Harj Taggar</a> is cofounder and CEO of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://triplebyte.com//">Triplebyte (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC.</em></p>\n<hr />\n<p>Once you’ve found an engineer you want to hire, the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and convincing them to accept it. This post offers advice for increasing the percentage of the offers you make that are accepted. Since working on Triplebyte I’ve been surprised by just how much variance there is in this rate among companies. Companies that use Triplebyte have acceptance rates ranging from as low as 10% to as high as 90%.</p>\n<p>Generating an offer for an engineer is expensive. It takes time to source good candidates and then hours of your engineering team’s time doing technical phone screens and onsite interviews. You’ll likely need to complete five onsite interviews to generate a single offer (the industry standard onsite interview to offer rate for engineers is around 20%). Assuming six hours of engineering time spent interviewing that’s 30 hours of engineering productivity lost. Given this cost it makes economic sense to work as hard as you can to get your offers accepted.</p>\n<p>The work to increase your offer acceptance rate begins well before presenting the offer itself. It starts with designing a great candidate experience at each step leading up to the offer. Every interaction a candidate has with you must balance your need to extract signal from them while still getting them excited about joining. This begins with doing something seemingly simple – being responsive.</p>\n<h2>Speed</h2>\n<p>Read this <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-or-how-to-find-a-job-as-a-software-engineer.html/">blog post</a> to get an engineer’s perspective on the importance of speed and responsiveness in their job search process. Being fast and responsive seems like obvious advice and yet we still see companies move slowly and miss out on good people. There’s two reasons this happens.</p>\n<p>The first is entropy. Maintaining an organized system for managing candidates is hard. It will naturally trend towards disorder unless you work really hard against it. This is especially true for larger companies with more people and processes. As a smaller startup speed is a huge advantage you have over them when competing for engineers.</p>\n<p>Make this easier for yourself by using software to manage and track the status of your candidates. At first you can use something simple like a spreadsheet or Airtable. As you grow and need to setup interview panels to gather feedback from interviewers you should graduate to a real ATS (Applicant Tracking System) like <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://lever.co//">Lever. Make it clear who has responsibility for reviewing and acting on candidates every day.</p>\n<p>The second reason is psychological. It’s easy to believe that candidates who drop out because you were slow weren’t interested in your company anyway. This is bad reasoning and will make you miss out on good candidates. Managing a job search process quickly becomes overwhelming, especially for the best candidates with the most options. To even have the chance to close the best candidates treat every candidate dropping out before you replied them as a failure, not a lucky escape.</p>\n<p>With an organized and responsive process in place you can now focus on optimizing the quality of each candidate interaction. This starts with the first call.</p>\n<h1>First Call</h1>\n<p>The first call with a candidate typically lasts for about 25 minutes. I’d recommend the following agenda:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Introduce yourself, the company and what you work on.</li>\n<li>Ask the candidate to introduce themselves and talk about what’s important to them in their next role (if you did the initial outreach and they’re not actively looking, you can soften this to e.g. “how do you think about developing your career and skills in the future?”).</li>\n<li>Ask questions about their skills and experiences to see if they match with what you’re looking for.</li>\n<li>Pitch the work being done at the company and why it’s an exciting time to join now.</li>\n<li>Finish with answering any questions they have and explain what the next steps in your hiring process are.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>It’s common to leave asking the candidate what they’re looking for until the end of the call. I think that’s suboptimal because you miss the opportunity to tailor your pitch around it throughout the call.</p>\n<p>If you’re an early stage company (less than 20 people) a founder should always be doing this call with engineering candidates. Commonly you’ll have one technical founder and one non-technical/sales founder. I’d recommend the sales founder do these calls even if they can’t speak in detail about the technical challenges. This gives the technical founder more uninterrupted time to build (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html/">maker vs manager schedule</a>). The sales founder should at least have enough sales ability to convince engineers to meet the technical founder in person to learn more about the technology.</p>\n<p>As you grow you’ll hire a recruiter and typically they’ll do these calls. I’d recommend doing the following to best set them up for success:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Ask your recruiter to send you a monthly report on number of first calls they’re doing and the % that opt’ed out of coming onsite. Have your recruiter keep a list of reasons why candidates said they wouldn’t move forward and continually review these with them to improve the pitch.</li>\n<li>Assign one engineer to train your recruiter on how to talk about the interesting technical challenges at the company. Have them listen to mock pitches, give feedback, and repeat. I often see companies give their recruiter no help in learning how to best pitch the company and then complain when they see low conversions. That’s not fair to them nor optimal for you.</li>\n<li>Asking technical vetting questions is difficult for recruiters as they’re usually not technical. This is usually the most awkward aspect of the interactions between engineers and recruiters. Give your recruiter support and structure so they can do this well. I’d advise giving them specific technical questions to ask. One idea I’ve seen companies use to good effect is making them multiple choice format so the recruiter can read out the answers and ask the candidate to pick one that fits best. This helps your recruiter feel confident and provide a better candidate experience.</li>\n<li>If you’re working on a deeply technical product that doesn’t yet have marquee customers or traction, I’d actually recommend having an engineer do these first calls, at least for particularly promising candidates. In this case your main selling point is the depth of your technical challenges and it’ll be very hard to find a recruiter who can pitch those well.</li>\n</ol>\n<h2>Technical Phone Screen</h2>\n<p>If the first call goes well you’ll usually move the candidate forward to a technical phone screen with an engineer (companies that use Triplebyte will skip these phone screens and move straight to the onsite). These phone screens are usually 45 minutes of the candidate working through a coding problem and screen sharing. I’d recommend allotting one full hour for the phone screen. 45 minutes for working through a technical problem and up to 15 minutes for a conversation between the candidate and engineer to ask each other questions.</p>\n<p>Ideally you want to select the engineers who are best at pitching your company for these phone screens. There are also ways to make the experience more candidate friendly e.g. letting them pick from several problems to solve during the call. This creates some more work for you but if a candidate can show their strength on a problem they enjoy they’ll have a more positive feeling towards you. You can also let them code in their own environment and screen share with you instead of using an artificial environment (though some of these e.g. Coderpad do have advantages of better collaboration and recording features).</p>\n<p>If the technical phone screen goes well, the next step is the onsite interview.</p>\n<h2>Onsite Interview</h2>\n<p>The onsite interview will be the first time a candidate meets your team in person. Their experience throughout the day will be a huge deciding factor in where they end up. It’s important to think through the details of the candidate experience when setting up your onsite. Start with the basic logistics and be sure to:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Send an email ahead of time with clear directions to the office.</li>\n<li>Assign someone to greet them when they arrive</li>\n<li>Have somewhere they can hang out if they arrive early (even if it’s just a spare desk and chair)</li>\n</ol>\n<p>A standard onsite interview agenda will typically look like this:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Quick welcome and talking through the agenda for the day (5 minutes)</li>\n<li>Technical interview 1 (1 hour)</li>\n<li>Technical interview 2 (1 hour)</li>\n<li>Lunch (1 hour)</li>\n<li>Technical interview 3 (1 hour)</li>\n<li>Technical interview 4 (1 hour)</li>\n<li>Behavioral / culture interview (45 mins)</li>\n<li>Closing Q&A for them to ask about the company (25 minutes)</li>\n</ol>\n<p>If you’re early stage I’d recommend having at least one of the founders involved in the closing Q&A. It can also be a good idea to include a demo or roadmap section here at the end. Give the candidate a sneak preview of a new feature you’re working on or talk through the most exciting upcoming projects so they finish the day feeling excited about your future momentum.</p>\n<p>We asked engineers using Triplebyte what caused them to have bad experiences during onsite interviews. Almost all the replies centered on their interactions with the interviewers. The top three complaints were interviewers being (1) unprepared and not knowing anything about them (2) not being familiar with the technical questions they asked and (3) being determined to prove their intelligence to the interviewee.</p>\n<p>It’s unlikely an engineer will accept your offer if they had a bad interaction with an interviewer. I’d make the importance of providing a good interview experience a part of your company culture. You can start by writing a simple interviewing guide for your team that emphasizes the importance of being on-time, prepared and friendly when interviewing. You can also only pick the engineers who are friendliest and best at representing your company as interviewers.</p>\n<p>For question familiarity, have a centralized question bank that interviewers work through together before using them on candidates. For more ideas on the kind of content and questions you can use in technical interviews, my co-founder Ammon wrote a detailed post on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-to-interview-engineers/">how to interview engineers</a>.</p>\n<p>It’s also great to do something that makes lunch a chance for the candidate to get to know the team. At Triplebyte we Slack our team in the morning that a candidate is interviewing and ask people to head over to the lunch table at the same time. Our office manager introduces the candidate to the team and we do an icebreaker where the candidate gets to ask a question which everyone goes around and answers (we tell them to think of this ahead of time and make it lighthearted). It’s a good way for them to get to know the team and is usually quite fun. We’ve had candidates tell us this experience was the deciding factor in joining.</p>\n<h2>Making The Offer</h2>\n<p>After a successful onsite you’ll make the formal offer and the work to get it accepted really starts. The first step is making sure you actually present the offer details. A complaint we hear from Triplebyte candidates is being asked how likely they would be to accept an offer before knowing the actual offer details. The reality is that compensation details are a large factor in where people decide to work and you can’t expect someone to know if they want to work for you without giving them that data.</p>\n<p>Create a formal offer letter template that includes these details:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Salary and benefits</li>\n<li>Signing bonus details (if applicable)</li>\n<li>Health insurance details (include a link to the policy documents)</li>\n<li>401(k) details, if any</li>\n<li>Vacation policy details</li>\n</ul>\n<p>Equity</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Total number of shares/stock options presented</li>\n<li>Total number of shares outstanding</li>\n<li>% ownership that represents</li>\n<li>Exercise price for options</li>\n<li>Vesting schedule details</li>\n</ul>\n<p>When presenting the offer I’d recommend doing things in the following order:</p>\n<p>Step One: Call to tell them they’ll be receiving an offer</p>\n<p>Have the hiring manager (if you’re early stage that’s the founder) call the candidate as soon as possible after the onsite. Do it the same day if you can. Tell them the day went really well and you’d love to make them an offer to join the team. Mention specific reasons why you’re excited about them joining the team and reference what they did well during the day. You could even have multiple people on the call and ask each of them to mention a specific reason they’d be excited to work with the candidate. Tell them the next step will be you (or a recruiter) calling them back to talk through offer details.</p>\n<p>Step Two: Call with offer details</p>\n<p>Call the next day to talk them through the offer details. Explaining salary and benefits is fairly straightforward. For equity, before giving any details, ask them how familiar they are with equity concepts like stock options or RSUs.</p>\n<ul>\n<li>If they have little familiarity, do not overwhelm them with information on the call. Give them a quick explanation of how equity works. Talk them through the numbers of your offer and tell them you’ll send them some resources on equity to read through on their own time.</li>\n<li>If they’re experienced with equity, then go straight into the numbers and ask if they have any questions about the details they’d like you to talk more about.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>Tell them you’ll be sending through the formal offer letter, documenting all these details, via email shortly. They should take some time to digest that and the next step would be a follow up call to talk through their thoughts. Offer some times for that call right then.</p>\n<p>It’s tempting to push hard for a decision on this call. I’d recommend not doing that to avoid the candidate feeling pressured. This will make it harder for you to stay engaged with them as they go through the decision making process. It’s fine to ask them if they have any initial thoughts or questions and then move on if they seem hesitant to go into details. It is also ok to ask them about their decision making timeline if you haven’t discussed that already.</p>\n<h2>Culture</h2>\n<p>Now the offer has been presented it’s time to focus on closing. To be effective at closing candidates you need to work hard at selling them on the most exciting reasons to join. This sounds obvious but there is a temptation to stop if the candidate doesn’t seem immediately excited or asks probing questions about your business. The reality is that working at your company will seem more exciting to you than the candidate because you’ve had time and data to build up that excitement. Now you have to pull out all the stops to transfer that excitement.</p>\n<p>It’s common at this stage for candidates to start probing more deeply into questions about your company culture. They’re trying to build a picture of what it will be like to work with you on a daily basis. We’ve observed at Triplebyte that most companies use fairly generic descriptions of their culture. This is optimal for not offending candidates but won’t make your company stand out. To use your culture as a differentiator you’ll need to take some risk. You could try describing your culture with tradeoffs e.g. don’t just say you’re “collaborative”, say you’re willing to trade the upside of collaboration (better ideas and execution) for the downsides (reduced personal autonomy to just do things).</p>\n<p>Depending on the content you choose, being different in describing your culture could backfire or it could give you a hiring advantage with the right candidates. Whichever approach you take, make sure you and your team are prepared to talk in detail about this with candidates. Sounding unprepared about culture is itself a negative signal about how much the company cares about and values its team.</p>\n<h2>Closing</h2>\n<p>Make sure to get your team involved in the closing process. Ask everyone who met the candidate during the onsite to send them a follow up email with specific reasons they enjoyed it and offering to talk with them again. If you’re small it’s ok if this is literally the entire company. If you have multiple teams and you already know which team the candidate would be working on, make sure that team reaches out. Encourage them to talk about the details of what the first two weeks would look like and who would help get them ramped up. Nitty gritty details will make the offer feel more real and we’ve seen this be the deciding factor for candidates.</p>\n<p>If you’re early stage, include your investors in every engineering offer you make. Then become selective as you grow and the hiring pace picks up. Choose the investor you think will be most likely to effectively sell that candidate and give the candidate context on why you thought that in the intro email. Don’t pick an investor who isn’t up to date and familiar with the details about your company.</p>\n<p>Also think about more than just closing the candidate. Think about their personal circumstances and other decision makers involved. The best recruiters we work with at Triplebyte are continually taking notes about this and referring back to them to take action. I’ve seen a great recruiter learn early on that the candidate’s wife was reluctant to move location because she was worried it’d negatively impact her medical career. The recruiter spent time researching places she could work, gathered contact information and compensation data, and asked to speak with the wife to share it. The candidate accepted the offer shortly afterwards.</p>\n<p>What matters most during the closing process is how long its been since your last communication with the candidate. You need to strike a balance between proactively following up without being overbearing. It’s good to find reasons to reach out again that aren’t asking “have you decided yet?” even if you both know what the real agenda is. For example you could send them links to recent news stories you think they’d be interested in based on what you learnt about them during the onsite. If you’re doing team events send them an invitation to join. Your goal is to stay near the top of their mind as they’re deciding but not suffocate them.</p>\n<h2>Exploding Offers</h2>\n<p>One tactic companies use for closing is putting an aggressive deadline on the offer e.g. we need a final decision within a week. I’d advise against this because good candidates with multiple options will push back. It’s also something an experienced recruiter at a competing company can use as ammunition against you. If a candidate tells them about your deadline they might respond well I’d question the culture that company is trying to build if they only want to hire people who can decide quickly. We want everyone to be sure this is the best place for them over the long term and would never pressure someone into rushing their decision.</p>\n<p>A softer version you can try is an expiring signing bonus. We’ve seen this be effective and have used it ourselves with success at Triplebyte. The way I’d present this would be We want you to take all the time you need to make the right decision for you (and your family). At the same time we can’t leave offers hanging out there indefinitely as things can change rapidly at a startup. If you are able to make a final decision by X date, we’d be able to offer you a $X,000 signing bonus.</p>\n<h2>Big Company Competition and Bay Area Relocation</h2>\n<p>There are two common scenarios that present unique closing challenges – competing against big companies (Facebook and Google especially) and candidates considering relocation to the Bay Area. I’ll talk through some advice on handling both.</p>\n<p>As a startup it’s hard to compete with Facebook and Google compensation packages, especially for senior engineers. Unless you’re also a public company, you won’t be able to compete on total compensation. Still, you can win – we’ve seen startups successfully compete against them on Triplebyte. These are the arguments we’ve found are most successful:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>Learning</em>: You learn the fastest by being given real decision making responsibility. Large companies won’t give you this kind of responsibility for years, they need to have checks and balances in place to ensure no single person – especially a new hire – could cause too much damage. Fast growing startups don’t have this luxury and you’ll be thrown straight into making decisions that could materially affect the trajectory of the company.</li>\n<li><em>Career Progression</em>: Silicon Valley and the technology industry are unique because you can rise up through the ranks of a company faster than anywhere else (e.g. the Chief Product Officer of Facebook ($500bn market cap) is 36 years old). This only happens by joining a startup that grows fast and keeps throwing more responsibilities at you. Give the candidate examples of how this has already been happening for people at your startup and paint a specific picture of how the candidate could progress over the next few years with you.</li>\n<li><em>Opportunity cost</em>: At any point in time there will always be the safe option of working at a public technology company. The names might change but the experience of working at one is fungible. The experience of working at startups can vary wildly and you should present your startup as a unique opportunity right now because of the team and market. They can always go back to the big company experience if it doesn’t work out.</li>\n<li><em>Mentorship</em>: One concern engineers, especially juniors, can have about working at a smaller startup is they won’t learn best practices and the “right” way to do things. It will help a lot if you have experienced engineers on your team who would be willing to provide mentorship. If you do be sure to tell the candidate this.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>For candidates who would need to relocate to the Bay Area, they may be frightened by the cost of living, which has both increased in dollars and frequency of press coverage. While this is ultimately a personal decision for the candidate I have been surprised by how often even engineers don’t take an analytical approach to running the numbers to be sure what their actual cost of living would be. You can be proactive about this. Don’t assume that when a candidate says they don’t think they can afford to live in the Bay Area that they’ve run through the numbers. If you really want them to join then spend time helping them think through this. You can create a spreadsheet template with cost of living assumptions and work through this together with them to figure out what their real monthly income would be. We also wrote a <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://triplebyte.com/blog/does-it-make-sense-for-programmers-to-move-to-the-bay-area/">blog post</a> talking through the pros and cons in detail that you could share.</p>\n<h2>Feedback and Iterate</h2>\n<p>No company has a 100% offer acceptance rate and you will inevitably miss out on closing candidates you really wanted. That’s an inevitable part of hiring and it sucks. Use every rejected offer as an opportunity to gather data on how you can improve your hiring process and pitch. Do a quick exit interview with each candidate and ask for feedback on why they made the decision and their general feedback on the quality of your hiring process. Review these regularly with your team and use them to iterate and improve your interviewing and closing process over time.</p>\n<p>If you treat optimizing this process like you would optimizing your product you will see improved conversions and have more success hiring. Good luck!</p>\n<p><em>If you’re hiring engineers and would like to try Triplebyte, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://triplebyte.com/tblog/express/">use this link</a> to sign up and you’ll get a special $15,000 hiring fee for your first hire</em></p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1102829","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-09-07T04:20:17.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:04:49.000-07:00","published_at":"2018-09-07T04:20:17.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71094","name":"Harj Taggar","slug":"harj-taggar","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Harj.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Harj is a Group Partner at YC. He was cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (S15), which helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world with the least amount of time & effort.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/harj-taggar/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71094","name":"Harj Taggar","slug":"harj-taggar","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Harj.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Harj is a Group Partner at YC. He was cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (S15), which helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world with the least amount of time & effort.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/harj-taggar/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-your-team/","excerpt":"Harj Taggar is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find workat the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time andeffort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC.","reading_time":15,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71a88","uuid":"4aa97abd-dc67-46ae-83ff-c45f1ad7ac23","title":"How to Hire Your First Engineer","slug":"how-to-hire-your-first-engineer","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p><em><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/Harjeet/">Harj Taggar</a> is cofounder and CEO of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://triplebyte.com//">Triplebyte (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC.</em></p>\n<hr />\n<p>This post is advice for early stage startup founders who are hiring their first engineer. At this stage traditional recruiting methods e.g. hiring a recruiter won’t work as well for you as they do for larger companies.</p>\n<p>Hiring your first engineer at a startup is incredibly hard. As a founder you’re already stretched dangerously thin on time. There are bugs to fix, customers to close and any number of urgent existential fires that demand your full attention. You know you should be spending more time on hiring but it’s a battle to find it.</p>\n<p>The bad news is even once you find the time, much of it will feel like wasted effort. Hiring isn’t the kind of work that provides you constant dopamine hits. It involves a lot of dead ends and frustration.</p>\n<p>Start by being clear on what exactly you’re looking for. I’d recommend listing all the specific criteria your dream hire would have. This will be a combination of technical (are they a good engineer?) and non technical (would I work productively with them?). Then mark each candidate you interview against all these criteria and rigorously debate if you think they have enough strengths in some areas to make up for weaknesses in others.</p>\n<p>In practice hiring decisions invariably involve tradeoffs. You could trade quality for speed by rejecting solid candidates to wait for the dream one. Or you could trade money for time by paying a candidate above market rate to join now. Founders should be aware of all these tradeoffs and make the one that’s best for your circumstances.</p>\n<p>Once you know what you’re looking for, you’re ready to start finding candidates. I’ll go through the strategies available, starting with what I believe is most effective and working through to the least.</p>\n<p><em>Note: As the founder of a hiring platform I’m not neutral in discussing their effectiveness. I have articulated both their advantages and disadvantages and we did make our own first engineering hire through <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://triplebyte.com//">Triplebyte./n
Personal Networks</h2>\n<p>This is the most important source by far. Once your startup scales it’ll become less important as you’ll have more budget to spend on recruiting tools and building a recruiting team. At the start though it’s where you should exclusively focus your energy and only consider other sources when you’ve exhausted all possibilities here.</p>\n<p>Hiring someone you’ve already worked with is your best option because you already know if you’ll like working with them. How much you enjoy working with any single person matters less as you grow larger but for your first hire it could be the difference between persevering to success and shutting down the company. (Caveat: startups are also uniquely stressful environments and there’s still some probability you might not enjoy working with your friend under this kind of stress as much as when you were both at a bigger company).</p>\n<p>You’ll also have a better chance to convince someone you know to take a risk and join you. Asking anyone to join as your first hire is asking for an order of magnitude greater commitment than pitching an investor to invest. With personal connections you’ll know what would most motivate them to join and you can lean on friends to help convince them to make the leap.</p>\n<p>Yet I’m surprised by how often founders don’t fully explore their personal networks for hiring. It’s easy to be quick in assuming that none of your friends are available before even asking them. It’s understandable. Asking your friends to leave their jobs and take a risk with you is scary. It’s also more awkward to be rejected by your friends than strangers. Still, if you’re optimizing for the success of your startup you’ll have to put this aside. Here’s a plan you could follow:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>Make a list of the best engineers you know, whether you think they’re available or not. Go through your Facebook and LinkedIn to jog your memory.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Invite them to lunch or dinner with them to talk about your startup.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Make the ask – would you consider joining us?.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Whatever they answer, ask a follow up question – if you did join us, which engineers would you most want to hire?.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Ask for an introduction to those people.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Repeat 2 – 5 with each of the introductions.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Repeat 1 – 6 ad infinitum, I know public company founders who still do this. Expect to be spending at least a third of your time on this alone.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>For your first three engineering hires I’d recommend focusing exclusively on personal network hiring. As your team grows though you’ll start thinking more about the composition and diversity of your team. Hiring through your personal network usually isn’t the best option for this and the larger a team grows the harder it becomes to change the balance. After your first three hires, I’d suggest continue to work your personal network and supplementing with the strategies below to meet candidates your own network wouldn’t reach.</p>\n<h2>Hiring Marketplaces</h2>\n<p>Newer recruiting startups like us (Triplebyte) and Hired operate as marketplaces. There’s candidates on one side and companies on the other. The value to candidates is increasing their number of options and to companies it’s reducing their time to make hires.</p>\n<p>These marketplaces are strictly inferior to using personal networks for your first hire. The good ones can attract high quality candidates but most will want to work somewhere that already has an engineering team. They also charge a fee per hire that will usually be around $25,000 for an experienced engineer. Whether that’s good value for you depends on how much funding you’ve raised and how much founder time you’d have to spend on making that hire.</p>\n<p>Candidates on these marketplaces are also speaking with multiple companies so you’ll face competition. You can get success though (we’ve had startups make their first hire on Triplebyte). Your results will depend heavily on how effective your pitch and closing process is. I’ve seen a lot of variance in how effective companies are at this. An engineer hired at <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://gusto.com//">Gusto (YC W12) through Triplebyte <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-or-how-to-find-a-job-as-a-software-engineer.html/">blogged about how much difference there is between companies in just being responsive to him. To get the most from a hiring marketplace you need a polished pitch for why your company is an exciting place to work and a speedy process for moving them from first call to interview and offer.</p>\n<p>Despite the disadvantages I still rank (good) hiring marketplaces as your second best option because they provide quick access to a pool of vetted, skilled engineers. The candidates on these marketplaces are mostly motivated to move jobs right now. You can quickly get on the phone to make your pitch and start interviewing the interested ones. This also helps you practice and improve both your pitch and calibration on what exactly you’re looking for. Getting better at pitching will increase your success at hiring in general.</p>\n<p>Some of the marketplaces will also do a rigorous technical evaluation of the candidates before accepting them onto the marketplace. If that evaluation is done well, you can skip your own pre-onsite technical screening and expect a higher conversion rate of onsite interviews to offer which saves you time. (The average direct to onsite to offer rate for Triplebyte candidates is 40% vs the industry standard of 20%).</p>\n<h2>Generate Inbound</h2>\n<p>As an early stage startup you likely won’t get much organic inbound interest from good engineers. The quickest way to generate this is posting on job sites. However most job sites aren’t frequented by high-quality engineers. They’ll get you volume, not quality and volume alone isn’t what you want. The majority of job applicants for any job posting are below the bar and it creates more work for you to filter them. The job postings I would recommend trying are on sites with a sizable engineering audience e.g. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/">Stack Overflow Jobs</a>, the monthly Hacker News <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17442187\%22>%e2%80%9cWho is hiring?”</a> thread (Hacker News job postings themselves are only available to YC companies) and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://angel.co/recruiting/">Angel List</a>.</p>\n<p>You can also create content that appeals to engineers to generate inbound interest. This is especially easy if you’re working on a particularly exciting idea e.g. self-driving cars. As soon as you publicly announce what you’re doing you’ll get a burst of inbound applications. As this type of startup you’ll always have a hiring advantage by having an easier time getting press and building brand recognition.</p>\n<p>Developer tool companies also have an advantage. Your product is already interesting to engineers and you should be investing in writing good quality blog posts about it – both to attract customers and for hiring. Set a goal of writing an article that’s Hacker News front page worthy at least once a month.</p>\n<p>If you’re not either of these types of companies you can still blog about the technical choices you’ve made. Have you made any controversial or unusual choices in your stack? If so, write about them. You may alienate some engineers who disagree but you may also capture the full attention of a few who agree strongly e.g. Cognito have especially strong views on testing and wrote about how they use mutation testing (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.cognitohq.com/how-to-write-better-code-using-mutation-testing//">https://blog.cognitohq.com/how-to-write-better-code-using-mutation-testing/). Not only does this get the attention of potential candidates, it creates content that you can also use include in cold outreach (more on that later).</p>\n<p>A more time-intensive option is creating interactive content like coding challenges or puzzles, the Netflix algorithm contest being the most famous example. This can definitely work, Robby Walker, founder of Cue (acquired by Apple), wrote about how this worked well for them here (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/08/programming-challenges-benefit-job-seekers-and-employers//">https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/08/programming-challenges-benefit-job-seekers-and-employers/). It’s a high-risk strategy though. If you can’t design something genuinely interesting then spending time on this will be a boondoggle. If you’re confident in your ability to make something interesting then go for it but run your idea by some engineering friends first to see if it sparks interest.</p>\n<p>Finally your inbound conversion will increase the higher quality your job posting is. Invest time in making it stand out. Larger companies default to generic job postings that all look and sound the same (often because they’re literally using the same software to create them). As a startup you can do better. You could make your job posting personal by writing in the first person as founder about why you started this company. You could use an informal tone that doesn’t read like corporate boilerplate. Experiment with what feels right but move away from blandness.</p>\n<h2>Cold Outreach</h2>\n<p>Cold outreach is messaging engineers online. This could be on career/recruiting specific platforms like LinkedIn or places where engineers spend time like Hacker News and GitHub. (One advantage a technical founding team has here is they’ll already know where the best places are to look).</p>\n<p>The challenge with cold outreach, especially on recruiting-specific platforms like LinkedIn, is the overwhelming number of messages good engineers receive on them. For your message to stand out from the crowd you need to put in work to make it personalized. Greg Brockman has some great advice (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://stripe.com/blog/startup-advice-cold-recruiting/">https://stripe.com/blog/startup-advice-cold-recruiting) on this.</p>\n<p>You’ll also see a greater return if you can hunt down email addresses rather than sending messages. If you’re looking at profiles on LinkedIn, use the Connectifer (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.connectifier.com//">https://www.connectifier.com/) Chrome extension to get them. Otherwise do what you can to find an email address (sometimes people include them in their forum profiles or try finding a personal website that might have contact information). If you have any press articles or noteworthy mentions, I’d link to these in the message too. You also need to follow up and expect it’ll take two or three emails before you get a reply.</p>\n<p>This approach is how the majority of technical hiring at larger companies is done. Teams of recruiters reach out to candidates and optimize their messaging over time to get more responses. There are tools to help you with this optimization e.g. Sourceress and ZenSourcer. If you send enough messages this approach will work and can result in great hires. If you reach people just before they’ve started interviewing and move quickly, you’ll have a much higher chance of closing them.</p>\n<p>The disadvantage is it’s very time consuming and will feel draining. The majority of your messages won’t get replied and you’ll be tempted to give up. You’ll have to commit to spending a certain amount of time per day sending emails and messages. One time saving trick you can consider is giving someone else access to your email and paying them to send the messages on your behalf then you handle the replies. How comfortable you feel doing that is of course your call.</p>\n<p>It’s hard to estimate how quickly you might be able to hire through cold outreach. If you’re lucky you could get the right person in for an interview next week. More realistically, I’d expect this approach to take up to 6 months before it results in a hire.</p>\n<h2>Recruiters</h2>\n<p>Hiring a technical recruiter to make your first engineering hire is hard to make work. The strategy they’ll probably use is cold outreach and it’s unlikely they’ll achieve higher response rates than messages coming from a founder.</p>\n<p>What a recruiter does have more of than you is time and focus. They can send more messages per day and this could get more candidates replying if the gap between their effectiveness and yours is narrow enough. My recommendation if you go down this route would be to find recruiters who work on a contract basis. You can agree on a rate per hour, how many hours they’ll work per week and for what period of time. Then if they’re producing candidates, great. If not, you cancel the contract. Anecdotally, I’m noticing a trend where more of the best recruiters at companies are starting to work as independent contractors for multiple startups.</p>\n<p>Before working with a recruiter make sure you’ve invested time in really training them on how to pitch your company well. I’d give them all the information they need, give them a day to prepare and then ask them to pitch it back to you. Only work with them if they do this well.</p>\n<h2>Meetups</h2>\n<p>Meetups are difficult to rank on this list because their effectiveness has high variance depending on both the type of event and the type of person you are. Meetups that are primarily business conferences with corporate sponsors who send along some members of their IT department are almost certainly a complete waste of time. Smaller, informal meetups with a deeply technical agenda where people bring laptops and code can be great. Even these will still only be an effective strategy if you’re either:</p>\n<p>(1) An engineer who can gain the respect of other engineers through technical conversation. (2) A highly charismatic personality</p>\n<p>You need to honestly decide if you’re either of these. If you’re unsure whether you are (2), you probably aren’t. If you’re (1) and tend to avoid group meetups, you’ll have to get over this if you’re the only technical founder. Convincing engineers to join is one sales job you can’t delegate entirely to your cofounder.</p>\n<p>Even if you attend great technical meetups and you’re the right type of personality, it’s still unlikely you’ll make a good hire quickly through this channel. The better meetups have fewer people and they’re primarily not there to find a job. It’s a good way to build a network of smart people, which will become valuable as you scale, but not a good bet to solve your problem right now.</p>\n<h2>Agencies</h2>\n<p>Traditional recruiting agencies tend to have bad adverse selection bias on the candidates they can engage. Most good engineers won’t work with them and the engineers that do are being sent out to as many companies as possible. I can’t think of a startup I know that made their first engineering hire through a recruiting agency. While I’m sure there are counter examples, it’s more likely using an agency will suck up a lot of your time with little ROI. The best agencies tend to focus more on executive level hiring which won’t be helpful for you.</p>\n<h2>Conclusion</h2>\n<p>As I said at the start, hiring your first engineer is incredibly hard unless you’re lucky enough to have a friend you can convince to join. To make any other strategy work you need to treat hiring like you did fundraising and start by refining your message and pitch. Candidates think differently to investors and you’ll need to tweak the message that worked for your fundraise e.g. candidates will think less about your market size and more about your most interesting product challenges.</p>\n<p>Once you understand what resonates most about your company with engineers you can switch gears to working through channels to get that message out to potential candidates. Then be prepared for a lot of struggle and rejection until you find the right person. Good luck!</p>\n<p>If there are any other strategies you’ve tried with success that should be added here, please do email me (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"mailto:harj@triplebyte.com\">harj@triplebyte.com</a>), I’d love to hear them.</p>\n<p>If you’re hiring engineers and would like to try Triplebyte, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://triplebyte.com/tblog/express/">use this link</a> to sign up and you’ll get a special $15,000 hiring fee for your first hire</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1102767","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-08-21T05:02:11.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:05:59.000-07:00","published_at":"2018-08-21T05:02:11.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71094","name":"Harj Taggar","slug":"harj-taggar","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Harj.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Harj is a Group Partner at YC. He was cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (S15), which helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world with the least amount of time & effort.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/harj-taggar/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71094","name":"Harj Taggar","slug":"harj-taggar","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Harj.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Harj is a Group Partner at YC. He was cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (S15), which helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world with the least amount of time & effort.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/harj-taggar/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer/","excerpt":"Harj Taggar is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15). 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