Hiring
Best and easiest hires are ones you know do good work in field you working on. Usually through seeing their OSS work. You can start working immediately and after first month, you should know if you can work together or not. Make onboarding and work processes as smooth as possible. Async communication and lots of good docs for common questions with well defined tasks or vision.
It's good idea to fund people who work on tools/libraries you use in your startup. Can fund consultant help from them or even hire them on longer term basis too.
Small well aligned teams always work best.
I like Tesla's simple hiring page with just one question of What exceptional work have you done in .., link to CV and the name.
Love this list of favorite interview questions.
Recruitment tests
- Frontier's full stack take home
- Technical challenge @ MUI for React
- Cloudflare General Assignment
- Cloudflare Systems Assignment
- Guardian Coding Exercises
- Skyscanner
- Otta
- PFN Internship Coding Tasks
- Conduktor Coding Challenges
- Aztec Technical Challenge
- Teleport Careers
Nice Job pages
- Anthropic - Come work with us (Tweet)
- Linear - In Search of Magic
- Careers at Notion
- Careers - Calibre (Tweet)
- Primer - Founding Front End Engineer
- Daily.co - WebRTC Video Systems Engineer
- Careers at Figma (Twitter)
- Work at Basecamp
- Prisma Labs - Likes that it uses Notion to list/maintain the jobs.
- Gumroad
- Ueno Careers
- Apple Jobs
- Transloadit
- Apple Xcode Quality Engineer
- Fungarzione
- BeReal
- Aviasales
- Encore
- The Browser Company
- Scrimba typical dev day
Questions to ask
Notes
- You can tell so much about the culture of a startup by how fast the founder suggests hopping on a call after the first introduction. Urgency is either a part of company culture or not. This has historically proven to be a very reliable tell
- We’ve made an incredible innovation in hiring: Pay someone to do the work they would be doing if they get the job. If they are able to do it, they get the job.
- Do pilot projects for hiring instead of traditional interview with questions.
- Your job post should be an expression of your culture and values. If you value transparency, your job post should be as transparent as possible.
- Your first 10 hires set the stage for your company’s talent bar and culture. Spend a lot of time with them pre-hire. Get them to work with you for a day or even a week. You’re looking for diamonds in the rough. Known quantities are starting companies or joining sure things.
- Take more bets on people early in their careers.
- Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing.
- Normalize telling candidates when their ask is significantly below market rate. Nothing cute about underpaying people who are still figuring things out.
- Offer both early exercises and 10 year extended exercise window. Do it right after you raise a priced round and start granting options. That way you only have to change few lines in the options plan. It will be more painful to do later.
- Day Bridge options can be exercised as soon as they vest, and can be exercised long after you leave. You can also leave before fully vesting. They are also EMI approved (very tax efficient) and the strike price is currently ~£0.
- У нас собеседование не идёт в реальном времени — кандидат пишет текстом большой ответ на все наши вопросы сразу. Общаемся лично только в самом конце. Проверка на культуру — самая сложная. Её надо проводить с минимальным потоком людей, когда отсеяли по остальным критериям
- The best people you hire are awesome pretty much immediately. Slow starters rarely become stars.
- Mandatory PTO, besides being good for the wellness of the employees, ensures nobody in your org is solely relied on for a task or responsibility. Nobody should be a keystone. Smart leaders should make PTO hours taken over x time a deliverable.
- Don’t evaluate others based on their function, but rather their contribution to the mission. Recruiters are an extension of your team.
- Job posts of the future: Here's a task. We'll pay you to do it. If we're both happy, we'll keep going.
- Training new hires: 1. Prepare good documentation. 2. Be on a call with them when you have to explain stuff verbally. 3. Be available in text chat to answer their questions.
- Hiring more won’t make you go faster because the output of your projects follows a power law. When constrained by people, you focus on the 1-2 most critical bottlenecks. When you have extra people they work on non-bottlenecks, which does nothing to increase overall speed.
- If the CEO of a company is not spending >25% of their time recruiting, than that is a lifestyle business.
- Deadly mistake for founders and organizational leaders is to treat hiring a large team as a sign of success. Hiring should be treated as a last resort when your business will start failing without more engineers, sales people or customer success people. Otherwise you’re Fast.
- Biggest mistake founders make is they don't let go of under-performing hires quick enough. Then they do it wrong. Be direct. It should not be a surprise. It should be a continuation from prior discussions. No fluff, no excuses, be clear, state the facts.
- Startups that rely on recruiters to build their team have outsourced the single most critical aspect of building a company -- and the results are predictable
Links
- Hiring and the market for lemons
- How to reject (junior) applicants
- First hire to first fire (2018)
- Ask HN: Finding tech talent is getting harder. It's not a Bay Area problem only (2019)
- Gatsby Inc's Product & Engineering Hiring Philosophy (2019)
- Playbook For Recruiting and Hiring with Elaine Wherry (2019)
- Senior Developers are Getting Rejected for Jobs (2019) (HN)
- Hiring for Strengths (Not Weaknesses) with Charity Majors
- Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews? (2019) (HN)
- How to Hire Junior Developers (2019)
- Workable - World’s leading hiring platform.
- Hiring for Conscientiousness (2019)
- Lever - Recruiting Software Built for Hiring Success.
- The Hiring Post (2015)
- Reference checks
- How to Become a Magnet for Talent and Assess Talent (2019)
- When is a senior engineer not a senior engineer?
- The software industry's greatest sin: hiring (2020) (HN)
- Parachute List - All the layoff lists together.
- If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience (2020) (Lobsters) (HN)
- How we built the Figma design team (2018)
- Partnership, Freedom, and Responsibility — Metamuse (2020)
- When hiring, what's one quality or achievement in your field that makes someone an instant hire? (2020)
- Thoughts on using references when hiring
- Hiring a distributed team - Inside PSPDFKit (2016)
- Code katas for selecting technical talent (2020)
- How to spot top talent
- Thoughts on HR software (2020)
- The Problem of Overfitting in Tech Hiring (2020)
- Typo - Hiring simplified.
- My platonic ideal for how engineering hiring should work (2020) (HN)
- FairSourcing - Evaluate the impact of a candidate on the decided socially aware metrics in the sourcing process.
- Jeff Bezos’ 1st job posting for Amazon in August 1994
- Asking a tech recruiter (2020)
- Measuring Hiring Manager Effectiveness (2020)
- Reducing Time-to-Hire and Finding Niche Candidates via Text Mining and NLP (2021)
- DevScreen - Interview problems that are authentic for what your next hire will be doing on your team.
- What is Asynchronous Hiring
- Asynchr - Asynchronous hiring for remote teams.
- “Location-Based Pay” – Who are we to complain? (2021) (HN)
- Ask HN: Any startups solving for software engineering hiring? (2021)
- Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses (2021) (HN)
- Job descriptions should show a salary or salary range (2021) (HN)
- Tools for doing hiring coding challenges (2021)
- A Framework for Hiring a VP of Engineering, from Shopify's VPE
- What's going on here, with this human? (Tweet) (HN)
- Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative? (2021)
- Ask HN: What do you use to pay out multiple people (Stripe/Wise/PayPal, others?) (2021)
- Ask HN: What things that tech recruiters do, annoy you the most as an engineer? (2021)
- Recruiting during hyperscale from the guy who did it at DoorDash and Carta (2021)
- How we hire engineers
- Gitlab Employment Solutions
- Hiring, firing and retiring - Fathom Analytics (2021)
- Pallet - Infrastructure for Modern Hiring.
- How can you evaluate the caliber of people at a company before joining it?
- Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay? (2021) (HN)
- Benefits for employees besides salary (2021)
- Hiring Developers: How to avoid the best (2021) (HN) (Reddit)
- What's Wrong with Tech Hiring (2021) (HN)
- Companies should focus a lot more on retaining top talent
- Increasing number of engineers doesn't always make you go faster (2021)
- Avoiding the audience paradox when writing job descriptions (2021) (HN)
- Better alternative to giving out option grants (2021)
- Monzo's on-call compensation
- They don't even know the fundamentals (2021) (HN)
- Onboarding to a New Company (2021)
- Ask HN: What kind of projects make a junior candidate stand out from the rest? (2021)
- Introduction to Work Sample Tests (2021) - Hands-on, practical exercises.
- Ask HN: How much equity should an early employee get? (2021)
- Karat - The Interviewing Cloud | Accelerate technical hiring.
- Growing a Junior-Heavy Team (2021) (Tweet)
- Diversity in Hiring - Resources for diversity in hiring : job boards, organizations, educational resources.
- 8 reference call questions that get past BS and really help understand a candidate
- Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment? (2022)
- Rethinking Levels, Promotions and Salaries (HN)
- Truework - Employment & Income Verification.
- What identifying talent looks like in practice (HN)
- Our Vision for Location-Independent Salaries at Buffer (2022) (Tweet) (Tweet)
- Why not hire part-time developers? (2022) (HN)
- Litebulb - Automated coding onsite interviews for fast-growing remote teams. (HN)
- Putting salary & total compensation on job ads increases traction
- Why income share agreements did not work out (HN)
- Retaining Software Engineers and Engineering Managers (Tweet)
- How GitHub does take home technical interviews (2022)
- Steve Jobs taking a long term view on people, don't just fix problems
- VP of Engineering hiring cheat sheet
- We Need Someone Who Has Done “It” Before (2022) (HN)
- How to on-board properly at new jobs (2022)
- Don't ask for too many "must have" things in job adverts
- What I wish I knew about onboarding (HN)
- What Good, Cash-Strapped Hiring Looks Like (2022) (HN)
- Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it (2022)
- ChiefOnboarding - Free and open source employee onboarding platform. You can onboarding new hires through Slack or the dashboard. (Code)
- Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges (2022)
- How to Hire Good Engineers (2022) (HN)
- Awesome Engineering Ladders
- How to freaking hire great developers by having them read code (HN) (Lobsters)
- Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok (2022)
- The Scoop: the Hiring Market (2021)
- Ask HN: Firing an employee under a month before vest? (2022)
- Normalising Layoffs/Firing (2022)
- Ask HN: Who’s been laid off and what’s your strategy for seeking new employment (2022)
- Layoffs.fyi - Tech Layoff Tracker and Startup Layoff Lists.
- Ask HN: What prevents a company from hiring remote employees internationally? (2022)
- Frappe HR - Open Source HR and Payroll Software. (Web)
- What is your favorite interview question to ask when hiring?
- Ask HN: Why is hiring so dehumanized, and what can be done? (2023)
- How to hire engineering talent without the BS (2023) (HN)
- Ask HN: Engineering managers, how do you onboard new hires? (2023)