The Startup Founder’s Guide To Hiring A Developer

by Pranab @ www.zipboard.co

As I write this, we have a happy team of developers on board and a well-functioning app. It’s lunch time and some of them are probably playing a game of darts in the balcony. But ask me about a few months back when there were only three of us, the founders. We were looking for a developer… and it was a dark time… *cue thunder*

Forgive the theatrics, but hiring developers has been a stupidly hard task for us. And I believe I can say it with confidence that any startup in its baby stages struggles to hire good people. It’s definitely among the top 3 most difficult things, if not the most difficult thing.

So I decided to put together a short guide on how to hire a developer for your startup, or rather, how to hire the right developer. Let’s start with the challenges.

The Challenges

There are many challenges to hiring a competent developer that fits right into your team. Some can be area specific or domain specific.

For the sake of this post, let’s focus on the two biggest challenges that are common to all startups.

1. Convincing good talent

You don’t have a market presence, you don’t have a presence. People don’t know about you, so how are people going to have faith in you or your product?

This is possibly the single biggest challenge you will face when trying to recruit talented people. Developers are in high demand at the moment, what with tech businesses and startups mushrooming up all over the place. Their skills are required everywhere.

Yeah, you want to work with competent people who get things right in the first few tries. You want someone who knows their shit, but so does everybody else! Interesting talented developers in your idea and convincing them that your idea is worth their time is a huge challenge to overcome.

And if you hire someone who doesn’t really have faith in the idea’s potential, you’ll fail sooner or later. The developer will leave you when he sees a better opportunity somewhere else.

“Remember, your startup is only as good as your core team.”

2. Starting packages

It’s a no-brainer that bootstrapped startups can’t dish out as much money as funder startups or giants like Microsoft and Google. Add to that the tons of other incentives they provide, and things start looking really hopeless.

So how do we tackle these problems?

It’s About What YOU Bring To The Table

While you can’t offer your employees what the big companies offer, you can offer them something great.

Spoiler alert!

No, it’s not stock. You don’t even have a product right now, nobody cares about your stock.

I’ll let you in on the things that have worked for us.

1. Technology that is exciting

We’re developing our app in MeteorJS, which uses cutting edge technologies like MongoDB, and NodeJS. These are among the latest and most exciting technologies for web products today. Passionate developers want to learn it and explore it, because that’s what they do. They love to work on new tech!

Most companies use PHP, Ruby-on-Rails,

and the likes. But there are so many people who already know these languages, and hence, most young minds don’t fancy them. So if you’re a startup that’s using a new and emerging technology, you’re at an advantage here.

2. A great founding team

A great founding team adds a lot of value to what you’re explicitly offering. Between the three of us, we have considerable experience in tech, sales, marketing, UX, and much more which we have gathered over the course of many years. We want our employees to grow with us, and that’s why we try to mentor them in the best possible way.

This is something that smart people really value: good mentorship. You may not be offering extraordinary salaries or a fancy office in a metropolitan high-rise, but the learning opportunity you provide makes up for it.

3. Good work culture

Your work culture greatly affects how potential employees view your startup. A tense work environment or an uptight work culture can kill off your employees’ drive and productivity pretty quickly. Always aim to make the work environment fun and enjoyable. Coming to office shouldn’t feel like a chore to employees, it should feel like a breath of fresh air.

At zipBoard, we do everything we can do promote good work culture.

• We start with a 15-minute scrum meeting where the entire team gets together to discuss the goals of the day and try to keep everything light.
• Watercooler chats are encouraged, and we have a little game room of sorts to make the breaks fun.
• We hold informal meets every once in a while to take everyone’s suggestions and make sure things are working smoothly.
• Our office space gives the feel of a happy place, and it’s nothing too extravagant, really. You just have to strike the right balance. Little things (wall colors, posters) make huge differences.
• We never miss a chance to celebrate small victories: bug fix party, post-deployment party, pre-launch party, you name it. 😉

Granted, it is a bit capital intensive for a startup, but the long-term benefits outweigh that. It keeps the employees happy, and in the end, they are your biggest assets, right?

Some of these things come easily while others have to be worked on. Regardless, most young people crave them. They will love working for you if they can get these things out of their job. It just makes for a really satisfying job experience.

Other than these, one thing that can make or break the deal is your faith in your own idea. So do your research right and know exactly how potent your idea is. Your confidence is infectious.

What To Look For

Moving on, let’s focus on some of the things you need to look for in a developer when hiring.

1. Passion for learning

This is the most important quality in a developer — in any employee, in fact. Someone who has an intrinsic passion for learning will never stop growing, and that’s the kind of people I like working with. Startups work in high-speed environments and today’s market is already very dynamic.

Stagnancy is death. You need people who can handle a steep learning curve and are willing to grow with you.

2. Willingness to listen

People love to act like they know everything there is to know about a field. Youngsters can be especially guilty of it at times.

You got an excited developer, fresh out of college, probably won a Hackathon or two, thinks he can do no wrong. Say thank you and send him back.

“But his résumé looks amazi-”

It doesn’t matter how good it looks. You don’t want this person to be working with you. Yes, people are opinionated, and that’s okay. But someone who’s opinionated to the point where he thinks his solution is the only right solution won’t make a good employee, not for you.

Hubris is bad. You want a developer who’s humble and willing to listen to what you and other colleagues have to say.

3. Technical skills

I can almost hear you saying, “DUH!”

Yes, it’s pretty obvious. Your ideal candidate

needs to have a good logical reasoning skills and a flair for problem solving, because that’s what it all really boils down to. Besides that, she should have a good grasp of all major concepts in her field. That’s common knowledge.

What I really wanted to talk about here was how you test her technical skills. Most companies do a sample app test or ask you to write algorithms. This doesn’t give you a fair idea of the candidate’s caliber. So we don’t employ this method.

Instead, what we do is a live app test. We ask the candidate to create a small app in MeteorJS as a demo and let her walk us through it. We inquire about why she has written it the way it is and whether she fully understands the different concepts that have been used. This gives us fair insight into the developer’s mind and helps us determine if she will be the right fit for us.

4. Trust

A startup really wants reliable people, people who will stick with it for a long long time. Call it what you will: trust, chemistry, faith; it’s what makes things work.

When you hire a developer, you have to ask yourself:

• Do I get a good vibe from this person?
• Can I picture him working still working with us after “x” years when we have good funding and a bigger team?

These are important questions and answering them can be really difficult. But it’s worth spending some time on them.

Between these four qualities, I would say 60% of the weightage goes to the first two, 30% to technical expertise, and 10% to the trust element.

You might ask why I gave only 30% weightage to technical skills, and that’s a valid question. It’s really a personal preference, but skills hold less importance for me because they can be acquired over time. Passion and willingness to become better, on the other hand, are really innate qualities. They drive a person, wake him up every morning and push him to learn new things each day. So I lay more emphasis on these two.

Red Flags

Knowing what you want is important, but so is knowing what you don’t want. Hiring is a crucial process. It’s time-consuming, so you need to get it right the first time. For that, you must know what to avoid as well as what to look for.

Here are the two biggest things you should consider as absolute red flags and move on whenever you encounter them in a candidate.

1. An attitude problem

Most candidates I have ever rejected have been on the preliminary phone calls, and that’s because I was so put off by their attitude that I couldn’t imagine working with them for the rest of the foreseeable future. This includes people who are overconfident or too full of themselves to admit when they are wrong. Personally, I also don’t like working with people who have a highly opinionated and static worldview.

2. Being a lone wolf

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against introverts. Some of the most brilliant people I’ve met happen to be introverts. What I mean by a “lone wolf” is someone who doesn’t play well within a team. Teamwork is extremely important for a startup! I cannot stress it enough.

I remember this one time we almost hired a guy who was a massively poor team player, and we didn’t even know about it until we invited him to a party! He had cleared the interview well enough and we were confident in his abilities. He was to start working with us in two weeks, so we invited him to a little party we were hosting in the office.

At the party, we found out that this guy would have absolutely crashed and burned when it came to teamwork. His idea of fun was to put others down and tell everyone about his “mad skills”. We immediately reconsidered our decision and withdrew the job offer. And I gotta tell you, we really dodged a bullet there.

Summing It All Up

In conclusion, let me just sum it all up for you briefly.

Overcome the primary challenges:

• Work with technology that is exciting. You and your team are going on an adventure, my friend!
• Have a great founding team that works hard and doesn’t shy away from mentoring the employees.
• Actively promote an informal and happy work culture. The office is your playground.
• Do sufficient research beforehand and have rock solid faith in the potential of your idea.

Look for the following qualities:

• An innate passion to learn and willingness to listen.
• A good command over relevant technical skills.
• A good vibe that lets you know the person is going to stick with you.

Avoid these like the plague:

• A bad attitude.
• Poor team skills.

Let me know how it works for you in the comments section. If you have any questions or concerns, I’d love to help you out.

by Pranab @ www.zipboard.co

When designing your web project, you want to make sure it’s the best possible version of your design and a great way to do that is to use zipBoard, a visual bug tracking tool. It also allows you to annotate, collaborate, assign tasks, and provides responsive testing when designing your website or e-Learning course. It also allows you to gather feedback from various stakeholders and track progress.