Hiring Engineers for Startups
Building Startups
Its 2014. You are part of one of the bajillion startups in San Francisco. Worse, You are not a part of the hundreds of “celebrity” or “successful” startups in San Francisco. Startups with free lunches, 27" iMac’s, a guaranteed ticket to a social life etc.
And now, you are tasked with “hiring engineers” for your company. A huge problem for all startups, a bigger one if you are not the above.
Its very intimidating and depressing at first and if you are engineer who has not done it before, it is very challenging.
Its intimidating because its a tiring, manual process. As an engineer, your whole ethos repels the manual nature of the gig. Hours have to be spent looking at resumes, sending hand crafted tailored emails which don’t sound dubious and win you an “open”.
Its depressing because you are spending your day looking at more ‘successful’ resumes. Engineers like you. Engineers at successful big companies. People better than you.
The biggest challenge is convincing yourself that people will like to join your team. After conducting it over the past year, I’ve found some faith and finally feel, that it can be done. You might not get the “rockstars” but you are sure to get some very good people to join your journey.
The solution to the problem lies in understanding all the various touch points in the hiring process and improving on ones where the best of the companies fail. Touch points where other companies are providing the “resource” experience and you provide the “team-mate” experience.
Start with designing a respectful hiring process. For hiring an engineer, a test of the coding knowledge is the natural approach. Here are the things that seem to work well in my opinion here:
- Instead of asking cookie cutter problems on phone for screening, Give a take home real-life practical challenge. If possible, eat your own dog food.
- Time box the take home challenge so that its solvable in 2-3 hrs. Its unethical to ask a candidate to invest more time at this stage. And this should be enough to help you gauge how good his/her skills are.
- Give the candidate the opportunity to choose the problem he/she finds fun to solve. Remember, a lot of experienced candidates hate coding challenges and rightly so. Work hard on your end in creating problems which are fun and intriguing. This goes a long way in solving the “resource” problem.
Outside the coding challenge, the “phone screen” should be all about the candidate’s past experience and culture fit. It should be an informal chat about all things outside code and higher level concepts and trends in technology. You should take the time to explain your company’s goal/mission to the best of your ability. This is a huge part of the process. Remember, the pretext is that you are not hiring for a stable ‘house hold’ company yet.
The onsite process is the next stage and there are several takes on that depending on the stage your company is at. I need to assimilate my thoughts about it another time but the last thing I would leave you with is, after a decision has been cast about the candidate and if it is a no go, take the time to write a proper rejection note to the candidate. At bigger companies, this might not fly for various reasons(surprise: legal) but if you are a small startup, your odds of getting sued due to other reasons is way higher than this.
So take the time to right a proper rejection note. Be humble but at the same time, give direct solid feedback on why your team thinks that now is not the right time for the collaboration.
How have you hired engineers for your startup?
