“We just want the best engineers ”
I hear this from almost every customer with whom I speak. This also applies to any other recruiter.
Seriously – just say those eight words to every room full of recruiting people, and everyone will chuckle a bitter and roll their eyes. We have all heard it a million times.
“We just want the best Engineers. ‘
No. No, you don’t do that.
The best Engineers make more than your entire payroll. They have opinions about technical debts and timelines. She have on a remote controlIf they want them. They don’t “oh, well, this is your third company, so I think I will postpone all product decisions”. They care about Comp, a characteristic that you consider to disqualify. They can give a balance between work and private life because they are not desperate enough to feel the need that it doesn’t. And no matter how successful your company has been so far, they have other options that they like. [EDITED: and as an HN commenter points out, they often avoid standard interview processes entirely!]
You are not stupid. If I ask you, point blank: “Do you actually think that the best engineers in the world would give your company a second thought,” I bet you could say “well, no, clearly not”.
But you don’t behave like that.
You lock the same series of criteria as any other startup. Experience at an early stage. Very independent. In the office in the Bay Area. Not too “salary motivated”. Don’t even apply if you want a job of 40 hours/week – we work hard and play hard.
Four months later you have not found a good founding engineer. Do you know how long be four months in the life of a young startup? That’s one eternityAnd you spent it in Stasis.
Hiring is a negotiation and you pretend to hold all the cards if you are not. You are looking for a very competitive candidate -pool and you are not competitive: you simply check the same bases as everyone else. You behave as an employer at replacement level and you expect more than candidates at replacement level.
Do you prefer to spend four months in Stasis on a senior candidate who hits the ground on the first day, or hires a skilled hacker in the middle level that will immediately be at full capacity within two weeks?
Would you rather spend four months in Stasis waiting for a candidate of 50 hours/week, or now a 40H/week candidate?
Would you rather be a green bar in this graph, or a red one?
You don’t ask yourself these questions. You say: “I want a candidate with these characteristics” and sit on your hands until people materialize, until you no longer have any money, or – more likely – until someone manages to force your unrealistic expectations and convince you to make a compromise for them.
If you had accepted a compromise, you could have opened the locks on the first day and you had a choice of ten large, but non-perfect candidates. Instead, you waited for months and pleasure.
If you accept that you have a Great engineer, and not the best Engineer, you can consciously handle the considerations. Which characteristics are actually important? How much are you willing to give up to get them? What is the dollar value of a rent this month versus next month? “What is really important today?” is the most important question that a startup can askAnd you did not apply it to one of the most important aspects of running a company!
“Well, we are a bit different from other companies, because we have really high standards.”
Does it sound As if you are different?
“We just applied a very exciting Serie A!”
That also literally did a thousand other companies. There was $ 26 billion in early stage Venture Investment last quarterAnd you can do mathematics about how much you occupy $ 10 million raise. The recruitments you need do not look at your company such as the SLAM-Dunk success that a founder must necessarily believe that this is the case. Maybe as soon as they talk to you, but that is later – at the top of your funnel, you are just a different face in the crowd and you have to behave like that.
I don’t tell you that you have to hire people who are not good. I don’t even tell you that the characteristics you want are not good things to look for. I don’t tell you that you actually have to make a compromise on quality. I tell you that Try to hire The best engineers is the enemy of Actual Great. You will have to give up something (possibly time, possibly comp, possible workplace policy) to make the wish.
The longer you don’t think What To give up, the more you implicitly choose to give up time, the thing that startups more than anything. And you give up time – what, play it safely?
The standard outcome for a startup is always failure. You have taken a risk by even starting one. You ship things that can always be broken, Because you know that speed is more important than perfection. You make Moonshots because you know that big victories matter more than small losses. And then you give up for months because you refuse to apply the same philosophy to hiring!
I have a recruitment company. It is not skin of my back if you want to be irrational about hiring. Continue in all respects. You leave a thousand great engineers to be in my database instead of your ATS, and I would much prefer to pay me 40 Grand to find them than finding them yourself.
Or you can worn as the filthy realist you probably think you are, stop insisting on perfection and start moving quickly.
#dont #hire #engineers #Otherbranch