

How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire - ceonyc
http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2012/7/16/hire-today-or-gone-tomorrow-how-your-startup-is-getting-lapp.html

======
l3amm
As a start-up CEO in the hiring-efficiency space, I get to see a lot of
company's hiring process in gory detail. Anyone who's been around new start-
ups (and old guys, see: Google) has seen a great candidate withdraw from a req
due to long response time. In a larger organization these inefficiencies can
be handled by adding more schedulers, sourcers, recruiters, but in a small
start-up you need a top-down commitment to speedy processing of candidates.

As a company gets larger (~series A) there comes a sudden crunch wherein you
need 10 developers, yesterday. At that moment, if you haven't laid down the
ground work for a successful recruiting/hiring strategy you can experience a
very lossy hiring process. You'll miss out on great opportunities to companies
who have spent the time, money and effort to make their process efficient.

To the articles recommendations, I would add the following:

\- For top tier talent, recruiting is more like sales: you need to sell your
company to the recruit, not vice versa.

\- For each requisition do the following: decide what the relevant
skills/requirements for the position, decide who on the interview team will
assess each of those skills, train your interviewers to spend 1/2 their time
selling the company and why they love working there and 1/2 their time
grilling the applicant on their focus area. This forces you to think
critically about what you're looking for (forces understanding of the org
chart) and gives each person agency in the process (I'm in charge of sussing
out algorithmic ability).

\- Corollary to the above: train your interviewers. Make sure they know what
they're looking for both culturally and technically, and make sure they have
the ability to assess those properties (or lack thereof). Interviewers are
your company's brand emissaries (and the source of many candidates) if they
can't communicate well the recruits will come away with a bad experience.

\- Track things: I think of recruiting like sales. If a VC asked you how your
sales was going you wouldn't say something like "OK", you'd have numbers,
metrics, graphs, funnels, pipelines, etc etc. Though this can feel a bit
overkill in the beginning, getting in the habit of monitoring your candidate
pipeline is extremely important as you scale. Small inefficiencies become
enshrined as 'best practice' and as you scale they can turn into huge holes
for your organization. This is exactly the type of problem we're trying to
mitigate/measure by bringing the traditional applicant tracking system into
the inbox at www.foundryhiring.com.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
This looks really interesting. But I do have a few questions about things that
are not apparent from your pricing page[1]: * Does this integrate with google
apps or just gmail? * I think you should offer a plan in-between ingot and
enterprise with around 20 open positions.

[1] <http://www.foundryhiring.com/home/pricing>

~~~
l3amm
It integrates with Google Apps, specifically: Google Calendar, Google SSO,
Google Contacts, and Gmail. The widget listed is currently for Google Chrome
and inside the Gmail frame.

Thanks for the feedback on pricing. We are going to add a tier below
enterprise and compete in the JobVite territory. In the mean time we offer 30
day free trial on all plans and a 75% off coupon for early beta users:
HN75PCT.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
A 30 day free trial on the enterprise plan? That seems odd.

------
praptak
_"If you can't pull the process together to make a quick decision, you're not
only going to lose people, but you're going to signal that you can't move
quickly on other decisions as well, whether or not this is really the case."_

This one is important. Recruitment leaves impressions on the candidates. You
better make sure the impressions are positive ones, because they matter a lot.

The world is small. An unsuccessful candidate might get successful elsewhere.
Their opinion about your company might soon affect its future. Other
candidates passing on your offer because they heard your process sucks is just
the most obvious and immediate way, obviously there are others.

~~~
l3amm
Totally agree, I think of hiring as a chance to create company cultural
emissaries. The best companies turn potential recruits into advocates for
their brand, so even if they don't end up working at the company they tell
their friends about how good the process and company are. See
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html)

Palantir is another company that does this well at Stanford. Those track
jackets/t-shirts they wear are cultural symbols that give interns/employees
status and spark conversations about the company. These 'little' things carry
a lot of weight especially in the tight-packed network of university dorms.

~~~
textminer
Funny you say that. Finding a job recently, Palantir was the absolute worst at
the recruiting process. At the end of their two months, in one two-week span I
interviewed at and received offers from two much smaller startups. I told my
recruiter at the end of the all-day interview that I needed to make a decision
by the end of the week on other offers (it was Monday). I didn't hear from her
for another ten days, at my prompting. She was frazzled, passed me on to
another recruiter, who asked if I could come in again for another all-day.
Needless to say, I declined and went with one of the offers I already had.

~~~
l3amm
That's really too bad. I don't work with/for them, but I know many of the
recruiting team and they have been very responsive to feedback in the past. If
you have specific comments/critiques feel free to message me, I'd be happy to
pass them on.

------
aliston
The problem is compounded by the fact that many companies will not give a "no"
to candidates that are a pass due to legal reasons, social convention or
whatever else... it puts candidates who want to be persistent in a weird
position, because you "don't want to be pushy," but you don't know whether the
company is trying to send a message, taking their time, undecided or just
incompetent.

------
xiaoma
Yes, this has been maddening for me as well. For all of the people on this
site claiming the market is "red hot", job hunting in the bay area has been
_slow_. I have dealt with a couple of really well run companies that made it
through the process quickly, but others have all kinds of HR filters and take
weeks to even get a phone screen.

In contrast, I was able to join a start-up within three weeks of beginning my
search in 2010 in Beijing... and that was before I had any professional
experience. They made the decision on the basis of a couple of interviews and
a couple of retro flash games I'd done as a hobby project.

Incidentally, if anyone in SF is looking for someone who can code and a proven
record of hustle, my contact info is on my profile page.

~~~
joe_the_user
As far as I would guess, the market is hot if you meet all ten of the bullshit
_this is how you spot rockstars this week_ criteria. Otherwise it's slow.

The thing is, the GP is only about hiring the magic people super fast - as
soon you see them, yeah! Which isn't going to make more magic people.

The hire-ers might just think about making their process a bit wider rather
than chasing the same things over and over again. Give more people a chance to
show some ability rather than passing the same mantra about A-players back and
forth.

~~~
l3amm
This is an excellent point. The analogy I like to use is based on prospecting:
you can try to find fully-formed gold from the earth or you can smelt down ore
into something useful. Right now the valley is full of prospectors stealing
gold nuggets from each other, and I think there is a ton of opportunity to
transform smart, hardworking people into great employees.

Of course this requires time and training, which some start-ups feel they
can't afford. In the end I think it's worth it to focus on finding talent that
can learn quickly rather than emerge from Zeus's brain fully-formed.

------
drblast
Many companies I've dealt with seem to forget that the person they're
interviewing probably isn't interviewing with just one company.

The last place I worked for (government) was maddening in this respect. We'd
find a great candidate and HR would delay or otherwise jerk them around, and
then have the gall to be shocked when the person accepted another offer.

In my recent job search the company I joined had a written offer to me within
a day or two. Others contacted me weeks later with offers, even after I told
them I was considering multiple offers at the time.

I don't think most candidates will tell you that, but that's likely the case.
You snooze, you lose. There aren't many reasons you can't make an offer within
a week after an interview.

------
jkubicek
I experienced the exact same thing last time I was looking for a job. I had
companies go completely silent, then contact me weeks after I had already
accepted another position. With the dearth of available iOS developers in the
valley right now, I don't know how these places hire anyone at all, let alone
good devs.

------
nickbarnwell
This is, in my opinion, one of the largest issues startups face today. OSS and
a culture of blogging have significantly reduced the barriers to entry for
many technical issues including, but not limited to, scaling, data processing,
and even general development.

What's still just as difficult is building the right team - my personal pain
point is university recruiting, but it's bad across the board. If you're a
startup that's expanding beyond the second or third round of technical hires
the ability to draw on your network becomes increasingly limited as you've
likely tapped out all your personal connections at this point, and your team's
calendar still resembles one of the world's worst games of Tetris [1].

Traditional recruiting agencies are poor at matching technical hires with
opportunities that are interesting to them because most recruiters are non-
technical. GitHub profiles are worthless if the hiring manager (Read:
/founders?/) have no time to read them, and dealing with phone screens and in-
person interviews and arranging travel for candidates is a huge distraction
from what they should be focusing on, building their business [2]. There's a
huge potential for upset in the space, and I look forward to seeing a managed
hiring provider that manages the scheduling, very initial matching of
candidates, and once a hire is made follows-through with assistance on all of
the ensuing paperwork and documentation.

[1] [http://media.edge-
online.com/files/imagecache/article/tetris...](http://media.edge-
online.com/files/imagecache/article/tetris_aa.png)

[2] Hiring is one component of building a company, one of the most important
even, but it is a distraction. In an idyllic world perfect employees seek you
out and apply ;)

~~~
vosper
I completely agree that technical recruiting is open to disruption, and I hope
that it soon will be, however: given the fees that barely technical recruiters
extract now, what hope is there for a truly talented, highly technical
recruiter who needs to get paid at least what (s)he could make in a technical
role (120k minimum)

~~~
l3amm
Sadly, I think this is right. I know several recruiters at a big-name
recruiting agency in Silicon Valley, they try to act like an internal
recruiter (thorough vetting of candidates, understanding company culture, etc)
and they make much less money than if they had just adopted the pay and spray
mentality of their peers.

The bright hope for me is darwinian: if enough startups refuse to use these
pay and sprayers then they will die off, leaving only the higher quality
recruiters. Will that happen? Not any time soon.

------
anmol
Is any of this different because the person in context is a business role?

In my personal experience, smaller, tech-heavy focus startups are quick to
make an offer for technical candidates.

However business roles take much longer, partly because its not clear if the
company needs a full-time person running marketing, sales or business
development, and because the new hire can add to "product-market" fit noise.

~~~
adrianhoward
I still see some companies take a long time to fill tech roles.

It's the difference between companies who really _know_ what they're looking
for, and those who the "best" person but aren't quite sure what that is.

The former will hire as soon as they meet somebody who can do the job.

The latter will dither until they have a few possibles. Then dither some more
weighing up the various pros and cons... by which time their best candidate
has gone.

In the worst cases they then reject all their other candidates (since they're
"worse" than the best candidate they've just lost) and start the whole process
again!

~~~
bartonfink
I think you're absolutely right, Adrian. If you aren't sure what specific role
you'd like someone to be able to fill, you're just a window shopper, and
serious candidates aren't going to wait for you to make up your mind. For
every req, you've got to be able to answer the ? "What, specifically, do we
need this person to do?" That's a functional ? - it's not enough to say "This
person needs to be able to code in .NET " like many BigCorps do.

It astounds me how hard many organizations can find it to answer that ?,
though. Even if you set up a company that espoused a "we'll hire as many smart
people as we can get" policy, you could still say "Immediately, we need
someone to work on the performance of our frobnosticator, so they'll need to
know Java classloaders REALLY well." That's specific enough that you can know
"we found our engineer" when they show up, and doesn't use a lame proxy for
knowledge like years of experience (there are certainly Java developers out
there with 15 years of experience who know nothing about classloaders).

------
MaxGabriel
What advice would you give to someone who's getting a slow response?

~~~
l3amm
It really depends on the size of organization. For something like Google, I
would say that long-response times are the norm and frequently the
recruiter/contact person are extremely swamped and may have forgotten about
you. Not necessarily because you aren't good, but because their volume is
insane. In this case I would write a quick letter that says "Thanks, I really
enjoyed meeting X (person you talked to). We had a good conversation and I
wanted to check if you needed any more information from me." This is generally
enough to push them if they are inclined to pursue you, if they didn't like
you for whatever reason then they probably won't respond or will reject you.
If they don't respond after that I would say send one more email about a week
later that is slightly more urgent (considering other offers, etc). If they
don't respond to that, then it's best to let that one go.

For smaller companies, they most likely don't have the resources to keep in
touch with everyone. For me, this is the main value of an Applicant Tracking
System: making sure no one falls through the cracks. That being said, most
small companies don't have them, so they are relying on their memory +
spreadsheet to carry them through.

If you're working through an external recruiter: talk to them, they have every
incentive to push you through the pipeline and have a direct read on the
process.

If you have a contact in the company or you met with someone in person: send
them a quick follow up email is enough to move the pipeline usually.

If you've blind applied: then I would suggest sending them a quick note to get
back onto their priority queue. Whomever is in charge of the process WANTS to
respond to everyone, but if they don't see a fresh email sitting in their
inbox, they quite possibly have forgotten that you're in the pipeline.

Also as mentioned below, pursuing many job opportunities in parallel is good
for you and can be a great forcing-function/bargaining chip in late-stage
hiring processes.

