One item in particular you note is that Recruiters are "Not Worth It"
But also disclose that you got scared off of the $15k/fee and haven't tried that route.
In my experience the right recruiter can combine the utility of the "First-degree friends" and "Referrals" sections you list out.
I used to be anti-recruiter until we made it a point to "recruit a recruiter" and qualify them as hard as we would if we were looking for an internal role.
Interviewing recruiters through a process landed us a recruiter that is well known and respected in his niche, has built trust with dozens of candidates, and delivered strong hires.
We've gotten 6 amazing people in ~6 months and from an investment return basis I can't think of better money that we've spent.
The product side improvements that the new team members are delivering + reducing the brain damage you go through with bootstrapping hiring are high return investment categories in my view.
And the punchline is I think you $15k/hire is off - we've averaged $45k per hire (30% of first year) for engineering & sales talent in the $120 - 200k/yr range.
PS - As others have commented the "We spent less than $1,000 on hiring" should probably be amended, it weakens the rest of what is a very good article on boostrapping hiring!
I agree, if you have 10 hires to make in a quarter then the recruiter fee starts to be eye-watering (better to bring that role in-house), but for your first 5-10 engineers (with say 2-4 reqs open at any given time) I found recruiters to be the best source after direct referrals.
Note that finding a good recruiter is hard, especially as a very early-stage startup. We spent a long time digging through mediocre resumes until we happened upon some good recruiters. It seems mostly trial and error so I'd recommend re-rolling a few times before making a judgement on recruiters as a general strategy. The benefit of the commission model is that you pay nothing if you make no hires, so that makes it lower risk to try a few interviews from a new recruiter.
I'll second this, I've worked with a few really good recruiters.
Most of them are so-so, but the great ones are great and can find amazing candidates in a matter of days.
You are basically paying to hire someone whose only job is to keep in touch with great people.
The so-so recruiters go through LinkedIn, the best recruiter I ever worked with, when I told her the type of person I was looking for, had someone immediately in mind and got back to me the next day with a phone number.
My LinkedIn is full of spammy recruiter messages. Every message is a copy pasted blurb with the name substituted. I like to compare it to online dating: those poor women getting dozens (or hundreds on the dating sites) of messages by people just spamming messages to as many people as possible.
Maybe one day I’ll meet a recruiter who has actual value
Well, since they got 10 employees by spending time instead of lots of money (e.g. at least 10 x $15k), then it may well be a good tradeoff for a company/founder that's (relatively) time-rich/cash-poor.
Having gone on the journey of trying to spend the absolute minimum on recruiting to now effectively not caring what recruiters charge I think that paying, say, 15k for a strong senior engineer is a bargain. Stop wasting time generating leads at a pitiful rate, pay a pro to do it and concentrate on actually running your team and shipping product.
I also upgraded to LinkedIn Premium and started reaching out to engineers in my 2nd degree network. These people were complete strangers, and I had no reason to think they might be interested in Kapwing. This tactic definitely didn’t work. Not only did I not get a single response to my messages, I got one angry response from a Recruiting Director asking me to buzz off and stop pinging people at her company.
Does anyone find LinkedIn useful? The importance some people put on having an updated LinkedIn profile with updated contact lists seems outrageously disproportional to the actual value the site provides. It seems odd, too. Social media site around making business contact, keeping your cv online, yadda yadda... but the promise of the platform never seems to have materialized.
I've gotten my last two jobs through LinkedIn (and likely otherwise wouldn't even know about the companies). Yes, the signal/noise ratio is very very EXTREMELY low, but the variance (all on the upside, there's really no downside to LinkedIn) is well worth it.
(To clarify: this weren't just "last two jobs in the past 4 months while I was job hopping aggressively", but rather, 1 job that allowed me to from a low-income country to a high-income country, and another where I've significantly progressed in the past 4 years and have no intention of leaving it anytime soon as I expect the progress to continue.)
Yeah, I find it super useful as an employee. You can get tons of spam mail but it's worth it when that company you really want to work for reaches out.
Of course, that means from a recruiter's perspective, when you are cold-messaging you need to be able to differentiate from the other cold-messages people are receiving, get their attention, seem like some place they would want to work, and be attractive enough that people are willing to quit their current job for you. That's hard if you're not a recognizable name and, with all due respect, not working on something really sexy. Otherwise you are just noise.
LinkedIn is very useful to people outside of the tech community, especially those in law, accounting, and HR. It's also fairly useful for people in other white-collar job fields.
Anecdota, but still data: I know close to a dozen people "1st degree network contacts" (i.e., former co-workers) who found new jobs through LinkedIn...without needing to go through a recruiter. I used a recruiter to find my current position...but I found the recruiter through LinkedIn.
The article says their best channels were friends and referrals via friends. As Patty McCord likes to say, the first 20 hires are easy, you just hire your friends and their friends. It's the next 100 that are tough, because at that point you've exhausted all your friends.
This article is arguing strongly for the core value of the recruiter - time saving.
True that founders must spend time recruiting, but this person has essentially turned the job of company founder into the job of recruiter. Founders should have better things to do than make the incredible time commitment this person describes.
OK recruiters cost money, but isn't the founder's time worth something?
>> I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates.
This is not how to do recruiting, it's wasteful of the recruiter and the job seekers time.
The first interview should be a phone interview and it should be sufficiently detailed that any in person meeting coming out of it appears to meet many of the requirements.
If you are doing hundreds of coffee meetings then you're wasting vast amount of time.
It may sound trivial but the denim thing is signalling "young".
I work with a few software engineers who do not have CS degrees - they have extensive industry experience and are fantastic to work with.
At the same time, I do a lot of SDE1 level hiring and have found that while there are good bootcamp grads, it is just so much more work to sort through / screen the bootcamp grads. Some of them have been some of the worst interviews I've ever conducted (no idea what a class is), my guess is due to the variation in quality of bootcamp.
In the end I'd (selfishly) rather have my fresh grad pipeline coming through college rather than bootcamp just because I'll be able to get someone more quickly and with less effort. Not that there aren't good people out of both pipelines.
It makes a lot of sense. People don't need a CS degree to do programming or even to be really good programmers. They just need to have a passion for constantly learning and solving problems. Then they'll be able to figure things out as they go, just like all of us do. There's only so much pre-training you can do.
Also, a much better predictor than school, of how well someone will do at a job, is how they get along with their team. If they have a great degree from an amazing school, but they don't get along with their teammates, they will perform very poorly.
Dunno how this applies across the world, but, my 2 cents:
I'm fully "self educated" like in not even bootcamps, just jumped straight into taking client work from zero programming experience (well, I did hack on some research/side projects while in med school before abandoning that), and having been ob both sides of the hiring process I'd say that hiring CS grads is 100% worth it you can hire the top 10%, probably not worth it after that. People who learn on their own tend to be passionate and motivated, people getting into CS at a good uni have a variety of motivations - they might be smart and capable, and if you're a big corporation you'll always find room for smart and capable people that can play by the rules... but not necessarily what you want. OK, maybe for US ivy-league or whatever that 10% might go to 25%-40%, but a fresh company might still not afford that...
And really, be honest with yourself, having a CS/EE university degree, would you really hire anyone but the top 10% of your classmates?! You know how it is, the 10% are there to study, the rest are there to study 10% of the time (and paaaaarty the rest ;)...) And... would you have any chance to afford to hire those top 10%?
They're a twelve month old startup. In that time they've had the chance to see one career fair at a good school and a half a dozen batches of grads from a bootcamp.
Your team appears to lack diversity with regards to age, and your conclusion makes it sound like that was almost a goal. Older engineers can offer a lot of wisdom and save a lot of wasted effort
I know VCs like to appear as if they provide an advisory role. I don't know how many actually contribute more than capital to their portfolio companies, my guess would be that you have to seek out a reputable company that provides more than money to get more than money.
fwiw, having been at a company from 6-160 people, early stages, investors aren't a great source of ICs. They end up a lot more useful when you are hiring senior leadership and an executive team. These roles align better with their own personal and professional networks.
We had a little luck tapping YC and YC alums early on though to some extent, and posting job reqs here on HN definitely helped.
It's generally a signal for hiring and sales/marketing, similar to how universities create prestige for individuals. Highly subjective and immeasurable.
The part on recruiters is very so so. $15K in fees,in a place like SF,where devs don't come cheap, is peanuts. Meeting tens of candidates means a lot of time spent not doing something else, something more important,so the cost doesn't become lower. There are some crappy recruiters out there, however a good one would not just get a good candidate but also save a lot of time.
On average a startup < 200 employees will spend around 15k+ on hiring efforts anyway. Recruiters can simplify, and streamline the process. Had many high quality recruits that stayed 2+ years with the company from recruiters.
It is a huge myth that the hiring experience with recruiters is poor. It is a huge myth that the quality is low.
Find the right recruiter. Get good candidates. The onus is on you to do your research.
Not a recruiter. Just someone who has worked with some amazing recruiters in the past. I've interviewed thousands of candidates, hired many of them, passed on quite a few. Hiring is always the same. Don't make it harder.
When you look at some of the ideas that are being done you have to think that the idea here is simply the investors are funding acquihire special purpose vehicle (for lack of a better way to put it). That is they invest in a company that they know has less than a solid chance of working out long term because of a good idea (or even forking to a better idea). And they know this. Then what happens is they have one of their other investments acquire the company a few years later as well as the fully vetted workforce.
Their products are meme generators and what appears to be a frontend on ffmpeg. Not sure this kind of work couldn't be outsourced for bottom dollar rates overseas?
Small nit-pick: Remote hires and outsourced teams are very different things.
Hiring full-time remote individuals is great if your company puts in the work to be remote-friendly.
Successful outsourcing work to a dev shop (usually remote to some degree) depends on your ability to communicate your product's technical needs precisely.
This focuses on hiring channels - but wouldn't an economist recommend competing on salary/equity or other benefits? Why isn't that a part of the strategy in such a competitive labor market?
[+] [-] aresant|6 years ago|reply
But also disclose that you got scared off of the $15k/fee and haven't tried that route.
In my experience the right recruiter can combine the utility of the "First-degree friends" and "Referrals" sections you list out.
I used to be anti-recruiter until we made it a point to "recruit a recruiter" and qualify them as hard as we would if we were looking for an internal role.
Interviewing recruiters through a process landed us a recruiter that is well known and respected in his niche, has built trust with dozens of candidates, and delivered strong hires.
We've gotten 6 amazing people in ~6 months and from an investment return basis I can't think of better money that we've spent.
The product side improvements that the new team members are delivering + reducing the brain damage you go through with bootstrapping hiring are high return investment categories in my view.
And the punchline is I think you $15k/hire is off - we've averaged $45k per hire (30% of first year) for engineering & sales talent in the $120 - 200k/yr range.
PS - As others have commented the "We spent less than $1,000 on hiring" should probably be amended, it weakens the rest of what is a very good article on boostrapping hiring!
[+] [-] theptip|6 years ago|reply
Note that finding a good recruiter is hard, especially as a very early-stage startup. We spent a long time digging through mediocre resumes until we happened upon some good recruiters. It seems mostly trial and error so I'd recommend re-rolling a few times before making a judgement on recruiters as a general strategy. The benefit of the commission model is that you pay nothing if you make no hires, so that makes it lower risk to try a few interviews from a new recruiter.
[+] [-] jvagner|6 years ago|reply
Thing is, a lot of companies open the doors to a number of recruiters and get swamped.
[+] [-] com2kid|6 years ago|reply
Most of them are so-so, but the great ones are great and can find amazing candidates in a matter of days.
You are basically paying to hire someone whose only job is to keep in touch with great people.
The so-so recruiters go through LinkedIn, the best recruiter I ever worked with, when I told her the type of person I was looking for, had someone immediately in mind and got back to me the next day with a phone number.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jammygit|6 years ago|reply
Maybe one day I’ll meet a recruiter who has actual value
[+] [-] OJFord|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterisP|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numismatex|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chillydawg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crusso|6 years ago|reply
Does anyone find LinkedIn useful? The importance some people put on having an updated LinkedIn profile with updated contact lists seems outrageously disproportional to the actual value the site provides. It seems odd, too. Social media site around making business contact, keeping your cv online, yadda yadda... but the promise of the platform never seems to have materialized.
[+] [-] tomp|6 years ago|reply
(To clarify: this weren't just "last two jobs in the past 4 months while I was job hopping aggressively", but rather, 1 job that allowed me to from a low-income country to a high-income country, and another where I've significantly progressed in the past 4 years and have no intention of leaving it anytime soon as I expect the progress to continue.)
[+] [-] opportune|6 years ago|reply
Of course, that means from a recruiter's perspective, when you are cold-messaging you need to be able to differentiate from the other cold-messages people are receiving, get their attention, seem like some place they would want to work, and be attractive enough that people are willing to quit their current job for you. That's hard if you're not a recognizable name and, with all due respect, not working on something really sexy. Otherwise you are just noise.
[+] [-] gamblor956|6 years ago|reply
Anecdota, but still data: I know close to a dozen people "1st degree network contacts" (i.e., former co-workers) who found new jobs through LinkedIn...without needing to go through a recruiter. I used a recruiter to find my current position...but I found the recruiter through LinkedIn.
[+] [-] jedberg|6 years ago|reply
Edit: fiends to friends.
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart|6 years ago|reply
True that founders must spend time recruiting, but this person has essentially turned the job of company founder into the job of recruiter. Founders should have better things to do than make the incredible time commitment this person describes.
OK recruiters cost money, but isn't the founder's time worth something?
>> I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates.
This is not how to do recruiting, it's wasteful of the recruiter and the job seekers time.
The first interview should be a phone interview and it should be sufficiently detailed that any in person meeting coming out of it appears to meet many of the requirements.
If you are doing hundreds of coffee meetings then you're wasting vast amount of time.
It may sound trivial but the denim thing is signalling "young".
[+] [-] p1esk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 62197217|6 years ago|reply
At the same time, I do a lot of SDE1 level hiring and have found that while there are good bootcamp grads, it is just so much more work to sort through / screen the bootcamp grads. Some of them have been some of the worst interviews I've ever conducted (no idea what a class is), my guess is due to the variation in quality of bootcamp.
In the end I'd (selfishly) rather have my fresh grad pipeline coming through college rather than bootcamp just because I'll be able to get someone more quickly and with less effort. Not that there aren't good people out of both pipelines.
[+] [-] ta1234567890|6 years ago|reply
Also, a much better predictor than school, of how well someone will do at a job, is how they get along with their team. If they have a great degree from an amazing school, but they don't get along with their teammates, they will perform very poorly.
[+] [-] nnq|6 years ago|reply
I'm fully "self educated" like in not even bootcamps, just jumped straight into taking client work from zero programming experience (well, I did hack on some research/side projects while in med school before abandoning that), and having been ob both sides of the hiring process I'd say that hiring CS grads is 100% worth it you can hire the top 10%, probably not worth it after that. People who learn on their own tend to be passionate and motivated, people getting into CS at a good uni have a variety of motivations - they might be smart and capable, and if you're a big corporation you'll always find room for smart and capable people that can play by the rules... but not necessarily what you want. OK, maybe for US ivy-league or whatever that 10% might go to 25%-40%, but a fresh company might still not afford that...
And really, be honest with yourself, having a CS/EE university degree, would you really hire anyone but the top 10% of your classmates?! You know how it is, the 10% are there to study, the rest are there to study 10% of the time (and paaaaarty the rest ;)...) And... would you have any chance to afford to hire those top 10%?
[+] [-] rndmize|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apta|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] situational87|6 years ago|reply
1. Throw away any resumes from old people
[+] [-] mlthoughts2018|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sadness2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwm83|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sadness2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] WrtCdEvrydy|6 years ago|reply
LOL, name and shame, I'm looking to poach some people from a place that's so scared of this.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|6 years ago|reply
These are the investors from their Crunchbase page [0]:
- Kleiner Perkins
- Sinai Ventures
- Bryan Rosenblatt
- Village Global
- ZhenFund
- Shasta Ventures
- Ron Drabkin
- Riverside Ventures
One day it would be nice to really, deeply measure how investors contribute to their portfolio companies.
[0]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kapwing#section-inve...
[+] [-] delinka|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codezero|6 years ago|reply
We had a little luck tapping YC and YC alums early on though to some extent, and posting job reqs here on HN definitely helped.
[+] [-] mbesto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmodisk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samschooler|6 years ago|reply
I understand the benefits of having a fully co-located team, however in this article they did not address fulltime remote employees.
I currently work as a fulltime remote employee for a startup with a similar team size, and we are able to iterate rapidly on product.
[+] [-] codesushi42|6 years ago|reply
It's not like they are hiring people straight out of Stanford. They're getting people from bootcamps!
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jimmaswell|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnycomputer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graphememes|6 years ago|reply
It is a huge myth that the hiring experience with recruiters is poor. It is a huge myth that the quality is low.
Find the right recruiter. Get good candidates. The onus is on you to do your research.
Not a recruiter. Just someone who has worked with some amazing recruiters in the past. I've interviewed thousands of candidates, hired many of them, passed on quite a few. Hiring is always the same. Don't make it harder.
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|6 years ago|reply
Kapwing has 1 Funding Round totaling $1.7M
---
https://www.similarweb.com/website/kapwing.com
In the last 6 months, kapwing.com traffic grew from 1.75 M to 3.3 M Total Visits per month.
3.3 M Visits per month is, usually, a good result on $1.75M investment.
[+] [-] gist|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamleppert|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acangiano|6 years ago|reply
> When it was difficult to hire, we considered outsourcing engineering work to an external dev shop.
Outsourcing and remote hires are two completely different things.
[+] [-] mLuby|6 years ago|reply
Hiring full-time remote individuals is great if your company puts in the work to be remote-friendly.
Successful outsourcing work to a dev shop (usually remote to some degree) depends on your ability to communicate your product's technical needs precisely.
[+] [-] akozak|6 years ago|reply