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

When The VC Asks: About Your Hiring Plan

When The VC Asks: About Your Hiring Plan.

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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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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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.

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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

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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

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