Lessons from Hiring for a Startup in NYC
Everyone is talking about how hot the startup scene is in NYC now, but there’s one big problem with that. While there are tons of exciting startups, the resources that those startups are built upon are constrained. Nope, I’m not talking about Ramen noodles and Red Bull… but developers.
We recently made 2 hires at SkillSlate, and the process of finding them was one of the most challenging things we faced as a company. I was involved in recruiting in my past life at Monitor, so I expected the process to be fairly simple, but in the end it was a completely different experience. Here are some differences:
Initially Attracting Talent:
Monitor Group: Sexy consulting shop that undergrads at Ivy League schools fight to work at
SkillSlate: Unknown startup (which will ultimately take the U.S. by storm)
Talent Required
Monitor Group: Any undergrad who has a basic grasp of business principles
SkillSlate: Ruby on Rails developers with experience at startups
Interview Infrastructure
Monitor Group: Elaborate case process, with clearly wrong and right answers
SkillSlate: Tech puzzle that Lawrence, our tech lead, put together
Impact of Hire
Monitor Group: Added another person to the 1,500 person machine
SkillSlate: 1 person increases the team by 20%
Point is, hiring was MUCH easier at Monitor. The talent pool was larger, the process was established and clear, and the impact was generally low. If I recommended we hire someone after I interviewed them, there was still a low probability of me ever working with that person, and an incredibly low probability of that person having a very large impact on the firm. Things are completely different at a startup. Not only are the early stages of recruiting harder, but it’s also important to find someone who happily drinks our Kool-Aid and who will build the company. However, after looking at hundreds of resumes and interviewing 50+ people, I’m super excited about our team.
However, I’ve got some learnings:
- Craigslist is king. We used recruiters, job sites, and our network, but ultimately, the most high quality candidates came from Craigslist posting. Sure, there were mostly duds, but it was easy to filter out the good ones, and you can’t beat the bang-for-your buck of $25 per posting.
- Sell early, sell hard. It’s important to get people to drink the Kool-Aid early, especially at a startup that most people don’t know about. The last thing you want is a solid developer slipping away because he/she didn’t think the idea was sexy.
- Trust your gut. This is something I rarely did at Monitor since we were so data focused, but turned out to be much more important at SkillSlate. I leave the data/ quant questions to our tech lead, and if he approves, I’ve got nothing but gut to determine whether I want to spend 12 hours a day with this person for the foreseeable future.
