by @abhia90 // newsletter // youtube

How to Hire Your First Engineer: Early Stage, Engineering, Hiring

Summary:

• Hiring your first engineer is usually super difficult
• Unless you can convince a friend to join you, you'll have to keep refining your message and pitch
  • Ex: For your pitch to investors, they'll care about your market size, whereas Engineers would care about your most interesting product challenges
• For a more detailed, process-oriented on hiring engineers, also see [YC's How to Hire Handbook](YC's How to Hire Handbook.).

Hiring isn't the kind of work that provides you constant dopamine hits. It involves a lot of dead ends and frustration.

• Hiring your first engineer is super difficult — you barely have time. But then when you do have time, a lot of it will feel like wasted effort. So just be mentally prepared for that.

How to Hire your first engineer:

1. Get clear on what EXACTLY you're looking for
   • List all the criteria your dream hire would have (Technical & non-technical)
   • In reality, there will be tradeoffs (ex: spending more than you want on a good candidate, or waiting longer for your ideal one)
2. Follow one of these strategies to find candidates (ranked from Most —> Least effective)

   • Personal networks (MOST effective)

     • You must FULLY exhaust your network before you move on to any other strategy!
     • Strategy:

     

     • Expect to be spending at 1/3 of your time on just meeting people.
     • YC recommends using your personal network for your first 3 engineering hires; After this, use the other strategies mentioned (helps you diversify/balance your team)

   • Hiring marketplaces

     • Ex: Triplebyte, Hired — provide quick access to a pool of vetted (ie the hiring marketplaces can sometimes do a rigorous technical evaluation that you won't need to do, which ultimately saves you time and money), skilled engineers that are motivated to work immediately
     • Remember, this is inferior to Personal Networks
     • "The good marketplaces can attract high quality candidates but most of those engineers want to work somewhere that already has an engineering team. [The marketplaces] also charge a fee per hire that will usually be around $25,000 for an experienced engineer."
     • With this option, you're also competing with other companies for talent, so your pitch should be polished

   • Generate inbound

     1. posting on job sites
        • Why should you consider this?
          • b/c as an early-stage startup you likely won't get much organic inbound interest from good engineers
        • Downside: most job sites aren't frequented by high-quality engineers
        • Try sites with a big engineering audience— ex: Hacker News, Stack Overflow Jobs, Angel List
        • Make sure your posting is high quality (so it stands out)
     2. Create content that appeals to engineers
        • This becomes easier if you're working on exciting, difficult problems (Ex: self-driving cars)
        • Ex: Write high quality blog posts (ie Hacker-News-front-page-worthy) about what you're working on— Set goal of 1 article/month
        • Ex: Create interactive content like coding challenges or puzzles— only do this if you can create something genuinely interesting

   • Cold outreach

     • ie Messaging engineers online (LinkedIn, Hacker News, GitHub, etc)
     • Beware: Good engineers get a lot of messages. So, winning with this approach is all about endurance (up to 6 months)
     • Try to find email addresses rather than DM'ing ppl
     • Read this article from Stripe on cold recruiting
     • Tools to help you optimize your messaging— Sourceress and ZenSourcer
     • Trick: outsource your messaging in order to utilize your time better— "Give someone else access to your email and paying them to send the messages on your behalf then you handle the replies."

   • Recruiters

     • Con: Not great strategy to get your first engineering hire b/c they're also using cold outreach. Plus, cold outreach sounds worse from them as compared to you (the founder)
     • Pro: Their time is dedicated to basically this process
     • Recs: if you decide to do this, hire a recuiter on a contract basis
     • Make sure to train them well on how to pitch your company. Give them a day to prepare and then ask them to pitch it back to you.

   • Meetups

     • Good if 1) you're at a high quality meetup and 2) You're good at talking to strangers
     • Focus on smaller, informal meetups (allows for better conversations and connection)

   • Agencies (least effective)

     • Worst option b/c their focus is not on engineers; they tend to focus more on executive level hiring
     • Also, most engineers don't work with them

<aside> ⭐ All information is owned by Y Combinator. I claim no ownership of this information.

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by @abhia90 // newsletter // youtube