Lessons from hiring tech talent coast to coast

Kailey Raymond
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read

This week, we sat down with Hired’s Senior Technical Recruiter, Drew Angers, to learn from his experiences in hiring technical talent across the country as both an agency and in-house recruiter. We wanted to know how the landscape differed from coast to coast and what metrics are universal. Let’s hear it, Drew!

Tell us about yourself

My name is Drew and I’ve been a Technical Recruiter for over 7 years on both the agency and corporate side. Like most people in my industry I fell into recruiting… who knew a recruiting agency was the only the only place that would hire a Liberal Arts major right out of college in 2011?! In the Spring of 2017, I decided to try my luck at the big leagues and moved out to San Francisco from Boston.

You’ve recruited all across North America — any major differences you’ve noticed in sourcing for tech talent on the East Coast vs. West Coast?

The difference lies in the supply and demand of both candidates and companies in how effective sourcing is and why. In the Bay, the Tech Giants and startups have always existed and have always driven a competitive market for engineers. As a result, even with the ample supply of engineers, sourcing is difficult because there’s so much noise and so much opportunity. You’re much less likely to stand out and get a response. Even when you do get a response, the likelihood is high that the candidate is also interviewing at several other companies. As a result, you may need to send out several hundred LinkedIn or emails messages to get a hire (seriously). Using Hired helps cut through that noise, but the fact remains that it is a candidate’s market.

The East Coast is a little different. Up until about 5 years ago, the only industries employing the bulk of engineers in cities like Boston and NYC were large enterprises (EMC, Fidelity, Oracle) and financial institutions (Goldman, Amex). Homegrown tech companies were few and far in between and as a result, you had a very conservative group of candidates on the East coast. From my experience, that made sourcing a little easier — there is less noise and candidates are more willing to reply. At the same time, candidates are much less willing to jump ship because there isn’t as much opportunity — a much more cautious bunch than out West! A potential game-changer to the East is companies like Google and Amazon opening satellite offices. With that, we’re seeing a shift to more of a Bay area sourcing landscape and competition is increasing on the East Coast.

What about in the offer stage? Any major differences in expectations between candidates in different cities?

In SF you’re competing with 4 other offers and in Boston or NYC you’re competing with maybe one. In the Bay you’re much more likely to be competing with a Google or Facebook whose resources can make it difficult to compete against their offers. With Amazon’s HQ2 potentially on the East Coast and engineering offices for Google and Facebook opening in cities across the country, I imagine competitive landscapes in other cities looking similar to the Bay soon.

What are the metrics you’re keeping an eye on to understand what success looks like? Any helpful benchmarks that indicate you have a healthy recruiting process?

I have a pretty standard expectation for benchmarking a healthy recruiting process. I don’t really worry about sourcing numbers as they can vary from region to region and vary depending on what tools you’re using. The real number lies in the number of candidates you screen and ultimately allow past your initial screen. A typical engineering interview process should be Screen>Tech Screen>Onsite>Offer. Usually, if I’m speaking to a candidate, I’ve already deemed their resumé worthwhile. Unless I’m on the fence about a candidate, I will usually dedicate the screen mostly to selling, instead of probing. Therefore, about 75% of my initial screens make it into Tech Screen. A healthy number would be 50% of all candidates that you move forward to tech screen then make it to an onsite interview. And about a third of the onsites should receive an offer. The healthiest of funnels should be 12 Screens> 8 Tech Screens > 3 Onsites > 1 Offer.

When do you ask for more budget? How do you pitch the spend to your manager?

It’s just a fact that it costs money to hire engineers. Depending on company size and resources, it costs anywhere between $12,000 to $22,000 per engineering hire. If you have 10 engineers to hire this year and don’t have at least a $150,000–$200,000 budget carved out to split between sourcing tools, referrals, and agencies, it’s not going to be easy for you. Typically, I ask for more budget if I gain additional headcount or if one of my roles is stale. If a role has stayed open for 3+ months, then opportunity cost of having the headcount open outweighs the cost of paying extra to have them filled!

In an era of AI and automation-everything, recruiting teams are beginning to automate their recruiting processes. In your experience, are there things that you can’t (or shouldn’t) automate in the hiring process?

We’re already seeing sourcing and scheduling being automated with tools like Envoy from Entelo and software like Clara that uses AI to schedule screens. In the next few years, I think it could be more difficult to get into recruiting from an entry level role because scheduling and sourcing will be almost entirely automated, while right now, we rely on coordinators. That said, I don’t think we ever should fully remove the human element from recruiting because first and foremost, it’s a people business. You’ll always need a human at the end of the recruiting process to close the candidate, but I imagine a great deal of the front end process will certainly be automated in the near future.

Kailey Raymond

Written by

Growth at @Hired_HQ. Previously, global community @StartupInst. Ask about talent acquisition, go-to-market, & community