18 year agency recruiter here. The problem with most recruiters today is that they are so concerned with controlling the process that they get in the way of letting two adults have a dialogue, and the recruiting industry is inundated with junior level people who don't know what they are doing.

The theory is that if the recruiter has a high level of control over both candidate and client, the odds of a positive outcome for the recruiter (a fee) increase. The client and candidate are both essentially 'buyers' in the sense that they have to agree to accept the other, and the recruiter is 'selling' to both parties.

But nobody wants to buy from someone who sells too hard, and that's what most recruiters end up doing.

When I started in recruiting, I wanted to be involved in every stage of the process to be sure I had some level of control. More recently I've realized that if the candidate is mature (and not going to make rookie mistakes like asking 3x market rate for salary just to 'test the waters') and the client has a decent hiring process, I'll make the intro and then step away until (if) I'm needed.

A recruiter can be quite helpful as a sounding board for both sides during negotiations to help facilitate a deal or save a deal that is failing.

>I’ve had folks change their mind even after accepting an offer. Hell, to be honest I’ve done it myself (and felt terrible about it).

A recruiter should also be helpful in providing guidance on situations like these. For example, I usually offer my clients a handful of tips to try and guarantee that someone who accepts the job will actually show up on day one. Having lunch with the new team between acceptance and start date is probably the most common.

But today's recruiter is far too interested in control. Make the intro, step away, and step in when necessary - otherwise, let them talk.

Thoughts on the final 'Offer' stage. If it's your startup, be brutally honest with your first hires. Put yourself in their shoes when you make the offer. Explain it like you would explain it to yourself.

- Tell them, unprompted, key difficulties that may lie ahead (in an upbeat manner)

- Sell them on the goal, but don't sell them that they are the right person - that's their choice

- Do not make promises you can't keep. Let me repeat this. Do not make promises you can't keep

The reason for doing the above is a) You will have tough times together - this is your team - you must start well b) If they can't handle these conversations you probably don't want them c) You're human, behave well if you can

Context disclaimer - this is from a London, UK perspective while hiring senior people. YMMV.

Great advice. I was wondering if anyone out there has experience of sourcing technical leads when what's primarily on offer is equity for a founding/lead role at a bootstrapped startup with an early product. Clearly you need to have a compelling vision, show potential and find people in the right frame of mind/stage in their career but I'm wondering if I'm missing any important channels? So far here are a few I've tried and my experience:

* AngelList - seem to mainly attract recent bootcamp grads

* Meetups and Networking Events - seems very inefficient and so far I've come across very few technical folks at these events, at least in digital health

* A lot of personal outreach using LinkedIn/email - probably the most successful so far..

* HN Who's Hiring - surprisingly few leads, but very high quality ones so far.

* Personal network - although similar to the author's I'm relatively new to the Bay Area

I'm absolutely amazed that there isn't a single mention of referencing in here. It's by far the most important thing we do in our hiring cycle.

Here's what we do, which is a little different:

1/ We'll spend in the order of 5-6 hours with a mid-to-senior hire before we recruit them. We pick one topic from their CV (the project they're proudest of or happiest with), and dive into it in huge detail: everything from the people involved to the outcomes and recognition of success. It helps to illustrate what the person is truly like.

2/ Where it's possible, we'll pay the person a pro rata salary equivalent to spend a day with us actually working in the role. I know a couple of other companies doing this and it's really great.

3/ If we like the person we immediately throw out whatever references they provide and spend a few hours dredging up people they worked with from our networks. We also look at the people they named in the project example. Once we've got a list of 6-10 people, we ask the candidate if we can reference using those people.

4/ Typically at this point we've decided that on paper we want to make an offer. Referencing is the last opportunity we have to really assess the person's ability to cope under pressure, how quickly they drop their "new job" act and get into being themselves, and crucially what "themselves" is like. I nearly always only ask questions which could be perceived as negative at this point -- what makes them throw their laptop across the room? What stresses them out? How do they communicate when under pressure? What are the things you told them they need to work on in their last review?

Referencing probably only accounts for 10-20% of the time I spend on a candidate, but the weighting I give it is huge when it comes to working with and managing that candidate when they're on the team.

A million different ways of doing things -- but referencing is so often overlooked and I've never understood why.

Most hiring by most companies is not based on research. There is a huge body of research on how to hire effectively, part of the filed called industrial and organizational psychology, that goes back a full century all over the world. There is also a lot of legal regulation about what can be done and what cannot be done in hiring procedures. I wrote a FAQ about this issue a few years ago that lives on as a well liked Hacker News comment[1] that I welcome you to check. The FAQ links out to a lot of useful online resources about the research and law on hiring procedures.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613413#4613543

Mentioned in a comment or two, but want to highlight. Be up front with salary ranges, especially if you want people to come in and pair, etc.

I had a great initial process with a promising startup who wanted to graduate to a "we'll pay you contract rates to work with us a couple of days" sort of evaluation.

Since I was a FTE elsewhere and would have had to take PTO, I asked for a comp talk first. While I had no expectation to make the same salary I already was, I discovered their high end was way under what I'd calculated as a max pay cut I could take and still pay bills. It probably would've gone above water a round or two of funding later, but I would potentially have drained my savings waiting around. Unless I were founding, that would've been unacceptable.

I'm glad I forced the talk first or else that would've been a frustrating end to the process. My basic take is the more you ask as part of your evaluation process, the more you need to make sure it's even a possibility for both sides.

My sense of every recruiter I've interacted with is that they have made a few deals with specific companies and they are just trying to sell me on them. Like a travel agent who only sells trips to a handful of specific resorts.

There are recruiters out there that concentrate on very specific technical areas, keep in touch with senior people, and still fulfill a necessary function pairing up qualified people with new opportunities. These folks can save all kinds of time and risk when you're looking for somebody with very specific skills. Some are pretty well known in the industry (e.g., you call Julia when you need a compiler writer) but I wonder whether they're eventually going to go the way of the professional high-end travel agent.

Some things that are missing and I do want to know: the exact location of the office, pictures inside the office so I can see the chair and desk I'll be using.

Here's my perspective.

(I am writing in a snarky way to convey a message)

1. If you're using recruiters, you're already losing. Especially if those are recruiting agencies that "hide" the name of the companies.

The cold emails are just ridiculously hideous.

2. Use as little hyped up words as you possibly can. You might change the world, but everyone else is saying the same thing and people are getting sensitive about it.

3. Impact - Emphasize what is the impact of the role. Why do you need my skills, Not just an engineer skills, why do you need me. If you don't need me I don't care what you need, post on LinkedIn for all I care.

4. The mail needs to come from the CTO with as many details as possible about the company. Not how much money you raised and from which VCs, everybody raised money and everybody as VCs behind them. I could care less. What are the technical challenges, what's the roadmap, what challenges are you facing that you need me to solve and help with.

5. Compensation - "Competitive salary" means nothing. I don't think it's relevant to me at all. You need to be specific about the compensation levels. If you wanna give a range, that's also fine. If your range stops at X and I am making X+50%, I know we are too far apart, we could save each other the trouble.

6. Interview - If the interview requires more than a single day, I don't care. If it requires whiteboard, I don't care, If it requires multiple processes and screens, I don't care.

It's all about managing friction. Just like acquiring a customer on Google or Facebook. If the process has too much friction, I don't want to go through it. I just don't. I'm happy where I am and it's not worth my trouble.

All of these may sound elitist, I get that. I really do. But if you want really senior engineers the targeting is different than people that just finished bootcamp or have 2-3 years of experience.

The author doesn't mention much about how to position yourself to be attractive to your candidates. Here's what I look for - and what I learned when we were hiring people of our own(not a startup but a dev shop of two...now seven). If you want good candidates to pick you, you have to show them (much like investors) that you know what the hell you're doing, otherwise the smartest will walk away.

1) Look legit, as much as possible without spending mass $. Marketing is key for startups, again try look like you know what the hell you're doing.

Most people will walk away if you don't have a solid website. Have a company Linkedin, Facebook, and GMaps listing as well.

The more results in google search the better, try to fill the front page for your name with random things like an actual company would. As long as your name isn't stupid this is much easier than it sounds, you can make a lot of noise on the interest for free.

Have a working phone number with a phone tree, best if it's an 800 # but local area code is better than nothing.

A few company shirts helps even if you only wear them while interviewing. If you have an office on top of it you're set.

Whatever you do try to avoid meeting at public places like coffee shops, a lot of scams are doing this nowadays and candidates will be weary. If you don't have an office your home is probably best.

Another thing, use something like Workable to manage candidates and have a real financing and benefits system setup like zenefits + freshbooks. These things will be visible to prospects and new employees quickly and again shows that you know how to run a real company.

2) Cut all the buzz and BS in job listings. Don't try to make it sound like a difficult job to land. Make interviews easy and fast to get, LOWER the bar. Emphasize lax rules and freedom. These are your only advantages.

Remember who you're competing against. Good candidates will have many choices of where to work and you don't have anything against their brand appeal, pay, benefits, and overall attractiveness. Don't pretend that you do, your selling points are as follows: Be your own boss, loose rules and freedom to build something as they see fit will be the main drivers for most of your early hires. You may get wannabe CEO types, and don't be afraid, these are the people you want. Be afraid of the ones in it solely for money. There's much better ways of making money than joining a startup...these people are probably stupid or naive.

Most good candidates will end up with more than one offer. You need to make the process faster than any other company so that you can short circuit some of these people before other companies have a chance. You're small enough to be quicker to the draw than larger companies, use that to your advantage. To make the process faster, you need to do more thorough initial screenings so that you hire more people that come in the doors. Bigger companies don't want to waste the time but you can afford to. Most companies have an "offer lag" of about 1.5-3 weeks from initial contact, so you should be hiring people by Friday if you meet them Monday.

The "culture fit" is really important in super small companies. Try to make friends with the person you're interviewing. Is it someone you would chill with? Look at your current employees. Do they like to go out an party on the weekends? Play sports? Video game nerds? Try to hire the same at first. People not getting along at huge companies doesn't matter much, but when you're forced to work together all day it's important

You're missing probably the biggest one of them all - free postings on indeed. They aren't as visible as the paid ones but the traffic is massive. We got a lot of low quality leads through them, but the pure volume still made it our best recruiting tool by far.

also, Ads on stackoverflow tend to get us high q leads as well

FWIW, I really liked Angel List for finding smaller companies. I found their listings to be of high quality. Ended up taking a job across the country from Angel List.

On the hiring side, we seem to get inundated by recent grads regardless of where we post. LinkedIn and Indeed seemed like the worst offenders for us in previous gigs.

Meetup is my vector as well. I am organizing my first meetup on the topic of mechanical sympathy and low latency microservices with focus on low level details like dedicating cpu cores to interrupt request handlers, call routing within service discovery and so on. Only 5 people have confirmed but these are the folks I am interested in talking to and hearing from. It can be quite rewarding both personally and professionally.

IMO, and as you mentioned, your best bet in those early days is to rely on your network and have that insanely compelling vision with which to sell them on. I think you need a certain level of trust with people for them to be willing to bet a significant chunk of their time and such an inordinate amount of energy on your vision. Conversely no matter how much the person may love you, if your vision for the company is a giant pile of "meh" then you won't (and shouldn't) have much luck convincing them either.

The two go hand in hand for your first few hires.

> * Meetups and Networking Events - seems very inefficient and so far I've come across very few technical folks at these events, at least in digital health

I haven't tested this idea, but... consider starting a meetup that would draw more technical folks. I would personally like to see deeper technical meetups near where I am, but I haven't pulled the trigger to try and organise anything yet.

Because most people worth a dime interviewing for you are actively working for a different company. By asking and calling references you're "flushing them out".

This does not mean I disagree with you. We had someone working for us, we're connected on LinkedIn. That person since then switched multiple jobs and I know for a hard fact that he'd never get a job if the company just called people working with him. No way.

That sounds unbelievably risky for the people giving the references to have long, nuanced conversations about someone's potential weaknesses in a new job. I can imagine many ways these conversations could be made off the record, but the people providing the references are at the mercy of your interpretations and how their statements are later represented. Even if you don't hire the person for entirely different reasons they could end of being held liable for loss of earnings if it's decided that some of the information was untruthful, unsubstantiated or illegal.

> A million different ways of doing things -- but referencing is so often overlooked and I've never understood why.

Because it's worthless.

There is a 1% chance that you'll find out that "that guy" was a drug dealed and he was let go.

The other 99%. It's impossible to know if you're calling a friend of him, if you're talking with an ex-grumpy manager who's backstabby (that may be why the guy left in the first place), if you're reaching someone at all (do you seriously expect employees to have valid phone numbers from people they've worked with 5 years ago and the numbers are still valid??? wtf), and of course you can't get nor trust references for the current company (you're not only rattling him out but the reference may have a serious incentive to lie to you in ways you can't possible understand).

And last but not least, all consulting and sweat shops will ask and insist for name and references of everything, not to hire you BUT to go harass your companies as potential customers for their services.

IMO: references are optimizing against everything they're supposed to help with. Never do referencing. Stop interviews when people insist on references.

[P.S. Answering reference requests is a liability that's putting you at risk (and it's forbidden in a lot of places). Don't do it. The only acceptable answer is "That guy has worked with us around <that period of time>. That's all I can tell you."]

> 1/ We'll spend in the order of 5-6 hours with a mid-to-senior hire before we recruit them.

That's great if they're unemployed, but not so good if they have a job. Most employers won't do after hours interviews either. Is a currently employed person meant to call in sick?

It's absolutely terrible if you are one of a million generic companies that candidates aren't excited to work for.

Wow this truly sounds horrible, glad I have never had to go through something like this.

> spend a few hours dredging up people they worked with from our networks

What if there aren't any?

I've had conversations with recruiters where I've initially sounded interested, then changed my mind because it just sounds like too much hassle.

They simply can't understand that I would give up when I realised there were three interviews, or that I needed to spend a day doing a test.

Sure if I did well in one interview the other two would likely be fine too, but equally... I could just go to another company that says "OK" after a conversation in a bar and save myself a lot of friction.

"Competitive salary" means "we pay the same crappy salaries as everybody else". Your salary will increase only if their competition increases salaries and people start to leave (hence "competitive").

>There's much better ways of making money than joining a startup...these people are probably stupid or naive.

I see this to an extent, but it's not stupid to refuse to work for a low salary. There seems to be an idea floating around that magic startup pixie dust somehow makes it possible to hire good people for little money. I'm not so sure.

Very good points! However I feel like if you speed the hireing process up too much many candidates will walk home without the impression of having to achieved something bigger. Shure, you should not waste too much time, but greater upfront effort will make the candidate feel like he has actually achieved something if he gets the offer. And this in return may increase the likelyhood of him or her accepting the job. The point I am telling you may be hard to explain, but in a nutshell I just want to say that you should try to increase the value of getting an offer by increasing the time frame between first contact and final offer just a little, for instance by having an extra meeting/screening/etc. in between.