

Hiring Your Start-up’s First Employee - nlow
http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/7-keys-to-hiring-your-start-ups-first-employee/

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dustingetz
the thing a lot of these articles don't talk about is how to attract these
employees to your startup in particular, because the class of person a startup
wants to hire, can get hired by a lot of other startups too.

two factors, I think:

1\. invest significant effort in networking in your local tech community. why
should I want to work with you? how do I know you understand technology? speak
at conferences and meetups, show up at hack nights, interact with the local
talent so they can get to know you, and when they decide to switch jobs, they
will approach you.

2\. pick an interesting business with interesting tech. All engineers good and
bad exist on a spectrum of value. The harder your technical problems, the more
you need the very best engineers. If your problem is mostly not technical, you
don't need as many rockstars, and they don't have to be quite as strong.

there was a recent YC job post for a "recruiting engineer" which made me groan
inside. Your best engineers are the only ones who can attract other best-of-
class engineers. typical recruiters, of course, are out of the question.

------
neverbethefirst
No talk of equity?

You'd be an idiot to join as the first employee and not get 100/N percent of
the company.

In other words, consider yourself a cofounder. Not the first employee.

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bbrian
100/N after the product has launched etc?

