Whether you're a technical or non-technical founder you will need to recruit technical talent to help you scale your startup. In this talk, I'll cover strategies for how to attract and close top technical candidates for an early stage startup.
13. Communicate criteria.
Supplemental Reading: Recruiting for a Startup? First Figure Out Who & What You Want., How to Keep Your Startup
Engineer Sane, Technical Recruiters Get a Bad Rap
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20. Validate candidate.
Assess their needs,
skills, experience &
interest.
Pitch the company.
Vision, why candidate is a
fit & story that meets
their needs.
Explain process.
Employees, recruiters &
referrals.
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22. Explain to candidate the
interview process.
Steps of the process.
Who they will meet.
When to expect an
answer.
Interview the candidate.
Divvy up areas & review
questions.
Every interview MUST tell
vision.
What it’s like to work
there.
Evaluate the candidate.
No communication
during interview.
Have criteria set &
measure every
candidate the same.
Feedback system.
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37. Motivation
Why do you want to work at a startup?
Why do you want to work at this startup?
What do you need from me to be productive?
How do you keep up with tech trends?
Technology Acumen
What technologies are you familiar with i.e. can you actually write code in?
Can you handle full stack development (front to back end)?
Do you do TDD/BDD?
What are the gaps in your skill set or knowledge? Are you willing to help recruit people who can compliment you?
How would you scale a system from 1-10, 10-10k, 10k-1M users, and do so with in a fixed budget?
Are you familiar with: security, monitoring, backup stores, deployment, scaling, performance tuning?
Process
How do you interact with product managers and designers?
How would you implement an agile development team?
How do you evaluate a build vs. buy situation?
How do you ensure code quality?
What is your process for handling technical debt?
Mini Project
Come up with a small project that you think will take them either a couple days to 1 week to implement. Can be as simple as
integrate signups with email marketing provider.
Grade on attention to detail (quality), how accurately they implemented what you wanted (capable of building & shipping), and
turnaround time (speed).
Sample interview questions.
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38. Resources
Books
Basic Black by Cathie Black
Good Boss, Bad Boss by Robert Sutton
Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
Secrets of Rockstart Programmers by Ed Burns
Smart & Gets Things Done by Joel Spolsky
The Leadership Pipeline by Charan, Drotter, Noel
The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard
Blog Posts
http://femgineer.com/2011/12/blurred-vision-is-better-than-blindness/
http://femgineer.com/2010/05/startup-engineer-which-number-is-
right-for-you/
http://femgineer.com/2012/10/optimizing-outsourcing/
http://femgineer.com/2012/10/where-to-find-femgineers/
Podcasts
Hire & Retain Talent - Barry Deutsch & Brad Remillard
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39. Infrastructure
Application Hosting
Website Hosting
Code Repository
Backups, Security
Product Features
Deployment
Testing
Continuous Integration
Release Cycles
App Store
Maintenance Technical Debt
Org Efficiency
Email Server
Email Marketing
Social Media
Data & Analytics
Engineering Department
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40. Roles
Front End Interactions: JavaScript, HTML/CSS
Back End Algorithms, Features, Scaling
Architect Understands entire system.
DBA or DevOps Data Storage, security, scaling
Growth Hacker Get me more users!
Language Specific Rails Developer
Mobile Developer iOS or Android Developer
CTO/VP of Eng Manager
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