How I Hired My First Full-Time Backend and Frontend Engineers
Hiring is hard.
I was mingling with other founders at one of the network meetings. One guy introduced himself as a founder slash CTO with backend engineering background. Suddenly, people in the room turned around and started asking him questions as if they were interviewing a backend engineer position for their companies. I live in Silicon Valley and let me tell you, we don’t have enough engineers at the least that’s the case for the most startups. How many startups can fight against FAANG companies with $200K basic salary?
Meet first, strategy comes later.
I was tired of saying ‘hiring is hard’ and frustrated not knowing where to start with. Just like that my hiring wasn’t making any progress until I met Jaeshik, a co-founder at Daily Hotel, Sequoia Capital-backed startup, and exited last year.
“You have to meet A LOT OF candidates first, then you should talk about a hiring strategy.”
Said Jaeshik when I asked him about what was his hiring strategy. He was right. I could start with testing with different hiring channels and find out which one works the best for my company. I have been preaching this approach with product development, sales, everything else but hiring.
Set 3 hypothesis and immediately test them out the following:
- Asked 17 friends for referrals
- Ran a paid ad campaign at Rocketpunch, a recruiting platform in Korea.
- Reached out 10 people from LinkedIn
I listed out channels where I can control the quality of candidates in somewhat degree. I pulled off a list of my Facebook friends who are either an engineer or work with engineers. I haven’t talked to most of them in the last 10 years or so. I spent half a day and had 17 friends who promised to make a referral. Spoiler alert, we hired from one of my friend’s referrals within a month.
My second hiring channel was using a recruiting platform. Since I was recruiting an engineer based in Korea I decided to try a paid ad with a Korean recruiting platform. We spent about $400 for a week and ended up interviewing 2 candidates.
Last, I reached out to 10 candidates over LinkedIn search. It wasn’t easy to find an engineer who is based in Korea through LinkedIn, but spent another half-day and ended up interviewing 1 candidate.
When I think I had 4 top candidates, I moved on to an interviewing stage. Sukjae, CTO and Co-founder and I agreed not to compromise the quality for an early employee and were ready to spend time as long as it takes. Previously, I’ve hired some bad apples for a part-time position, and NEVER wanted to go through that again. (Thank you for engraving the lesson in me.)
Screen interview and live coding.
We spent between 30 ~60 minutes screen interview then conducted 1 ~ 2 hours of live coding interview. It was all Zoom interview and worked out perfectly. Any lesson learned? Don’t skip the live coding interview if you are hiring an engineer.
As I’ve already spoiled the result, we hired an engineer from my friends’ referrals. Interestingly, the candidate saw our job posting from two different people in one day. Two friends simultaneously posted our job posting to their friends and network (huge thanks to Minwoo Park and Donghyun Lee) that it got picked up to his attention.
It is not serendipity, but it’s marketing 101. Communicate through a target customer’s journey. Admittedly, I didn’t plan on it, but it makes sense, right?! Our now employee #1 has years of experience at the top leading eCommerce companies from both a startup and a corporate. One of my two friends happens to be a former fashion startup employee and another one is a developer advocate and active in a Python community.
Frontend Engineer
We had a completely different approach to hiring a frontend engineer. To make a long story short. We converted a part-timer into a full-timer. After changing probably 5 to 6 different frontend engineers we hired from Upwork we finally settled down with one engineer since last year. Time to time, I would comment like once we raise our seed round, he should join us for full time. Also, I’ve shared our vision as a company and a year-long roadmap, particularly what kind of help we need from him. Of course, I don’t do that with every freelancer, but only with a few whom I want to bring in someday. I don’t know if my long term strategy with a visible intention did magic, but we got an email that he is joining us a full-timer a week after we made an offer.
What didn’t work
- Shared a job posting on my FB and waiting for someone wonderful to join us.
- Posted a job position on our company website and waiting for someone wonderful to join us.
- Asked a friend from time to time and waiting for someone wonderful to join us.
See the commonality? Passively waiting. I interviewed 2 candidates in the past entire year with this strategy, passively waiting. Now our new strategy, actively testing a hypothesis got me a total of 5 top candidates in 4 weeks and closed hiring with two wonderful full-time engineers.
In summary
Let’s rewind. The total process took me 2 weeks of searching and 2 weeks of interviewing as following:
Posted a job description on Notion (half-day) > Picked 3 channels to test (2–3 hours of contemplating) > Tested with 3 channels (3 days) > Narrowed down to top candidates > Interviewed 5 candidates (over two weeks) > Made a job offer > Closed
Next — Happy Ending?
As excited as I am to finally close with hiring and getting ready to conquer the world, I have no idea how well we will get along or how long we will stay together. I will keep you posted. Till then, maybe hiring is not so hard if I stop worrying and start meeting candidates.
