Great Recruitment Begins with Your Mission Statement

The following is adapted from Raising Engineers by David Dettmer.

Some founders are initially a bit shocked by how hard it can be to attract software engineers to their team.

I remember consulting with a founder who had previously worked at Apple. He told me that every night he’d sit at his desk sending out message after message to try to get people interested in working for his company. He was getting very little response.

“At Apple, everyone just wanted to come work for us,” he said. He was finding out just how different attracting engineers is at a startup. I’ve also met founders who assume that engineers will automatically be excited to join their newly funded startup with a unique offering. Of course, the truth is that attracting engineers is hard, no matter what your previous experience is or how special your startup may be.

The good news is that there are effective ways to do it. Founders just aren’t always sure where to begin.

When I ask founders about how they will start hiring more engineers, I typically hear things like ‘“create an enticing job description” or “reach out to my network” or “just hire a good recruiting agency.”

Those answers aren’t wrong exactly, but they are the wrong place to start. Those are tactics, and those come later. There’s a deeper and more strategic need that must come first if you want to truly connect with the right people for your company.

Great recruiting begins with getting clarity on three things:

• The mission of your company
• Creating a pitch around what engineers care about
• Why you personally want to build this company

Get these three right, and you’ll have a powerful foundation for attracting engineers who are the right match for your company. The last part of that sentence is especially important. You’re not only looking for the best software engineers. You’re seeking the engineers who are the best fit for your startup.

Recruiting = An Invitation to Contribute to Your Company Mission

Before you do any recruiting, can you state simply and clearly what your company does? Notice I didn’t say what it sells, but what it does. Let me illustrate the difference with an example from my own experience.

As head of engineering at Rev, I’ve had literally thousands of conversations with prospective engineering candidates. When I ask those candidates what it is they think we do at Rev, they almost inevitably say something that boils down to “you sell transcription and other speech-to-text services.”

My response is always the same: “You’re right. But that’s not why we exist.”

Next, I share what we really do at Rev: we create work-from-home jobs. That’s our mission. Then I go deeper and explain what that means.

“We change people’s lives by allowing them to work where, when, and how they want. You hear every day how companies move to the next city, state, or country or have just shut down permanently and not everyone is as fortunate as you and me and can just work from anywhere or move. They have families, mortgages, and responsibilities, and we create opportunities for these people. Because of Rev, there are thousands of people who can pay that mortgage, put food on the table, or just have some extra cash for the weekend. We change lives.”

I’m trying to reach them at a gut level and see how they respond. It’s like I’m extending them an invitation to share in the mission of Rev, and that comes before we talk about the actual job and its details. If our mission excites them, then we can go through the rest of the recruitment process to make sure everything else is a match. But the mission has to be the foundation and provide the necessary spark.

Compare this to what would happen if I told engineers, “We sell speech-to-text services.” Unless they’re a speech scientist, it might come across like any other tech job and would probably do little to distinguish it from other options they may have. On the other hand, letting them in on our true mission — to change lives by creating work-from-home jobs — creates connection and excitement.

Does this mission and pitch connect with every candidate I talk to? Of course not. And that’s the point.

Whenever I’m in a conversation with a prospective engineer, I’m watching for signs that the mission generates some spark of interest. However, even if I’m not getting those signals right off the bat, I don’t immediately rule them out.

I’ll continue to bring up the mission at different points of the conversation. I’m probing to see if they do connect with it and I just haven’t found out why yet.

If by the end of the conversation I like a candidate’s skills and potential, but I still don’t feel any excitement about this mission, I ask two questions: “Are you interested in moving forward with this process? If so, why?”

What I hope to hear is one of three things: that they do connect with the mission, that they’re excited about the technical challenges we’re tackling, or that they’re excited about how the engineering team operates.

On the other hand, some candidates will focus their answers on negative circumstances in their current job. If they’re simply looking for an escape valve and don’t seem to have any genuinely positive reasons to work for your company, hiring them will likely end badly.

Although ideally, all your engineers will be excited about your mission, there may be a handful who connect with your company for other positive reasons and these can be good hires, too.

That said, alignment with mission needs be a key criterion in deciding whom to hire in most cases. As a founder of a startup in early-growth mode, the first twenty engineers you bring on are crucial for going to the next level. These hires need to be aligned with you and buy into what you do at a very deep level. By recruiting people who are enthusiastic about your mission and want to help you achieve your goal, you’ll get motivated engineers on board. These motivated engineers are the people who will fuel your company’s growth.

This is why great recruitment all starts with figuring out what you do and putting it in one succinct mission sentence. A good rule of thumb is this: your mission statement should be eight words or less and extremely easy to understand. As in, super clear and immediately graspable to pretty much everyone.

I should also note that you shouldn’t confuse the mission statement with an elevator pitch. Most tech founders have an elevator pitch that they use to raise money, which is perfect for that purpose. A mission is something shorter and more visionary, the tagline that sums up the core motivation behind everything your company does.

If you only know what you sell but not what you do, here are three great questions to ask yourself to find your mission:

• What’s going to change in the world because of your company’s success?
• How are people’s lives going to change because of your company?
• Why is what your company does important?

For more advice on recruiting high performers you can find Raising Engineers on Amazon.

David Dettmer has been a leader in product engineering for startups for more than twenty years. He’s built several successful software engineering teams from scratch and consulted with hundreds of startup founders on how to hire, build, and optimize high-performing engineering teams. David lives in Austin, Texas, with his family and has raised his own engineer, his daughter.