Recruiting a rockstar venture design team (Part B): Outreach

In our 2nd post of the venture design team formation series, I’d like to share details about the recruitment outreach strategy I used.

Where do you find great people?

As I started building a pool of people I was interested in interviewing for the team, I knew I needed to be smart about where to find them in order to get the right people as quickly as possible. I ended up using 8 different channels to market the project and attract great teammates.

1. Personal contact outreach: emailed friends/acquaintances who I think would be a great fit
2. Cold outreach: researched the most relevant communities in the Boston area (e.g., IDEO, MIT Media Lab, Harvard’s new Design Engineering master) and messaged specific people via LinkedIn
3. Referral: asked friends for high-quality referrals
4. Special email list servs: asked my professional contacts to send out a posting on specific email list servs (e.g., MIT Integrated Design & Management master, Harvard Graduate School of Design)
5. Princeton alumni FB group & listserv: reached out to my alma mater’s alumni groups in the Boston area
6. Harvard/MIT entrepreneurship FB groups: posted on Harvard/MIT entrepreneurship FB groups
7. Meetup.com: created a new Meetup in Boston, requesting interested folks to complete the application form. Note I didn’t actually host any events (which is what a Meetup is typically for). In place of an event, I posted the application form for the project and was very clear/upfront about the intention of the Meetup.
8. Trellis (formerly known as Qollaboration): posted on Trellis’s Harvard network
9. Unsolicited: two people messaged me unsolicited; one after reading the project description on my LinkedIn profile, and the other after finding the project application form via organic Google search

Summary by channel

Key takeaways

• Most successful channels: Meetup (high volume), personal contact outreach (high quality), special list servs (high quality).
• Meetup is an interesting way to reach a large, diverse population. This channel is great because it pre-screens for those who take the initiative to proactively seek out an entrepreneurial community. Also, in my case, Meetup applicants had gone a step further by sticking their neck out and completing the long application form. I particularly appreciated that this channel connected me to a) many experienced, accomplished professionals looking to transition into an interesting new gig, and b) wild card candidates coming from a completely different social circle. One caveat — it was harder to sort applicants upfront because many had credentials I was unfamiliar with.
• While entrepreneurship-focused student FB groups drew a fair number of applicants, the quality/fit of the pool was not as great. Many of the applicants were either too inexperienced or too hesitant in committing to a substantive side project given their existing school commitments.

What I would consider doing differently next time

• Nail down one great teammate early in the recruitment process and then work as a duo to recruit the rest of the team
• Test offline channels (flyering, community networking sessions). I was away from Boston for a substantial part of the recruitment process, so I did not utilize any offline channel
• Systematically test the content of outreach messaging (i.e., do A/B testing) to see what resonates most with other aspiring entrepreneurs
• Create a separate Google form by channel to measure individual channel effectiveness more automatically (especially if I need to recruit a larger group of people)

Example outreach messaging

In case you are curious about my specific messaging on the different channels, below are some screenshots:

Cold outreach (on LinkedIn):

FB post:

Meetup:

Meetup main page

Meetup “event” with project application link

Trellis post: