social media sites, creating inbound recruiting – folks will jump at the opportunity to work at your startup.

Ok Suggestions:

1) Go to every single meetup group for the selected skill sets (no needs for certain IT positions you can probably fill them yourself) – collect business cards like crazy – make yourself a familiar face in the startup community.

2) Linkedin is a great source for talent, you can identify them however the response rate is often very poor – find alternate ways of contacting these folks, phone numbers and emails are the best. I always get feedback that personal emails go down a lot better than linked in requests.

3) Join recruiting networks, network with other recruiters, add discussion points, ask for advice and help, someone is always willing to answer your questions. You can isolate some startups that have had phenomenal success due to adopting some excellent process and systems in place – and also recruiters who are willing to work hard at understanding technology and understand the motivations of candidates and how to really create interest.

I have many many more – if you are struggling in anyway and could do with a sounding board or some free ebooks that go into much more detail email me mynetsol.inc@gmail.com or call me for a chat 510 239 7829.

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

How to attract Talent prior to funding

I’ve noticed a few start-ups are well on their way. Seed funding, various funding from sources takes you up to a good mark. You have a pilot, a trial with a client and you only have one shot. Now you need those engineers that will work hard, be passionate as you and will put their all in to get this finished. You believe in it, your fledgling team believe in it – how do you get the top talent to believe in it.

Firstly – how did you find your current developers….friends, old colleagues, referrals, people approaching you, connections networking, it goes a long way. How did you pitch your company to them, its easier when you know them, the trust is there. How do you build this trust with a developer who sits on a few offers, they are taking a huge risk joining any start up and how can you convince him/her to join your company when funding is less than a $million.

Quite honestly, this suggestion cuts me out of a job with these types of start ups, and recruiters alike, but when used with another source is highly effective.

Ok Mr CEO – I know you don’t have time, but when you have a team of 5-10 people and you have money to raise, a company to run, spending 24/7 making real your dream, however to build and grow your first engineering team takes finesse and a little time.  You still have your network to keep tapping into, you have that gift, your passion ignites people, they are excited about your product, you know you will get funding, whenever you talk to people they get excited. Keep going to specific meetups yourself, it is impossible not to be flattered to be approached by a CEO, it is highly likely they will want to continue the conversation. This approach is better than any recruiter/headhunter anyday. If the role is that important then you are the selling factor, the way you are, your approach to work, your personality. Everyone has their own favorite app but i like “unsocial” – i can be in a room full of mobile devs, ruby devs, network admins, UI people, switch this on and it tells me who’s in the vicinity and what they do, helps speed things up a bit so i’m not spending 30 minutes talking to the janitor.

Don’t get too many – but identify a specialist agency who can start a contingent search.

If you have a generalist on board you can teach them a few things. Searches in linkedin will bring up a plethora of exactly the role, experience of developer you need. Have them save the search, ideally 100-200 names. If possible have someone go through this list and identify roughly skills wise who will be a good fit. Have someone who can track down email addresses and phone numbers – just in case ( just a bit of sleuth work).

This part won’t take much time at all – if this role is so crucial. Send out a personalized email to each and every person on the list. Call them directly. There is not one person I know in the working world who would not only be flattered but are 50x more likely to engage in an opportunity with you than a recruiter.

Just some thoughts…..

You can find me on linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ruby-bhattacharya/1/655/818/ , my website www.mynetsolinc.com

Fill in the contact form below to receive free whitepapers that focus only on tech recruiting for startups and shoot me any burning hiring challenges you may be having.

Choosing an Agency, and how many to use

Hello again! Chatting with some CEO’s of tech start-ups, a common issue that has been coming up is “how do we manage agencies, deal with them and choose them” – some of you probably have tried and trusted agency partners that you have worked with for years, but if you don’t……

This is a difficult one. I hark back to the days when larger companies had the same issues, back then majority did not have a centralized team for recruitment just HR. Hiring Managers were pretty much left to their own devices after not receiving adequate or quality resumes from HR. With production deadlines tight, their only option would be to take on recruitment themselves and to reach out to agencies, the key problem here was that hiring managers simply don’t have the time to be able to put into recruiting efforts, advertising, going through resumes, calling and allowing maybe 8-10 agencies working on their positions assuming that there will be a resume or two that will be good there is no real guarantee the would get the talent when needed. I worked in the agency world for years, you have to be relentless, and one is required to push for feedback on a daily basis, calls and emails – this easily gets out of hand and quite frankly will p** anyone off after a while. Its not their fault its their job!

I see this pattern repeating again in the start-up world. If a start-up has the advantage of being funded by a VC who have recruiting capabilities then the problem is solved, however if your start-up isn’t funded by a VC with these capabilities the Founder/CEO, senior team members are left scrabbling about adding recruiting to their many other responsibilities. Every agency says they specialize in recruiting for start-ups, some have excellent capabilities hiring certain vertical markets such as engineering. A couple of years ago, I presented some recruiting solutions to an early stage start-up, the first comment to me was “in the last few years not one agency representative actually bothered to come and meet us”. If they want to come meet with you, this is a very good sign, this allows them to see your company, be on site, get a feel for the company culture and puts them in a very good position to be able to hire the right personality fit. With all that said here’s some practical advise, questions you can ask to eliminate the bad apples.

1) How long have you been recruiting? Are you purely business development? Can you provide numbers of placements in a 12 month period for specific skill sets you need

2) How many recruiters do you have working at your satellite office – how many recruiters will work on my position? how does your company prioritize which  jobs get worked on daily.

3) What methods do your recruiters employ to find my candidates? (you’re looking to see if they just post on Dice, Monster) or whether the recruiters actually dig in and find new people, folks who are working, passive candidates, attend meetups and are actively building up candidate pipelines.

4) Do you meet the candidates? Do you talk to them on the phone? If so how long? How do you assess technical and personality.

5) How long will it take for you to find me someone for (give them a typical role), this allows them to set expectations.

A useful thing to do if you have time is to ask to meet the team who will recruit for you. One company I recruited for insisted on resume/bios on the team responsible for recruiting for them and meeting us all – this shows you a lot. Do you want to trust hiring your first Lead SW engineer to a rookie? The more they get involved the more likely they are to produce results. While technical recruiters and account managers will have some knowledge in the tech field the majority of the time, they will be able to assess some basic technical skills, they are not programmers or engineers and can’t dig as deep as you can. What they can do is ensure basic assessment and very importantly cultural fit.

When I first started out in  recruitment, my boss asked me what makes us stand out from other agencies. I looked a little perlexed, tried desperately to remember the key points from the company manual, i didn’t really know the answer because everyone says they do the same thing. He told me “Its you” – and that is actually the key thing here, forge strong relationships with the recruiter/account manager – do you get on with them, do you feel they take your hiring needs seriously or are they in it for the bucks. Would you go out for beers/non alcoholic beverages with them outside of work?

All this may seem a little much, especially when a lot of agencies are calling, you can’t bring them all in, but treat that 10-15 minute call as a phone screen, get those questions asked and if anyone bumbles, can’t answer or b*llsh*ts you, you can knock them out immediately. If they don’t even make an attempt to come see you again knock them out. How much do they really know about the start-up industry and your particular product and market, from idea/inception, through to development, through funding, through customer development, more funding, gaining customers, implementation of product or release to consumers, hiring strategies set out by advisors or VC partners.

Pick no more than 3 awesome agencies who you get on with,  have experience, excellent customer service, answer their cell and office phones, respond immediately to emails you send..(there is no reason someone shouldn’t since all account managers recruiters will have a smart phone!). Try not to haggle them on  fees, you’re most likley to use an agency for the really hard to find engineers, the harder to find, the more work the agency has to do and this warrants a decent fee. Set out expectations from both sides, they do need feedback but you may be travelling up and down the country or abroad and heading into a crunch time and are unable to look through resumes – here its crucial to be upfront and explain the most realistic time scale you can get back to them.  A lot of agency owners or sales managers want to see results, and if a recuiter comes back at their morning meeting with “i’ve had no contact or response” they have a hard time justifying working on the role and may be assigned to work on another position. The first few weeks you may not get the best resumes, but it can take one or two attempts and they should get it right, then it should be fairly plain sailing after then. The objective here is to be able to call one of these agencies up in the future and say “hey you know you found me Joe Bloggs – i need another one like him”, with as little information as that, they can start a search and even have resumes over to you. Even if you may not have budget approval or definitive funding to hire the position you need, it is advisable to give as much notice as possible, they can use this time to build up a solid pipeline of candidates who will move for the right opportunity – don’t feel bad about doing this, if you leave it last minute it can add another 2-3 months to actually get someone through the door.

Ok thats my rant for the day – hope its useful.

You can find me on linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ruby-bhattacharya/1/655/818/ , my website www.mynetsolinc.com

Fill in the contact form below to receive free whitepapers that focus only on tech recruiting for startups and shoot me any burning hiring challenges you may be having.

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

I have no time to do this, who can I delegate this to……

Be wary of hiring an internal recruiter – make sure they are qualified in sourcing, recruiting in the tech industry and have at least 1 years experience, this may not be the best hire. The best internal recruiters work on contract earning anything from $70-$80p/hr, Senior Recruiters can command higher salaries however these recruiters tend to stay in the agency world because of the compensastion package. It is an unfortunate fact that any recruiter willing to work for $30-$40K has probably been an agency drop out and was unable to meet goals and ultimately unable to make enough placements. HR and generalists will not have any kind of grasp on the state of tech recruiting right now and will take a while to figure it out or they leave or you let them go.

Connections in the industry such as having a VP or Director of recruiting can help, can they be a mentor to your fledgling recruiting department?

You can find me on linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ruby-bhattacharya/1/655/818/ , my website www.mynetsolinc.com

Fill in the contact form below to receive free whitepapers that focus only on tech recruiting for startups and feel free to send me any burning recruiting challenges you may be having, i’m here to help!

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

Everyones looking for the same thing!

 Ok so you are on the right track, Angel Funding, The pitch went down well, VC’s are investing in your company, VC Partners, advisors and board members get involved. Your VC will talk strategies including hiring your team. They may or not leave it up to you after all you’ve probably been working with developers for most of your career and know plenty of guys/gals you have worked with who are awesome and you know will make a great team and who are willing to work and be passionate about the company/product as much as you are. What do you do next when you have run out of referrals and recommendations. How can you possibly find the people as passionate as those you know, how can you find your next Lead Ruby Developer or Python Developer when there are at least 15 other companies wanting to hire the same people and they are all fast growing, well funded start-ups , how do these people decide who to reach out to.

I did a quick search on Indeed to see how many start-ups are looking for senior Ruby Developers just as an example, the figures are a lot more than I thought – in excess of 20 companies in San Francisco and Bay Area. How can you stand out, how are you going to attract these candidates to your company when everyone seems to be offering the same. All Start-ups have a new innovative product or a product that is on the market but vastly improved, perhaps your start up is opening into a totally new market.

The key to attracting the best developers is a fairly simple task but laborious. Its very important to develop a candidate pipeline, when I talk about candidate pipeline I don’t mean someone finding you random resumes on various job sites, these people invariably are probably jumping from job to job, they have time to trawl the job sites (probably while they are still at work) and apply. If you are using agencies this is even worse, the developers are spoken to for maybe 15 minutes max, key word search, they probably don’t remember who they have been put forward to, and by the time you may want to interview they’ve already accepted an offer at your arch nemesis’s company!

The best and only way to do this is having someone within the company who has the ability to do a real dig into developers who are rather incognito, who hate agencies, who probably find their own jobs and have their own connections, they don’t need an agency to get them a job and they don’t trust agencies anyway. There is a different approach with these guys and gals, expressing interest in their career even when they are not interested in a move, they maybe in 6 months time. Job descriptions can be a little limited only showing responsibilities and skills needed and a “are you interested” – well probably not. That first email or conversation is crucial, done right you are well on the way to a good hire, if its done wrong, then you’ve potentially lost a great candidate who was approached the wrong way. These guys aren’t so interested in the money aspect (of course its important) but in my experience they are looking for the potential and the opportunity to have some major accomplishments under their belt especially once your product has been developed and has gone through to market or implementation – big plus points!

You or your VP of Engineering may have time to go to networking events, but time is not always there, this is a great place to start, and if there is a delegated person to recruit – send them out to each and every meetup and networking event, collect names and more names, search them, find github codes, find websites, how passionate are they about development, how active are they in their programming community. These are the ones you want to focus on, and again salary and equity is not the only factor, the company and product often is a factor and what kind of accomplishments they are set to achieve. Once you have this you are in much better position to offer them something that they really want.

You may already know all these things, execution is the hardest part and can take a long time to hire someone when you have little time to focus on this as the product and the business road map are the top priority and you may only want to hire when the exact person comes along.

You can find me on linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ruby-bhattacharya/1/655/818/ , my website www.mynetsolinc.com

Fill in the contact form below to receive free whitepapers that focus only on tech recruiting for startups or let me know any challenges you are facing I’ll do my best to help!

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

Recruiting for tech start-ups – Do’s Don’ts and How to

Yep thats me!

Hello there – my name is Ruby, firstly I’m a lover of life, I enjoy making music, taking photographs, painting, and desperately want to learn screen printing so i can put obscure British sayings on T-Shirts to get people to talk more Brit Slang. I believe in community and helping each other out. I want to earn a living but i don’t want to screw people on the way. I am passionate about what I do, and I do it my way now, I refuse to work for someone who is unethical, says they want whats best for their client and not delivering and making excuses, forcing a commitment before even seeing performance. I have a ridiculous amount of ideas, i listen, i execute and I want whats best for everybody. I like to connect people even if there is no monetary advantage to me. My aim is to raise the bar in the recruitment world, not to have to take the wrong size clothing from a shop just because its the only size they have. In the start up industry one size does not fit all. Agencies should earn their 25-30% fee. Everyone has got lazy and no-one seems to have intelligence to do this. Sorry to sound controversial but its true. Intelligence is no longer a requirement with recruiters and even less so for Account Managers.

I want to advise and highlight issues that come up time and time again and offer some practical advise in dealing with it.

You can find me on linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ruby-bhattacharya/1/655/818/ , my website www.mynetsolinc.com or email me if you have any burning challenges mynetsol.inc@gmail.com

Fill in the contact form below to receive free whitepapers that focus only on tech recruiting for startups.

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ