How We Hire
An inside look at our process
Right now, as the CEO of BlueLight, I spend about 40% of my time focused on building and developing our team. It is the most important thing I can do for our company right now — that’s why I’m spending so much time on it. Last week itself I spent 12 hours just interviewing candidates (not including messaging, coordination, or review).
This is written to give prospective employees, customers, and fellow business people a perspective on how we approach hiring.
It is structured as follows:
Why hiring is SO important
What we look for in hires
Our process from open rec to hire
Why Hiring Is SO Important
A business can rarely start, and will definitely never scale without the right people. Accordingly, hiring is a key ingredient to scaling your company.
Our mission as a company is to remove the anxiety of feeling unsafe and get people help faster in an emergency. Right now when you call 911 from a smartphone, they don’t receive your name, picture, or location (yes, really). We want to fix that and so much more.
The positions we’re currently hiring for, a server-side Architect and iOS engineer, are to help us further our mission.
This is especially true for our server-side Architect. We need their skills to ensure our infrastructure is extremely reliable and highly available. 99% up time is not good enough — people are using our service and trusting us to get them help faster than just calling 9-1-1. Without this hire’s contributions, we will not be able to impact at the scale we want to.
What We Look For In Hires
We are looking for candidates who fit the following four criterion:
- Empathy for the mission of the company. In our case, it’s about how much someone wants to see safety and emergency response services improved. They personally want to see 911 get better and for people to have better outcomes in an emergency.
- Unquestionable skill for the hired position. For our iOS engineering position, we’d love to see someone who is already experimenting with iOS on their own and has published an app leveraging GPS before.
- Willingness to learn. If you’re reading this on a smartphone, the operating system you’re using probably didn’t exist nine years ago. Technology is changing extremely fast, and we as a company accordingly celebrate the practice of learning. If we don’t learn, the world will leave us behind.
- Ability to trust and take action in the face of ambiguity. We’re hiring people because they are better than us in their respective area (see point #2 above). Accordingly, we have to trust each other’s decisions and take action in the face of ambiguity even when the right choice isn’t entirely clear.
In our hiring process, which we’ll dive into more below, we ensure that we test for all of these.
Our Process from Open Rec to Hire
Since the cost to the company of a bad hire is really high, both financially and emotionally, we ensure that our process thoroughly evaluates prospective hires for personality fit with what we’re looking for.
Our process from first contact with a candidate to an offer should take 2-3 weeks.
Here are the linear steps of the process:
Opening a position to hire for
When we are opening up a position, we first clarify why we need this person. What value will they add? Is someone going to be able to focus more on a specific, crucial task by this hire being made? Can we quantify the impact on the business?
In a lot of cases this is very clear. For example, with our iOS engineering position, we will be on Android only until we bring on this hire. That means that we’re probably leaving anywhere from 30-60% of the addressable market on the table and constraining our network effects.
Validate description with employees and advisors
The reason for this step is quite simple: we confirm that our reason for this hire matches up with other folks who know our needs quite well. It’s easy to spend money and want to hire a lot of people. It’s harder to make sure that these hires will impact the business and make your team better.
Make digital contact
We connect with candidates through job postings, LinkedIn, Facebook, network introductions, and even AngelList. I personally write an individualized note to each person we reach out to.
Survey for context
Before meeting, we send a candidate a quick 10-minute survey. This has two purposes:
1) It gives us context on the candidate before we meet. Why are they interested in our company? Why join a startup? What questions do they have for us?
2) It’s a pretty clear sign that someone isn’t that excited about your company if they won’t spend 10 minutes to take your survey. This stops us from wasting time and lets us focus on folks who are very interested.
If you want to see our survey, see here
Meet in Person or on phone to understand fit
We use this time to follow up on the survey and really just to get to know the person. What are they motivated by? Do they actually care about this problem or has TechCrunch just convinced them that startups are sexy?
This is where we understand someone’s ‘empathy for the mission’.
I can’t overstate how important it is to make sure we connect with someone on a personal level. When working together in a small company, we are effectively office roommates.
Check compensation expectations
If there is mutual interest, we ask the candidate about their financial expectations on salary. We are generous on equity, so there is usually not an issue there.
This isn’t an offer letter, but we use this step to simply make sure that we and the candidate are in the same range. While we can definitely accommodate different levels of compensation, we simply are not in a position to compete with Google on salary.
This step helps us save a lot of time and understand how serious people are.
Project
If we’re speaking the same language for compensation, we move forward with a project that should take ~10-12 hours and is constrained to the timeline of a single week. We use it to test someone’s skill, bar for quality, and how they approach their work. It is always work that is relevant to our product and could be released to production.
This tests for that ‘Unquestionable skill’.
If you are wondering, we’re happy to pay for this time as we understand the candidate’s time is valuable and is coming from time that otherwise would be spent with friends and family.
Final Interview
We use this time to go through the project and understand the candidate’s approach. Finally, as a last exercise, we give them resources to directly impact our business in a very short time-frame (less than a day). I can’t share more here as I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but this is how we test for someone’s decisiveness in the face of ambiguity
To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt:
“The best thing you can do is to make the right decision. The next best thing is to make the wrong decision. The worst thing is to make no decision at all.”
Reference Check
Honestly, this usually doesn’t happen. If the candidate has gotten through to this point, they are clearly motivated and we should have enough context on our key criterion to make a hiring decision.
Then we make an offer!
There are a lot of steps in the process for us but we move through them pretty quickly. It ensures that we have the most motivated people joining our company and that they are excited to make an impact.
Also, if I didn’t make it clear, we are looking to bring on a Server-side Architect and an iOS engineer. It’s one of the few opportunities where you can say that your work directly saved lives. Please shoot me an email at preet@getbluelight.com if you are interested!
