Matt_Mickiewicz

Unfortunately, Hired isn't in Tel Aviv yet, otherwise I'd love to help!

Yep, you nailed it.

This is part of the "unicorn hunting" that we see at Hired.com. We've even seen hiring managers rejecting candidates because they didn't use a particular JavaScript framework, or they haven't shipped code relating to a particular industry/vertical.

I liked - http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/16/what-if-cars-were-...

You've summarized a lot of the points I made to the Fastcomapny reporter for the article... and in the process you described a good number of seed stage companies, including ones coming out of YCombinator.

Their background was impressive enough that they where able to raise venture funding for their start-up.

Many times they have built or worked on something technically impressive, that became big & well known (Google Maps, Facebook timeline, Founding engineer at start-up with Billion dollar+ valuation).

Ding, ding, ding.

You hit the nail on the head.

The technical interviews & hiring criteria are often not aligned with what the company fundamentally needs in order to accomplish its goals. The founders/CTO are often rockstars, and they refuse to acknowledge that what their company needs is productive employees, not clones of themselves.

This leads to an enormous amount of time spent interviewing people in search for these rare "unicorns".

"They have a smaller job pool to choose from, but in the tech industry (context of most HN discussions about H1s), there really isn’t a shortage of employers willing to file."

To quantify, on DeveloperAuction we've found that Engineers on H1B's get an average of 32% fewer job opportunities than citizens/green card holders.

Hopefully the recent news articles about Google's data-driven analysis of these techniques will start moving things in the right direction... there is ZERO predictive value to many of these questions, and they bring with them a tremendous - and unaccounted for - cost around interviewing & rejecting qualified people.

My experience at DeveloperAuction shows that some companies actually view it as a point of pride that they reject 19 out of 20 Engineers they interview and that it's near-impossible to pass their rigours technical screening. It seems almost seems like they are trying to "trick" people into failing by asking obscure questions that have little relevance to the job at hand.

Of course, what they fail to account for, is the incredibly cost of hundreds of hours spent talking to candidates & administering these silly challenges or the fact that Google's interview data proves that such such logic questions have little predictive value on future on-the-job performance.

I was actually really impressed recently by Stripe's technical interview process - outlined on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Stripe-company/What-is-the-engineering-...

Fits the bill perfectly... it could have been the education start-up, seeking mentorship from the founder who was in that space.

I think that is why they are hedging their bets by offering yellow taxi service and UberX.

Classic strategy... conquer the premium market first (BMW 3,5 and 7 series) then start going more mainstream (1-Series BMW) once the brand is established and is viewed as prestigious.

This is a fantastic interview, and highlights the most common mistakes that I see early stage companies making:

1.) Seeking someone in their own image who is willing to work 18 hour days, including an unwillingness to look at candidates who have a different (or non-startup) background or are a missing a few buzzwords from their resume.

It might work for your first few engineering hires, but scaling it becomes incredibly difficult and brings with it huge lost opportunity costs. The faster you move out of your comfort zone, the better.

I know one well known start-up who has been trying to fill a role for over 4 months, and has gone through two dozen candidates, simply because of a strongly held philosophy by the founder who mandates 80-hour work weeks which effectively eliminates anybody who is married or has kids.

2.) Using fizzbuzz technical coding challenges as a proxy for how effectively someone will contribute to the team & your company hitting its product roadmap goals.

3.) Accurately & honestly assessing where you stand, and realizing that if you're a 7, trying to hire a "10" can be a recipe for failure. This is especially true if you're trying to pay below market rates.

4.) Moving with a sense of urgency and speed. If hiring is really your #1 priority, being willing to skip lunch with your monthly lunch with mom in order to make time for a hot candidate. In general, working under the assumption that anybody good is going to have multiple paper offers in hand, is a good philosophy.

5.) Decisiveness. "Making the offer when you've found the right house" vs. changing your mind because the color of the window boxes is wrong. Avoiding decisions by committee.

I never use travel agents for standard things (hotels/flights/cars) and only hire them for long, complex itineraries (2 countries, 8 cities in Asia over 4 weeks, etc.).

Both Conde Nast Traveler and Travel+Leisure Magazine publish A-List or "Gold List" travel agents who specialize in a certain region... These are not the guys that work in your local shopping centre or mall.

Clearly, the answer is no.

BUT, and this is a big BUT, having multiple personal projects does make you much more marketable to potential employers.

If you don't have a well known University or a well known company on your resume, having a stack of personal projects that show you're constantly learning, that you're passionate about the programming and that you love what you do can mean the difference between getting a request to interview at a start-up vs. getting put in the "pass" pile of resumes/profiles that internal recruiters have to look at.

This especially holds true if you work at a large, enterpris-ey company (IBM, VMWare, Goldman, Delloite, etc.) and want to attract the attention of, and get a job at, a venture funded start-up based on our experience at DeveloperAuction.

1. Be Decisive & move with a sense of urgency.

2. Don't be cheap. Not worth missing your product roadmap to save $20K/year or having to spend 6 months re-architecting your entire app because the early people weren't senior & experienced enough.

3. The only three questions that matter:

- Do I like this person and can I work with them?

- Can they get the job done and have a positive attitude (especially when s*it hits the wall)?

- Are they excited and interested in what we're doing?

When Google pushed out their interview-results data this year, one of the big findings was that there is NO SUCH THING as a good interviewer.

To quote the NY Times interview with Laszlo Black of Google - "Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert."

That being said, there are a lot of very disorganized interviewers out there, especially among seed stage companies. I've been amazed about how many people grumble about the "talent shortage", yet regularly miss interviews with "hot" candidates because of meetings, forget them altogether, or just lack a sense of urgency & speed when it comes to running an effective hiring process.

A large part of having a hiring culture is about decisiveness. Loosing a fantastic Engineer because you spent 4 weeks making up your mind, or you didn't want to pay an extra $10K/year is just silly when it means that you won't hit your product roadmap goals.

Hey Clifton,

Matt here, co-founder of DeveloperAuction.

Great insights in your comments above.

I generally agree that the "Talent War" is largely self-imposed: unwillingness to interview candidates outside of a 25 mile radius or relocate Engineers, being slow, disorganized or indecisive in the hiring process, trying to get Engineers to take massive paycuts from what they are earning at LinkedIn/SalesForce/Google/VmWare/Facebook, or simply requiring Engineers to work 80-hour weeks...

Some of the biggest & most successful companies also achieve major talent lock-in by compensating people really well, making it difficult for cash-strapped seed stage start-ups to compete with a lower budget.

Interestingly enough, RE: GitHub, we've seen zero positive correlation that having a GitHub account increases the number of interview requests that Engineers get on our marketplace when we analyzed our data.

There's definitely believe there's room in the market to displace contingent recruiters, create efficiency, drive down costs, and create a much more pleasant experience for both sides of the transaction.

One key with job seekers: there's a narrow window of opportunity to make matches. If you have quality talent, but you lack intent to switch jobs, nothing happens.

Likewise, if you have a huge pool of talent - and only some of it is good - you create too much work for the employers to filter/sort, and they are better off just using LinkedIn/Entelo/TalentBin to play spray & pray game - also known as guess & check - at a lower cost.

They raised $10.5m... probably at a $30-$40m pre-money valuation for their later stage, $8m round.

Not a great outcome, especially if the investors had liquidation preferences.

To be perfectly honest, 87% of candidates who go through the process and take a job, go with a company OTHER than the one that made the highest offer.

In fact, many more interview requests get rejected for "not interested in the company/industry" rather than insufficient compensation.

It's almost always more about the opportunity & the company, rather than the pay.

Weird.

We have couple hundred seed stage companies on DevAuc, including many YC Alumns. Typical offers are $90-$110K. I've never seen a $60K offer.

Series A and B companies are typically able to start paying more "market" rates of $120K-$160K. We're going to run the numbers on this at some point and put out a proper report.

Interesting arbitrage...

Half the time there is no client... They are just luring you in, and once they have your resume, it gets spammed out to as many employers as the have in their address book. Your resume gets used as "bait" in order for them to find new clients.

Even at DeveloperAuction we get clueless recruiters pitching us Java Engineers in NYC (We're rails in SF) and sending us "blinded" resumes with personally identifiable contact details removed. It's craziness!

Yeah, the incentives are really screwed up.

Firms like Riviera Partners in SanFran have different tiers of clients. Some pay 33% on base salary, others 25%... guess what interviews you'll be pushed into first?

If you pass, you probably won't even hear about the job openings at the companies that are "only" paying 25% commissions, even if it's potentially a better fit for you.

"Thank you" - From, The Internet.

Agreed.

Way too many people start a company these days because they want "Founder", "CTO" or "CEO" title... rather than because they see a real need and want to solve a real problem.

The fact that anybody with Google or Stanford on their resume can raise a $500K or $750K seed round doesn't help things either.

It was actually on the Ruby meetup list... I was surprised how many recruiters where monitoring that group, how quickly they responded to the fake message (within 5 minutes), and how little care, thought or attention they paid when asking people to entrust them with their career/job.

Congrats guys!

Sounds like they are re-living the lessons learned by Kozmo (anybody remember them?). Free, local delivery is a tough business, and people will absue it without minimums.

Kozmo learned that customers would order a pack of gum... expecting free delivery (which they did honor... until they went out of business).

Always really good to know what went before you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com

Based on the thousands of offers from hundreds of start-ups that I've seen DeveloperAuction, that is definitely a little bit on the low end for a "late stage" startup (Series B+?) company, but you're not horribly far off.

You could probably get $125K-$130K elsewhere, maybe even more, and potentially with a signing bonus as well.

$100-$115K is a typical salary at a seed stage company which would offer a significant equity stake

Only 5%? That's cheap... you should have taken the fee model from collection agencies, and taken 20%+.