
The Best Hires Are Right Under Your Nose - zt
http://firstround.com/article/Mine-Your-Network-for-Early-Stage-Hiring-Gold
======
tptacek
It's received wisdom in the valley that your most lucrative pool of candidates
is the network of your current employees. I'm skeptical, for several reasons.

* The saying goes that "A's hire A's, B's hire C's". Whether you believe that or not, concentrated network hiring definitely doubles down on whatever selection criteria you used to begin with. That has costs in terms of skills and experience diversity. Some of our best hires at Matasano were complete left-field candidates with radically different experiences than our existing team had.

* Network hiring unavoidably personalizes the hiring process: candidates come in the door with sponsors. It's hard to hire objectively, staying as close to apple-apples as possible, when your candidates are friends of employees who have significant bonuses riding on the selection.

* Network hiring can make company cultures cliquish and, worse, brittle. People who've managed teams long-term have probably experienced the phenomenon where a team member leaves because they're unhappy, and suddenly 1/3rd of the rest of the team "wakes up" and starts to churn as well. When you hire based on employee networks, your whole hiring thesis is that employees "drag other employees along". What I don't see is people acknowledging that it works both ways.

Add to this of course the mildly grasping sensibility behind shaking down your
team members as the moral equivalent of an MLM scheme for hiring. I kid, a
little --- we pay recruiting bonuses too --- but I'm "kidding on the square".

My sense of it is that the valley believes recruiting to be a "top of the
funnel" problem. My experience says that it isn't. My hypothesis is that the
inefficiency is in qualifying candidates (deeper in the funnel), and that if
you can fix that problem, the top of the funnel can sort itself out without
much effort.

~~~
vonmoltke
> My sense of it is that the valley believes recruiting to be a "top of the
> funnel" problem. My experience says that it isn't. My hypothesis is that the
> inefficiency is in qualifying candidates (deeper in the funnel), and that if
> you can fix that problem, the top of the funnel can sort itself out without
> much effort.

My sense is, in addition, that Valley conventional wisdom sees missing the
left-field successes you mentioned at Matasano as acceptable collateral damage
in the name of preventing "bad hires"[1] and finding people who will "hit the
ground running"[2]. I think both of those are myopic and misguided, and
contributing to the "talent shortage" these companies so frequently complain
about.

[1] Quoted because, when pressed, hiring managers almost always define them in
terms of their worst-case incarnations. [2] Again, the definition of this
phrase is rather nebulous, but seems to conflate having experience with a
laundry list of technologies that overlaps with the set of technologies used
by the company's current products with having a reduced learning curve on said
products.

~~~
tptacek
The irony of this is that virtually any serious hiring manager (ie, hiring
more than 1 person per quarter, continuously over many quarters) can tell you
stories about bad hires they've made in the last 18 months, despite the norm
of "network hiring".

(I can't tell that story, though, partly because I've been really lucky, but
more because we've nailed qualification.)

------
angersock
_" Have your employee log in to LinkedIn and do a "first degree network"
search to return all of their immediate connections.

Read more: [http://firstround.com/article/Mine-Your-Network-for-Early-
St...](http://firstround.com/article/Mine-Your-Network-for-Early-Stage-Hiring-
Gold#ixzz2zdU2bWWF) "_

Hah, no, try again--this strikes me as exceedingly scummy.

What's really annoying is when you try to bring in talented engineers from
your network, and your company drops the ball: either by not getting in touch
with them, or lowballing them, or refusing decent equity.

If I'm referring somebody from my network to you, I want to make sure you
treat them well and with promptness--disrespecting them is a sign of
disrespect to me as well, and makes _me_ look like an ass to _them_.

And I know that hiring in small companies is a huge pain in the neck, but
that's no excuse for not taking care of this kind of stuff.

EDIT:

Oh wow:

 _" So, that's LinkedIn. Now we're going to do the same thing with Facebook."_

And then:

 _" Make it a homework assignment for your staffer to fill in as much email
contact data for their list as they can. "_

I am sick to my stomach with this.

TalentBin sounds super scummy, and I wouldn't want to recommend their services
to anyone.

~~~
GVIrish
This was absolutely my problem with this strategy as well. "Strip mining"
someone's professional network doesn't give the impression that the employee's
contacts will be treated with thought and care. The whole reason referrals are
valuable is because they leverage the trust between two people. I trust that
someone I refer is going to put their best foot forward and perform well, the
person I refer trusts that I'm not going to recommend them to a crappy hiring
experience or a crappy company. They also trust that I'm not going to spam
them or otherwise waste their time.

By putting all of my contacts in the hands of the HR dept I no longer have any
control over how or when the company contacts them. That company can easily
break the trust I have with my contacts. I wouldn't be comfortable doing that,
referral bonus or no referral bonus.

Then there's the section about outsourcing this internal contact mining and
impersonating a VP in recruiting emails. If you're starting out the process
with outsourcing and fake personal touches chances are you are not going to
treat my network with care.

The most important question doesn't even get asked here, does an employee
_want_ to refer his or her network to the company. Some people are just not
going to feel comfortable with doing that at all, or maybe they don't trust
the company enough yet. Being aggressive with someone that feels that way
could elicit quite a negative reaction.

I do think working the networks of employees could bear great referrals but I
think a delicate and thoughtful touch needs to be applied.

------
pnathan
> At TalentBin, I refined my own approach to strip mining networks for the
> best possible people. It comes down to three things:

Yeah, so, I have my own personal EPA, and it's banned companies from strip
mining my networks, period. No, no, and NO a third time. If you want me to
recommend the company to everyone, you have to make this company freaking
awesome on everyone's dimension. That's really not going to happen.

Worse, unless it's a condition of hiring, I'm not going to want to sit down
with you and let you chew through my social networks for recruiting leads.
That's unethical (although I'm not sure quite off how to quantify that).

~~~
mathattack
I agree that forcing people to open social networks in front of someone from
HR (yes, recruiting is part of HR) is very creepy. Is it anyone's business who
you are friends with? Opening up someone's facebook opens up so many cans of
worms.

The only way this can be done is via opting in. "Email X to open up your
social networks, and get a $200 gift certificate to Amazon. If it leads to a
hire, get $2000 cash for a non-engineering hire, and $5000-10000 for an
engineering hire based on seniority."

~~~
Terr_
> Opening up someone's facebook opens up so many cans of worms.

"Well, if it's really a precondition to employment, I suppose I _could_ give
you access to a site which clearly displays my exact age, ethnicity, and
sexual orientation. That is, if your HR department says they really need the
information in order to make a decision."

"Uh, y'know, never mind..."

~~~
pnathan
Hahaha, yeah, the legal angle is.... interesting. I'd love to see a lawyer's
analysis of how many minefields this idea introduces.

~~~
danielweber
It's rather easy to work around from the start if the company is really
concerned about it.

------
jsnell
> When someone writes back "thanks but no thanks," be sure to respond with the
> ask that they pass the details of your open positions to their friends and
> colleagues.

I don't get enough recruiter spam to be really bothered about it, so I respond
with a polite "no thanks" to any reasonable messages. It's common courtesy,
and as a bonus helps to avoid the "hey, did you read our previous email?"
followups also recommended in this article. This strategy used to work fine,
but recently there have been a few cases where the followup then is either a
request to pass the job posting along, or (even worse) for me to refer people
to them.

"Not interested" means I'm not interested, it's not some kind of a sign of
engagement for you to exploit. I really hope this doesn't become a trend.

~~~
suyash
That is why I just mark them SPAM and don't bother again.

------
ivankirigin
I help make [http://yesgraph.com](http://yesgraph.com) a competitor to
TalentBin. Their approach is to get your company's network indexed, and let
recruiters search that network.

This doesn't make sense for a few reasons:

    
    
      1- you are a better judge of your relationships than a recruiter
      2- it's a bit weird exposing all your contacts to your company's hiring team.
    

Recruiters spend a lot of time spelunking into these relationships, when there
is a much better way.

YesGraph follows the same referral recruiting mission, but gets employees
involved. Here is an example job for a software engineer. You can connect to
Facebook and LinkedIn to get your network, and then see some contacts to make
referrals. No one is contacted in the process, this is just an example job:
[https://www.yesgraph.com/job/i/r3AG-5-m6bx5CqzsJBFeT0/g](https://www.yesgraph.com/job/i/r3AG-5-m6bx5CqzsJBFeT0/g)

In less than a minute, you can be more productive than a recruiter in hours.
That's because you know your contacts much better than they do. Oh, and we
don't hand over all your contacts to the company. We only show if you're
connected to a referral.

Overall though, I think FirstRound's content is really great. You can learn a
lot from the article.

Feel free to get in touch with more questions: ivan@yesgraph.com

------
logfromblammo
Reading this article made me nauseous. Barging past the work-life barrier in
this fashion is completely unacceptable.

The only way to ethically "mine" your employees' social networks is to make
them so happy with their jobs that they voluntarily brag about it to their
friends and family.

~~~
conorgil145
This. This. A million times this. I would never expose my personal social
network to my job for any price.

If I love my job, then you better believe that all of my developer friends are
going to hear about it until I am blue in the face. I also like to work with
good developers who I know, so I may try to recruit them if I think they would
be a good fit!

~~~
krschultz
As someone in your personal social network, I appreciate that.

------
edandersen
> "The key is to make it someone's full-time job to 1) proactively mine staff
> networks, 2) extract reputation information from staffers about their
> networks, and 3) execute scaled outreach to the potential candidates that
> get surfaced."

My personal network is not yours to "mine". If an HR person at my company
contacts a friend of mine to pitch a job at the company I work at, trying to
use my name as an "in", that is seriously unprofessional.

If you want access to my personal network, you should compensate accordingly.

> "You should definitely offer a referral recruiting bonus. It varies, but
> generally speaking, $1,000 to $2,000 for non-engineering staff and up from
> there for good engineers is market rate."

If you get a referral from a recuiter and then hire the referred candidate,
you need to pay that recruiter anywhere from 10-30% of the first year salary
of that person as a placement fee. For an engineer that could be over $20,000.
But you are only willing to pay $2,000 referral fees to your own employees,
who can provide much better candidates than a recruiter? This is not a "sweet
deal", it is taking advantage.

~~~
danielweber
I was once at a company where the VP asked me for an introduction to someone
and I said "how do I know that he'll be treated better than the prior 2 people
I referred to the company" and I got a thundering silence in return.

I guess it bothered me more than I thought since I still think of it today.

------
aristus
I hope employees can opt out, though the author doesn't even seem to think of
this as a possibility. I would absolutely not want some rabid HR ferret
demanding to paw through my private Facebook account.

~~~
Consultant32452
I certainly wouldn't do it, even if it meant my job.

------
wspeirs
I don't know, anyone else find it creepy to have someone from recruiting ask
you to do a LinkedIn search, then methodically ask you name-by-name if the
company should try and poach them? I would think that could kill recruiting.

~~~
kevinskii
The company gets to hire some good engineers who in turn probably get a salary
bump and improved job satisfaction, and you get to work with someone you like.
Anyone who is not amenable to being poached can easily avoid being contacted.
Which part do you find creepy?

~~~
aristus
The part where they turn around and demand to do the same thing with private
Facebook accounts?

~~~
kevinskii
I agree. I skimmed the article before I made my parent comment. While I have
no problems with my company asking me for selective referrals, I would never
let a recruiter sit next to me at my workstation and build a spam database of
my contacts regardless of the source.

------
outworlder
Hold on a second. TalentBin's reason for existing is to help other companies
find candidates, but they themselves have to resort to asking their employees
for their Facebook accounts?

------
rhizome
This is basically recruiter MLM to me: even if it affects the employee's
relationships with their friends, family, and acquaintances, a company should
try to extract as much value from those people as possible.

------
lsc
The whole benefit of hiring based on recommendations of your technical staff
is that nerds generally only recommend people who can do the job. They aren't
going to recommend someone who can't pull their weight, because it will hold
the whole team back.

If you take the nerd judgement out of the equation, as this article seems to
suggest, and just spider their connections? you lose most of that benefit.
Yes, if you are a connection, you can spider my linkedin; and yeah, people on
that are probably above average. But if I'm in the loop? I can give you more
information than a recruiter could possibly understand about the technical
abilities of many people on that network.

As an aside, I /really/ need to find an app to keep private notes on my
linkedin profile. I have a lot of customers as connections... more, really,
than my tiny brain can handle. I need some (private) way of recording what's
what (as well as a public way of telling them to mark their relationship with
me as a prgmr.com customer)

------
codyb
My company has a pretty aggressive in pool referral program. $2,500 dollars
for any low to mid level employee who stays three months and $5,000 grand for
any high level employee who stays three months. Recently they threw some fuel
on the fire and started e-mailing to remind us which roles were open, and
started having an employee to hire of the month program. Finally they've added
in things like any referrel which even comes in for an interview gets you
entered into a monthly drawing for an iPad.

My only problem is I have no network! I don't have a facebook. I constantly
prune numbers from my phone if I don't talk to people. I'm not a loner, it's
just I have four or five really good friends I keep in contact with, and I a
bunch of friends in the area where I live.

But shit, if I couldn't use a couple grand! A free semester at grad school.
Security for my new apartment. A 4k display and keyboard for my new laptop to
make doing school work even more enjoyable.

So I guess, if anyone in the NYC area needs a job ;-)

------
jaimebuelta
I must say that I have very conflicting feelings with referrals. I totally
understand they are a great way of getting great people, and they are probably
not used enough. On the other, referral bonuses feels wrong for me. I had
recommended people that has been hired in my company, but I've never cared
about the bonus (to the point of saying to our recruiter "forget about
referral process, just contact him and tell him I'm sending you"), to my eyes
I am helping a friend, not making a business transaction.

I understand that referrals have a lot of value, but I don't know how to make
them more common without being pushy and uncomfortable...

------
badman_ting
This wouldn't get anyone very far in my case, I really don't know that many
developers outside of work. I don't like them, usually. They have bad senses
of humor and annoying personality traits.

------
andrewstuart
People (including me) keep reinventing this concept every few years thinking
they are first to market or doing it slightly differently but "right". They
all fail. History certainly repeats in building social referral websites for
recruiting. Someone should build a list of failed sites that tried do this,
hopefully saving future entrepreneurs time and money.

The core of the problem is that it's socially stinky to exploit your personal
networks for money. That's the bottom line.

Sorry to say that this one too will be binned or "pivot" to something else.

------
lotsofcows
"reached out" "awesome" "proud" "excited"

Do people really talk like that? They all trigger my weasel words sensor. I'd
hit the spam button before I got half way through the email.

------
graycat
The comments on this threat about the OP are cruel, so cruel, so critical, I
mean, so negative! :-)!

I mean; I mean; I mean; just what is the problem with raping, pillaging,
exploiting, mining, filtering, drilling and blasting, harvesting, clear
cutting, etc. each employee's family, friends, fellow school alumni,
neighbors, SO, social networks, etc.?

Somehow most of the posts here seem not really to understand: The OP is just
writing an article to get publicity for himself, his company, and First Round.
What could be wrong with that?

With "right under your nose", eyes, chin, rear end, feet, etc., he is just
spinning a catchy title for a catchy story that can get 'into' and get all
fired up about, at least until think again in the morning. I mean, what's
wrong with that? Since it's 'media', you expected something else?

In particular, I just can't overlook the leading comment by tptacek who threw
10,000 razor blades, 1000 sharp knives, and a full 90 second blast from the
main gun of an A-10 right at the OP. Of course all the tptacek remarks were
rock solid, but why beat up on some childish writing just trying to get some
attention?

Sure, if anyone actually followed the ideas in the OP, then there might be
some little consequences such as wrecking their company by some outrageous,
egregious managerial incompetence, but isn't that a small price to pay for the
thinking in the OP? I mean, where else did you get such ideas?

Besides, after the OP, wouldn't you really like to have First Round helping
your company with your recruiting?

I mean, how much do you expect for free? Or, ideas are free. Ideas that won't
wreck your company, $1.00. Good ideas are $100. Ideas that are actually useful
-- priceless!

