As a start-up CEO in the hiring-efficiency space, I get to see a lot of company's hiring process in gory detail. Anyone who's been around new start-ups (and old guys, see: Google) has seen a great candidate withdraw from a req due to long response time. In a larger organization these inefficiencies can be handled by adding more schedulers, sourcers, recruiters, but in a small start-up you need a top-down commitment to speedy processing of candidates.
As a company gets larger (~series A) there comes a sudden crunch wherein you need 10 developers, yesterday. At that moment, if you haven't laid down the ground work for a successful recruiting/hiring strategy you can experience a very lossy hiring process. You'll miss out on great opportunities to companies who have spent the time, money and effort to make their process efficient.
To the articles recommendations, I would add the following:
- For top tier talent, recruiting is more like sales: you need to sell your company to the recruit, not vice versa.
- For each requisition do the following: decide what the relevant skills/requirements for the position, decide who on the interview team will assess each of those skills, train your interviewers to spend 1/2 their time selling the company and why they love working there and 1/2 their time grilling the applicant on their focus area. This forces you to think critically about what you're looking for (forces understanding of the org chart) and gives each person agency in the process (I'm in charge of sussing out algorithmic ability).
- Corollary to the above: train your interviewers. Make sure they know what they're looking for both culturally and technically, and make sure they have the ability to assess those properties (or lack thereof). Interviewers are your company's brand emissaries (and the source of many candidates) if they can't communicate well the recruits will come away with a bad experience.
- Track things: I think of recruiting like sales. If a VC asked you how your sales was going you wouldn't say something like "OK", you'd have numbers, metrics, graphs, funnels, pipelines, etc etc. Though this can feel a bit overkill in the beginning, getting in the habit of monitoring your candidate pipeline is extremely important as you scale. Small inefficiencies become enshrined as 'best practice' and as you scale they can turn into huge holes for your organization. This is exactly the type of problem we're trying to mitigate/measure by bringing the traditional applicant tracking system into the inbox at www.foundryhiring.com.
This looks really interesting. But I do have a few questions about things that are not apparent from your pricing page[1]:
* Does this integrate with google apps or just gmail?
* I think you should offer a plan in-between ingot and enterprise with around 20 open positions.
It integrates with Google Apps, specifically: Google Calendar, Google SSO, Google Contacts, and Gmail. The widget listed is currently for Google Chrome and inside the Gmail frame.
Thanks for the feedback on pricing. We are going to add a tier below enterprise and compete in the JobVite territory. In the mean time we offer 30 day free trial on all plans and a 75% off coupon for early beta users: HN75PCT.
This is a super-helpful comment, no doubt because you're in the hiring business. Are people seeing a solid gain in efficiency with foundry or is the benefit elsewhere? Also, I've never seen foundry until now. When did you launch?
Thanks for your interest, we haven't officially launched, but we have a number of early beta customers. We'll be doing an official launch in the next month.
Our initial beta customers have been working really close with me and the rest of the team to shape the product. So, the benefits have been around automating parts of the process that are annoying and manual right now. An example: most of our customers have one centralized person (out of 10-40 in the company) that does all the scheduling, sourcing, coordinating with recruiters. We looked at her process (done in google docs) and tried to automate as much as possible. The result: you can now schedule interviews directly from our gmail widget, select a person from your org, a candidate, and a time and we book the meeting on the respective calendar, notify the interviewer about the interview, send them the resume/coverletter and evaluation form and then bug them every 24 hours after the interview to ensure the feedback is logged. The estimate was that by simplifying this process to 3-4 clicks we save her ~ 20 hours of annoying work per week.
The tool has been built around simplifying work flows like this. We're still hashing out all of them, but our central thesis is: 99% of recruiting time is done through the inbox so why doesn't your ATS/CRM live there with you. Over the next couple weeks we're moving the functionality from the web app into the gmail inbox, when that is done we'll officially launch.
Honestly, I think the main benefits of Foundry are as follows:
- We've studied workflows across dozens of companies from Palantir to Facebook to small companies and built the tool around optimizing workflow and collecting data.
- When you come to us we have an out of the box process that works well (we'll show you data) that is somewhat customizeable to your particular company's process. So you start with a good base and the tool reinforces good behavior. This is the part of the tool we're building on the most: how to convey/reinforce best practices in the hiring process.
- Everything is in your inbox: no context switching/learning a new system.
- In the early stage I work closely with all our customers and as we learn new best practices/tips we pass those on to you.
- Lastly, I honestly think that using something like Foundry forces you to think critically about your process (as opposed to winging it), by giving you a framework you end up with a process that works more efficiently.
Our hope is that once we get more data around hiring we can push that knowledge out to everyone, so that company's stop losing hires due to the problems listed above. If you have any questions about your process or want some friendly advice about what you're doing well/poorly I'd be happy to chat, email in my signature.
"If you can't pull the process together to make a quick decision, you're not only going to lose people, but you're going to signal that you can't move quickly on other decisions as well, whether or not this is really the case."
This one is important. Recruitment leaves impressions on the candidates. You better make sure the impressions are positive ones, because they matter a lot.
The world is small. An unsuccessful candidate might get successful elsewhere. Their opinion about your company might soon affect its future. Other candidates passing on your offer because they heard your process sucks is just the most obvious and immediate way, obviously there are others.
Totally agree, I think of hiring as a chance to create company cultural emissaries. The best companies turn potential recruits into advocates for their brand, so even if they don't end up working at the company they tell their friends about how good the process and company are. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...
Palantir is another company that does this well at Stanford. Those track jackets/t-shirts they wear are cultural symbols that give interns/employees status and spark conversations about the company. These 'little' things carry a lot of weight especially in the tight-packed network of university dorms.
Funny you say that. Finding a job recently, Palantir was the absolute worst at the recruiting process. At the end of their two months, in one two-week span I interviewed at and received offers from two much smaller startups. I told my recruiter at the end of the all-day interview that I needed to make a decision by the end of the week on other offers (it was Monday). I didn't hear from her for another ten days, at my prompting. She was frazzled, passed me on to another recruiter, who asked if I could come in again for another all-day. Needless to say, I declined and went with one of the offers I already had.
That's really too bad. I don't work with/for them, but I know many of the recruiting team and they have been very responsive to feedback in the past. If you have specific comments/critiques feel free to message me, I'd be happy to pass them on.
The problem is compounded by the fact that many companies will not give a "no" to candidates that are a pass due to legal reasons, social convention or whatever else... it puts candidates who want to be persistent in a weird position, because you "don't want to be pushy," but you don't know whether the company is trying to send a message, taking their time, undecided or just incompetent.
Yes, this has been maddening for me as well. For all of the people on this site claiming the market is "red hot", job hunting in the bay area has been slow. I have dealt with a couple of really well run companies that made it through the process quickly, but others have all kinds of HR filters and take weeks to even get a phone screen.
In contrast, I was able to join a start-up within three weeks of beginning my search in 2010 in Beijing... and that was before I had any professional experience. They made the decision on the basis of a couple of interviews and a couple of retro flash games I'd done as a hobby project.
Incidentally, if anyone in SF is looking for someone who can code and a proven record of hustle, my contact info is on my profile page.
As far as I would guess, the market is hot if you meet all ten of the bullshit this is how you spot rockstars this week criteria. Otherwise it's slow.
The thing is, the GP is only about hiring the magic people super fast - as soon you see them, yeah! Which isn't going to make more magic people.
The hire-ers might just think about making their process a bit wider rather than chasing the same things over and over again. Give more people a chance to show some ability rather than passing the same mantra about A-players back
and forth.
This is an excellent point. The analogy I like to use is based on prospecting: you can try to find fully-formed gold from the earth or you can smelt down ore into something useful. Right now the valley is full of prospectors stealing gold nuggets from each other, and I think there is a ton of opportunity to transform smart, hardworking people into great employees.
Of course this requires time and training, which some start-ups feel they can't afford. In the end I think it's worth it to focus on finding talent that can learn quickly rather than emerge from Zeus's brain fully-formed.
Many companies I've dealt with seem to forget that the person they're interviewing probably isn't interviewing with just one company.
The last place I worked for (government) was maddening in this respect. We'd find a great candidate and HR would delay or otherwise jerk them around, and then have the gall to be shocked when the person accepted another offer.
In my recent job search the company I joined had a written offer to me within a day or two. Others contacted me weeks later with offers, even after I told them I was considering multiple offers at the time.
I don't think most candidates will tell you that, but that's likely the case. You snooze, you lose. There aren't many reasons you can't make an offer within a week after an interview.
I experienced the exact same thing last time I was looking for a job. I had companies go completely silent, then contact me weeks after I had already accepted another position. With the dearth of available iOS developers in the valley right now, I don't know how these places hire anyone at all, let alone good devs.
This is, in my opinion, one of the largest issues startups face today. OSS and a culture of blogging have significantly reduced the barriers to entry for many technical issues including, but not limited to, scaling, data processing, and even general development.
What's still just as difficult is building the right team - my personal pain point is university recruiting, but it's bad across the board. If you're a startup that's expanding beyond the second or third round of technical hires the ability to draw on your network becomes increasingly limited as you've likely tapped out all your personal connections at this point, and your team's calendar still resembles one of the world's worst games of Tetris [1].
Traditional recruiting agencies are poor at matching technical hires with opportunities that are interesting to them because most recruiters are non-technical. GitHub profiles are worthless if the hiring manager (Read: /founders?/) have no time to read them, and dealing with phone screens and in-person interviews and arranging travel for candidates is a huge distraction from what they should be focusing on, building their business [2]. There's a huge potential for upset in the space, and I look forward to seeing a managed hiring provider that manages the scheduling, very initial matching of candidates, and once a hire is made follows-through with assistance on all of the ensuing paperwork and documentation.
[2] Hiring is one component of building a company, one of the most important even, but it is a distraction. In an idyllic world perfect employees seek you out and apply ;)
I completely agree that technical recruiting is open to disruption, and I hope that it soon will be, however: given the fees that barely technical recruiters extract now, what hope is there for a truly talented, highly technical recruiter who needs to get paid at least what (s)he could make in a technical role (120k minimum)
Sadly, I think this is right. I know several recruiters at a big-name recruiting agency in Silicon Valley, they try to act like an internal recruiter (thorough vetting of candidates, understanding company culture, etc) and they make much less money than if they had just adopted the pay and spray mentality of their peers.
The bright hope for me is darwinian: if enough startups refuse to use these pay and sprayers then they will die off, leaving only the higher quality recruiters. Will that happen? Not any time soon.
Is any of this different because the person in context is a business role?
In my personal experience, smaller, tech-heavy focus startups are quick to make an offer for technical candidates.
However business roles take much longer, partly because its not clear if the company needs a full-time person running marketing, sales or business development, and because the new hire can add to "product-market" fit noise.
I still see some companies take a long time to fill tech roles.
It's the difference between companies who really know what they're looking for, and those who the "best" person but aren't quite sure what that is.
The former will hire as soon as they meet somebody who can do the job.
The latter will dither until they have a few possibles. Then dither some more weighing up the various pros and cons... by which time their best candidate has gone.
In the worst cases they then reject all their other candidates (since they're "worse" than the best candidate they've just lost) and start the whole process again!
I think you're absolutely right, Adrian. If you aren't sure what specific role you'd like someone to be able to fill, you're just a window shopper, and serious candidates aren't going to wait for you to make up your mind. For every req, you've got to be able to answer the ? "What, specifically, do we need this person to do?" That's a functional ? - it's not enough to say "This person needs to be able to code in .NET " like many BigCorps do.
It astounds me how hard many organizations can find it to answer that ?, though. Even if you set up a company that espoused a "we'll hire as many smart people as we can get" policy, you could still say "Immediately, we need someone to work on the performance of our frobnosticator, so they'll need to know Java classloaders REALLY well." That's specific enough that you can know "we found our engineer" when they show up, and doesn't use a lame proxy for knowledge like years of experience (there are certainly Java developers out there with 15 years of experience who know nothing about classloaders).
It really depends on the size of organization. For something like Google, I would say that long-response times are the norm and frequently the recruiter/contact person are extremely swamped and may have forgotten about you. Not necessarily because you aren't good, but because their volume is insane. In this case I would write a quick letter that says "Thanks, I really enjoyed meeting X (person you talked to). We had a good conversation and I wanted to check if you needed any more information from me." This is generally enough to push them if they are inclined to pursue you, if they didn't like you for whatever reason then they probably won't respond or will reject you. If they don't respond after that I would say send one more email about a week later that is slightly more urgent (considering other offers, etc). If they don't respond to that, then it's best to let that one go.
For smaller companies, they most likely don't have the resources to keep in touch with everyone. For me, this is the main value of an Applicant Tracking System: making sure no one falls through the cracks. That being said, most small companies don't have them, so they are relying on their memory + spreadsheet to carry them through.
If you're working through an external recruiter: talk to them, they have every incentive to push you through the pipeline and have a direct read on the process.
If you have a contact in the company or you met with someone in person: send them a quick follow up email is enough to move the pipeline usually.
If you've blind applied: then I would suggest sending them a quick note to get back onto their priority queue. Whomever is in charge of the process WANTS to respond to everyone, but if they don't see a fresh email sitting in their inbox, they quite possibly have forgotten that you're in the pipeline.
Also as mentioned below, pursuing many job opportunities in parallel is good for you and can be a great forcing-function/bargaining chip in late-stage hiring processes.
Keep pinging people. Asking for updates on a roughly weekly basis is a good thing. You should presumably have at least one contact from when the interview was scheduled, and hopefully you met someone during the interview and have e-mail addresses - ping these people as well.
Also, keep looking. A successful interview, even with reassurances from your contacts that things are moving along, isn't worth very much. If you get another offer in this period, you have a lot more options.
In the past, after pinging the person via email, I've waited a few days and if I haven't gotten a response, I send the person an invitation to connect on Linked-In - I've been pleasantly surprised to see the connection accepted and a real response to the original email shortly thereafter more than once.
Depending on your skill and demand, you could simply nudge them by asking if they are considering an offer because youll need to make a decision soon, as you don't want other companies to wait simply because they responded quickly.
This communicates you have options, and that they are going slower than you'd like. Clearly this only works in certain situations and can be dangerous if executed poorly.
As a company gets larger (~series A) there comes a sudden crunch wherein you need 10 developers, yesterday. At that moment, if you haven't laid down the ground work for a successful recruiting/hiring strategy you can experience a very lossy hiring process. You'll miss out on great opportunities to companies who have spent the time, money and effort to make their process efficient.
To the articles recommendations, I would add the following:
- For top tier talent, recruiting is more like sales: you need to sell your company to the recruit, not vice versa.
- For each requisition do the following: decide what the relevant skills/requirements for the position, decide who on the interview team will assess each of those skills, train your interviewers to spend 1/2 their time selling the company and why they love working there and 1/2 their time grilling the applicant on their focus area. This forces you to think critically about what you're looking for (forces understanding of the org chart) and gives each person agency in the process (I'm in charge of sussing out algorithmic ability).
- Corollary to the above: train your interviewers. Make sure they know what they're looking for both culturally and technically, and make sure they have the ability to assess those properties (or lack thereof). Interviewers are your company's brand emissaries (and the source of many candidates) if they can't communicate well the recruits will come away with a bad experience.
- Track things: I think of recruiting like sales. If a VC asked you how your sales was going you wouldn't say something like "OK", you'd have numbers, metrics, graphs, funnels, pipelines, etc etc. Though this can feel a bit overkill in the beginning, getting in the habit of monitoring your candidate pipeline is extremely important as you scale. Small inefficiencies become enshrined as 'best practice' and as you scale they can turn into huge holes for your organization. This is exactly the type of problem we're trying to mitigate/measure by bringing the traditional applicant tracking system into the inbox at www.foundryhiring.com.