

How not to recruit for a startup - OJKoukaz
http://www.wepay.com/blog/2011/09/21/how-not-to-recruit-for-a-startup/

======
jxcole
Recommendation: Neither the word 'career' nor the word 'job' appear anywhere
on your front page. The best I can see is a contact us page. I had to do a
google search to find your jobs page:

<https://www.wepay.com/about/jobs>

~~~
aberman
duly noted - will update

------
GavinB
This recruiter's blunder gave you a great hook for this blog post, which is
certain to bring in some well qualified applications. So, in some sense, this
was a successful relationship.

~~~
aberman
I sent him a "thank you" email for that exact reason. Seriously.

~~~
amirhhz
What about the Atlassian approach [0]? They give the recruiters a chance to
prove that they can deliver excellence and if not, both parties know it won't
work out. I think it's a good model for the employer and the job-seeker.

p.s. I found out about this via this video: [1], scroll for transcript.

[0] <http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/recruiters.jsp>

[1]
[http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/09/from-0-100million...](http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/09/from-0-100million-
with-no-sales-people-the-atlassian-10-commandments-for-startups.html)

~~~
tptacek
That probably works because Atlassian hires so many people that they too are
in a position to play a numbers game with recruiters.

------
dmk23
You need to closely screen and supervise your recruiters. Start with an open-
ended question: "how would you go about sourcing candidates for XXX position",
"how would you screen them", "how would you entice them"? Listen closely to
what they say and if you do not feel comfortable this would yield you the
candidates you are looking for, fire the recruiter and look for one that would
understand your needs.

Recruiters, like any other service professionals, are always trying to sell
you on their experience, but you owe it to yourself to closely inspect their
claims and methods. If recruiter is any good they won't be offended and would
cooperate.

Contingency fee recruiters are especially renowned for sloppy work. If they
only get paid when they place a candidate their only incentive is to sell you
the first warm body they find. This type of attitude you have to nip in the
bud.

~~~
huherto
You almost need a recruiter to recruit recruiters...

~~~
dmk23
At the end of the day the responsibility for recruitment is with the company
management. Recruiters could have a role to play, but it is above their pay
grade to decide what kind of candidates you want. They could surely help
sourcing and pre-screening though. But if you are going to use recruiters you
have to manage them carefully. Recruiter not given clear direction is poised
to waste your time and money trying to place the first wrong candidates they
come across.

~~~
ericd
The whole point of using a human is that they should be able to intelligently
handle some level of screening that's hard to automate.

------
tptacek
I think the reality is that recruiting firms suffer from the same market
dynamics as SEO consultancies and, I suppose, startups in general. The good
ones are so valuable and so lucrative that they can be selective about their
clients and have virtually no need to do outbound marketing.

Which means that any recruiter you can reasonably expect engage on a tactical
basis is going to be drawn from the adverse selection pool.

------
0x12
Employees that you gain through a recruiter, you will probably lose through a
recruiter.

Building a company is hard, hiring lots of good, loyal people in a short time
is a lot harder than scaling some software.

~~~
dasil003
Loyalty is probably the last quality you should be looking for as a hiring
manager at a startup. Granted, you want people to be loyal, but it also has a
loose correlation to incompetence, mainly because incompetent people tend to
(rightly) fear losing their job more than people at the top of their game.

Better to hire the best you can by other criteria and let the chips fall where
they may.

~~~
0x12
Interesting, I think it would be one of the first.

The reason why is that people that you hire early and that put together the
core of the company will have a bunch of extremely important knowledge that
will be very hard to transfer to another new hire. If a start-up spends a
great deal of time replacing people that were hired and that left just as fast
that would seriously affect continuity.

It is for that very reason that in later funding rounds it is not unusual to
ask these people to sign on for an X number of years in return for some stock
with a vesting period.

~~~
dasil003
You should hire the most skilled people you can, period. If you can get a
brilliant developer or designer for 6 months, that's better than hiring some
schlub just because he'll stick with you.

Perhaps more apropos, skill is more of an unwavering quality than loyalty. The
way to make a great developer loyal is to give them interesting stuff to work
on and have the right culture. If loyalty is your metric, it's more effective
to worry about your office conditions than to try to pick the right
candidates.

I'm a prime example. At 33 I've only had 5 jobs since I was 20, so I look
incredibly loyal as an employee. But there's a reason I stayed at each of
those jobs for so long. I would not suffer a pointy-haired boss for a single
day.

------
wccrawford
At a previous job, when they kept sending crap candidates, we told them we
would stop working with them if they didn't filter them properly.

We did that to 3 recruiting companies. 2 of them shaped up and only send
decent candidates. The other lost our business.

------
cHalgan
This is so funny. A while ago recruiter (expensive one) which was working for
me to fill up a senior position in my team (I was a dev manager in a big
company) sent me an email trying to recruit me...

Regarding design candidates, there are some very very good designers working
in big corporation and they don't have online portfolio or personal site (in
many cases because HR does not allow it). For example, as far as know,
designers working at Apple (which are probably people you want to hire) will
not have online portfolio or personal blog site.

~~~
SwellJoe
How could a startup take that sort of chance on someone, though? Hiring and
firing is the most important job you have as you scale beyond a small team. A
big mistake at this early stage could sink a startup, while getting it right
could be the key to explosive success. Without a portfolio, you're guessing.

Also, someone who excels in the corporate world, where there are a dozen
people working on the website, a dozen people working on any given project,
and a couple of managers to make sure it all blends seamlessly, may not do so
well in an environment where they are expected to create and deploy without
guidance or oversight.

~~~
cHalgan
I completely agree that startup should minimize chance on hiring wrong people
(that is reason I'm arguing that pay in startup must be market rate (no 20%
less as many startup try) - otherwise your are gambling with the most
important asset you have).

Yes, without a portfolio, you're guessing, but the problem with requiring
candidate to have portfolio is that you will narrow the search to
consulting/freelancer group which might not be the best pool of candidates.

Also many intelligent people which had startups or consulting end up working
for corporations (Comcast, Apple, Oracle, etc.) because... because they are
very very good and corporation pay with gold to get these kind of guys.

------
johnrob
An open ended question I've wanted to ask for a while: when a startup (all of
a sudden) needs to hire a bunch of engineers, what kind of things do those
engineers work on? What requirements change so rapidly that doubling headcount
becomes necessary?

~~~
Firehed
It's not so much requirements changing as simply the timeframe for
implementation. As I work at WePay (with the author of the post), I can at
least comment on our specific growth needs:

* UI. As your customer base grows (along with your company's reputation), the overall expectation of a quality product grows with it. Bugs that are a minor irritation for some people are dealbreakers for others, especially when you're taking on an industry giant - so minor problems make you lose customers (often permanently, given the "tried them three years ago, buggy, will not come back" attitude of most people). We're taking on PayPal - which, while not exactly known for a quality user experience, is extremely stable. We found this problem increased by at least an order of magnitude when we launched our stores product.

* Testing. Front and back-end. Like above, growth = reputation = expectation of quality. Gotta keep things stable, and there are some things that have absolutely zero margin for error (I've spent three days to produce a three-line patch, simply because I had to be aware of and handle dozens of different scenarios, and making an error could result in the wrong amount of money ending up in an account. Yes, it worked correctly)

* Support. If you're dealing with people's money, it's kind of a big deal. I'll let you use your imagination.

* Fraud. A non-trivial portion of our payment review involves human screening. With a couple hundred payments per day, that's manageable. Hundreds or thousands per hour? Not so much. We have to make smarter automated rules to avoid human screening where possible, and improve the UX in our back-end review panels so that humans can make intelligent decisions faster where necessary. Good code can replace (or free up, or avoid the need for) several human reviewers, and good human reviewers are just as hard to hire as good programmers. This and support are currently our tightest bottlenecks, since they directly limit the number of payments we can process in a day.

* UX. Not so much "is it pretty", but "does it do what I want?", "will I use it again?", etc. A huge percentage of our user base is virally acquired (ex. someone who previously made a donation comes back and sets up his own donation campaign and starts collecting money), which costs us nothing. The more we can entice users to stay engaged or engage their friends, the faster we can grow. If we can turn a payment receipt into a customer acquisition medium (customer meaning person collecting money, not paying), that's more users at effectively no cost to us.

* Scaling (in the traditional code sense). Not just server load, but weird problems that simply don't happen except at volume - database row locking, update collisions, etc. Detecting and fixing those types of problems is much harder than most people would think.

* Sales + Marketing. Not only expanding your markets, but making sure that as you're spending more on those efforts that your spending is effective. Have you saturated a tiny niche? You need more niches, and bigger groups to go after.

* Compliance and legal stuff. Did you know that as your annual payment volume increases, you have to adhere to stricter security guidelines for PCI compliance? While we've always held ourselves above and beyond the strictest guidelines, you still have to deal with compliance audits and such that don't happen at lower payment volume.

* Analytics and metrics. We're past the point where we can randomly guess at what's working and what's not. While we don't hold ourselves up with internal red tape and politics, we do actually need to measure the efficacy of the changes we're making. It's no longer a single new customer bumping the graphs by 20%, so we need pretty fine-grained measurements for this kind of thing (thankfully, we have enough volume where we don't need to let stuff sit in production for weeks to get a statistically significant sample size)

There's plenty more than that - most is quite general, though some is very
specific to our company (fraud, in particular), and obviously not all of it is
specific to engineering. My day-to-day is around payment stability and related
back-end services, which also includes fraud management and our admin panel.
Working 50+ hour weeks - quite a bit less intense than the 80+ I did during
YC, but actually sustainable - simply doesn't allot me enough bandwidth to do
everything that I need to do (I'm only commenting because the original post is
a thinly veiled recruiting attempt and I've got desks that need filling). I
have to solve problems like "an API call to a credit card processor timed out,
how can I resume this automatically in a way where I know we will not
accidentally charge a card twice" and "what changes do I need to make to
ensure that a data integrity check never fails?" while at the same time
architecting data models for new features, interviewing developer candidates,
refactoring old systems for reliability and future-proofing, and providing our
support team tools that allow them to do their job but don't allow them access
to sensitive information (see again: PCI regulations). And I don't even touch
the front end anymore.

Obviously, we're hiring. wepay.com/jobs :)

~~~
makattack
For those reading, working at WePay was an amazing experience. They're a
talented, high energy team, moving fast and aimed for success.

@Firehed you guys might also want to post your openings at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs> too. Miss you guys!

\--Andrew M

------
adamseabrook
If you really want to get some amazing results from the recruiter do this:

1\. Go into their office and sit down and do some database searches with them.
Sift through a mountain of resumes and then show them what to look for and
what to ignore. Be sure to note down searches that bring back decent results.

2\. If you have existing staff that you want more of give the recruiter their
resumes and sit each of them down to do an interview with the recruiter so
they can be profiled.

3\. Once you have a stack of perfect candidates that they can use as a
reference do some analysis and look for the previous employers that are
statistically significant and add all of these to a list for headhunting. Also
add any special skill sets that someone in the past may have which would
predispose them to having skills you are after now.

4\. Sit down and write the recruitment ad together with the recruiter so it
"calls" to the candidates you want. Make sure they CC every resume that comes
in so you can quickly flick through them and ask them to screen any that look
interesting. Recruiters will often reject perfect candidates because they do
not fit the profile exactly or they miss something interesting.

The recruiter should now have a pile of information and reference points that
they can use to seed numerous searches that have a much higher likelihood of
delivering candidates of interest. If a submitted candidate is not right make
sure to give feedback that can be used to further refine the search.

------
sneak
I had seriously considered applying there 6 or 8 months ago, until I read
this:

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-
lerdorf-...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf-
joins-group-payments-startup-wepay/)

I've had enough professional nightmares as a result of Rasmus' technical
decisions in the past, so I didn't pursue it further.

Food for thought for anyone considering working there (if indeed he's even
still there - I haven't kept up).

------
sgdesign
I've yet to meet a startup that had a good experience dealing with recruiters,
at least when it comes to finding designers. I think the problem is that a lot
of designers are self-taught and the ones that have the best credentials might
not always produce the best work.

So I think design recruiting should be done by designers, and that's why I
built Folyo (<http://folyo.me>). Companies that have submitted an offer have
received an average of 8 replies each, and they're all from good designers
with solid portfolios.

(By the way, if you're wondering WePay was one of the early users of the
service, but the designers who replied were not in the US, and the visa issues
proved to be too big an obstacle)

------
jroseattle
This is so true. Having been on both the hiring and hired side, I take any
requests from recruiters that are sourcing candidates for small companies with
a gigantic grain of salt. It's unfortunate, but I know so many recruiters
that, while well-intentioned, are just clueless about great candidates.

It's a litmus test I use for early-stage companies: who is doing the
recruiting? At early-stage companies, having the right people is ultra-
critical. It's not work to be outsourced at that stage.

------
scottru
First, on the mail to the existing employee: get it, ha ha, recruiter so
stupid. It's generally kind, though, to make room for the capacity for human
error: it seems like a safe bet that the recruiter made a mistake and didn't
think that would actually work. People make mistakes, even recruiters(!),
especially when they send a fair amount of mail each day (which every one
does, some smart and targeted, some dumb and spammy).

We're a boutique shop, we're super-careful, and we still make mistakes: one of
my recruiters sent a mail about Client A to an employee of Client B. She
screwed up - she saw an old resume that didn't have Client B's name, and
didn't double-check on LinkedIn. The employee was pissed, Client B was pissed,
I was pissed, my recruiter was embarrassed, but we all got over it, because
we're adults.

Second, on finding an agency you like, I wrote a blog post on this a month
back: [http://roosterpark.com/blog/hiring-a-recruiter-how-to-
choose...](http://roosterpark.com/blog/hiring-a-recruiter-how-to-choose-your-
staffing-firm/). dmk23 is right that you should be asking real questions: I've
included some examples in the post. (I've never even submitted this to HN
before. Wonder why.)

------
dylanrw
Recruiters really aren't the best route for hiring designers anyway, but you
know this. ;)

~~~
aaronblohowiak
dribbble!

~~~
cschmidt
Absolutely. I think spending some time looking around dribble is a great way
to find people. It seems to be where designers hang out these days.

------
joshu
So after trying to use a variety of recruiters at tastylabs, we have
discovered that the vast majority of recruiters do no recruiting, but instead
just do sourcing and leave it up to us to actually filter and recruit.

So far as I can tell, they just get resumes off linkedin and make calls all
day. Very low-value for us.

------
j_baker
It's more likely the recruiter just didn't realize that the employee had
already been placed at WePay. For whatever reason, communication at recruiting
firms is terrible. I suspect it has something to do with recruiters not
wanting their coworkers to steal their commission.

------
nirvana
Recruiters are playing a numbers game and don't have the bandwidth to be
filtering candidates. The "only send me candidates with a portfolio" criteria
is completely objective. Imagine a recruiter trying to decide if a programmer
is any good? (e.g.: "I'm sorry, but the client [for this job writing java
software] is looking for a candidate with Oracle 9i experience"...when my
previous job had been using Oracle 8i. It wasn't a DBA position and SQL had
not changed much, and both companies were using ORMs anyway!)

For a startup, I think your early employees are so critical that you have to
do the recruiting job yourself. I know it is seductive to think that you can
outsource it, but you really can't.

These days you've got an entire social network -- LinkedIn -- designed to have
people help refer other people for jobs.

Further, it was very early in my career that I just completely gave up on
working with recruiters, and long before social networks even existed. I think
that other good programmers probably are the same way-- why send your resume
to people who will retype it with typos just to remove your name, lie to you,
and send it randomly to hiring managers without talking to you first?

Perfectly good blog post and amusing story. But I think that the startup
culture would do well to evolve away from using recruiters and rely more on
networking.

~~~
angelbob
_But I think that the startup culture would do well to evolve away from using
recruiters and rely more on networking._

The problem with that is that it makes it even more incestuous and hard to
enter from outside. Yes, yes, if you can't find an employee to introduce you,
you're not trying hard enough, etc, just like pitching a VC.

But seriously, given how hard a time we're having getting new blood now,
making it _harder_ to get in is negative progress. It's a lose.

~~~
nirvana
You make a good point. I wasn't intending to promote incestuousness, and to
limit potential hires to ones who got referred.... if I ever get an email out
of the blue from someone looking for a job, I'll help them, and I'll be keen
to see if they might be a good fit. Someone with some gumption like that is
automatically more interesting to me than someone who comes from a recruiter.

Also, kids in high school, new college grads, self taught hackers.... show me
someone with a strong drive and I'm half sold.

So, no, I didn't mean to imply any sort of incestuousness... I'd like the
opposite. I'm interested in a lot of people that reciters would filter out.
"No college degree? Trashcan!" For me, its "No college degree because he spent
the four years building a crappy startup that totally failed stupidly? Hire
'em!"

PS- please don't take this as me trying to recruit. I'm not. We're not ready
for that, yet.

------
savagecat
"First, if the candidate didn’t have an online portfolio, personal site, or
blog, I didn’t want to see a resumé. "

The author is an idiot.

ETA: I had a program manager who thought that having a blog meant the
developer was an accomplished/published author. The developer quit for having
to work 10 hour days after the first week and a half. Again, idiot.

~~~
reledi
I agree with the author. If they didn't have an online portfolio, personal
site, or blog, then I probably wouldn't want to see a resume. To me it shows
that they're driven and they trust their work enough to have it public for
anyone to judge. You also get a sense of what the person is like, rather than
what their experience is like.

~~~
diolpah
I'm ambivalent about this. Requiring an online portfolio for a designer does
make sense, but a blog? The only "drive" that attention whoring on a blog
shows is the drive to get attention.

~~~
chc
He said " _or_ blog," not " _and_ blog" — some people prefer to show off their
work in blog format rather than a traditional portfolio.

