

Why is Stripe hiring a Recruiting Engineer? - mgl

Does it sound like a fancy name for "HR Manager" or "Internal HR Sofware Developer" just to me? A separate "recruitment engineer" will always be detached from the core product development, he won't be able to understand the actual daily problems and challenges present in the core team, he won't understand its spirit.<p>Yes, you may want to build an internal application to improve the recruitment process, sure - there is always plenty of room here for a change. But does it need a separate engineer? Wouldn't it be a great side project for a few people from the core team? And who would like to become a "recruitment engineer" building some side application of second importance in a company building world-class product?<p>Stripe, you are brilliant as a service (BaaS), why so?
======
gdb
So, as a member of the core team who these days spends most of my time working
on recruiting, I can attest that the role you describe is very much not what
we're hiring for. A recruiting engineer isn't necessarily someone who works
only in the narrow recruiting box (our engineers get to work on the pieces of
Stripe they prefer, but most of us have a primary focus). Instead, it's
someone who is excited about solving recruiting, making it as efficient and
effective as possible, and wants to spend a lot of their time doing so.

There are a lot of problems in hiring that people have traditionally regarded
as unsolveable, and try to solve by throwing more people at them. It's not
just a matter of building a webapp to schedule candidates. It's about defining
and tracking metrics around the effectiveness of our recruiting process. It's
about building tools and platforms for identifying people we'd like to work
with. (There are entire startups devoted to some of these challenges, cf
Interviewstreet.)

Anyway, I think that above all, anyone working in recruiting at Stripe needs
to be part of the "core team". You're completely correct that someone working
in recruiting who is not part of the core team just wouldn't work out well.
But it's quite possible to be in this role and also be core.

------
zmitri
Perhaps in the same manner that Hackruiter (<http://www.hackruiter.com/>)
works, except it's cheaper if you can get someone to do it internally.

------
coryl
Recruitment engineer probably also means product evangelist. Someone who can
sell the product and be technically competent enough to sell potential hires
on why it would be interesting to join.

