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.

 

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

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