Tag Archives: recruitment for startups

09.05.13
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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

06.06.13
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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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