- The video discusses the importance of building a successful engineering team for a company.
- The speakers, Harj and Amin from Triple Byte, share their insights on hiring engineers.
- They emphasize the challenges and time-consuming nature of the hiring process.
- The hiring process is compared to a funnel, with sourcing, screening, and closing as the three main stages.
- The first place to look for engineers is personal networks, followed by hiring marketplaces, LinkedIn, GitHub, job boards, and meetups.
- The speakers recommend using personal networks extensively and following a strict process to reach out to potential candidates.
- They also suggest tapping into the personal networks of the existing team and organizing team events for brainstorming potential hires.
- Hiring marketplaces are discussed as a newer option for finding engineers, similar to dating sites.
- The demand for good engineering talent exceeds the supply, so companies need to be proactive in reaching out to candidates.

- Companies are being proactive in reaching out to candidates, who have multiple inquiries and can choose who they want to speak to
- Hiring marketplaces can help startups hire quickly, but can be competitive and expensive
- LinkedIn and GitHub are good sources for finding engineers, but response rates are dropping due to increased messaging
- Job boards like Stack Overflow Jobs and AngelList can result in underqualified applicants, so job listings should be unique and interesting
- In-person meetups are not very effective for finding qualified candidates, but hosting meetups at your own office can help build a network
- Recruiters should be considered after hiring the first engineer and having a good hiring cadence, with more than 50% of time spent on hiring
- Recruiters can be contract recruiters, in-house recruiters, or agency recruiters.

- The piece discusses the role of agencies in hiring engineers and suggests starting with a contract recruiter for sourcing and then transitioning to an in-house recruiter for pitching and setting up interviews.
- The author recommends exhausting personal networks, experimenting with hiring marketplaces, and doing personalized outreach on LinkedIn and GitHub as part of a startup hiring plan.
- The hiring process for most tech companies includes a resume screen, recruiter call, technical phone screen, optional take-home project, on-site interview, and decision meeting.
- The author emphasizes the challenge of inconsistency in interviews and highlights the noise in the interview process.
- The piece suggests using trial periods to assess engineers' skills, but notes that only 20% of engineers are willing to participate in trial periods.
- The author provides seven points of advice for reducing noise in a traditional interview process.

- The first way to reduce noise in interviews is to determine the specific skills that matter for your company, as interviewers may have different biases.
- Using structured interviews, where interviewers ask a set of defined questions, is more predictive and should be utilized.
- Holding the interview process constant for all candidates and providing interviewers with specific criteria to evaluate helps to eliminate biases.
- Using better interview questions involves avoiding questions that require leaps of insight and instead opting for multi-step problems that assess general programming ability.
- Budgeting about three times the amount of time it takes to solve a problem for the candidate is recommended, as interviewers often underestimate the difficulty of questions.
- Asking four or more questions in an interview helps to minimize noise and obtain a more consistent signal.
- A type of question that can be effective is providing the candidate with a problem and a solution, and having them implement it in code.

- The video discusses ways to improve the interview process for hiring programmers.
- It suggests implementing algorithms instead of expecting candidates to devise their own.
- The importance of ignoring credentials, such as school or company names, during interviews is emphasized.
- False negatives (passing on someone who could have been successful) and false positives (hiring someone who performs poorly) should be considered and minimized.
- The candidate experience should be positive and stress-free to ensure accurate performance assessment.
- The summary also includes specific advice for smaller startups, such as using structured interviews even with limited resources and being less aggressive in screening out candidates before the on-site interview.

- The first few hires at a company may write crappy code, but they are productive and get things done quickly.
- When hiring for an area outside of your expertise, ask candidates to explain their answers to gauge their technical skills.
- Conduct mock interviews with co-workers to highlight areas of weakness and disagreement in technical questions.
- Speed is an advantage for startups in the hiring process, so be fast and responsive at every step.
- Train interviewers to have a good bedside manner and avoid showing off their intelligence.
- Be prepared to talk about company culture, including diversity and trade-offs.
- Get the team and investors involved in the hiring process to increase the chances of closing a candidate.
- Present full and transparent offers with all the necessary details about compensation.
- Understand how to compete against tech giants like Google and Facebook in terms of compensation.

- Startups can win against larger companies by making compelling pitches
- Emphasize learning and real decision-making responsibility
- Highlight career progression and the opportunity for rapid growth in the tech industry
- Discuss the unique opportunity and varied experience of working at a startup
- Emphasize mentorship for junior candidates
- Background checks are not necessary, focus on fit and skills assessment
- Non-technical founders may struggle to assess technical skills, having a technical co-founder is helpful
- Working with universities for talent generation may not be the best option for startups
- Role-playing bad interviews can be helpful for feedback and improvement.

The video discusses the importance of building a successful engineering team for a company. The speakers share insights on hiring engineers and emphasize the challenges and time-consuming nature of the process. They suggest using personal networks extensively and tapping into the existing team's networks. Hiring marketplaces, LinkedIn, GitHub, and job boards are also recommended. Recruiters can be considered after hiring the first engineer. The hiring process for tech companies includes various stages and the author suggests ways to reduce noise and improve the interview process. Specific advice is given for smaller startups. The importance of a positive candidate experience and transparent offers is highlighted. Startups can compete against larger companies by emphasizing learning, career progression, and unique experiences. Background checks are not necessary, and having a technical co-founder can help assess technical skills. Role-playing bad interviews can be helpful for feedback and improvement.

The speaker mentioned a 95% success rate in hiring, but the questioner doubts this based on their own experience. The speaker explains that the 95% rate comes from surveys where companies reported that 5% of hires were fired, 30% were mediocre employees, and 10% were top performers.

- Speaker claims a 95% success rate in hiring
- Questioner doubts this based on personal experience
- Speaker explains that the 95% rate includes 5% fired employees, 30% mediocre employees, and 10% top performers

Former YC Partner and founder of TripleByte Harj Taggar, along with his cofounder Ammon Bartram discuss a topic startups often struggle with most: finding and hiring the key engineers who will build your product.

You can find the lecture transcript and slides here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/44

Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/

As the slides are loading, there is no topic that should occupy your minds more as you build your company than bringing on the team that's going to make your company successful as you move forward.

Harj and Amin from Triple Byte, YC alumnus, are going to talk about building in today's day and age, perhaps the key portion of that team, the engineering team.

So please welcome Harj, you're starting, yeah?

All right, thanks for having us, everyone.

So I'm Harj, I'm 1 of the co-founders of Triplebyte along with Armon.

Previously I used to be a partner at Y Combinator and part of the inspiration of starting TripleByte was noticing how, after graduating Y Combinator and raising the first investment round, everyone's number 1 problem was hiring and specifically hiring engineers, because it's the hardest hiring challenge.

So Through working on TripleByte, which is a hiring marketplace that's used by engineers to find new places to work, Armand and I have gathered lots of data on what works well when it comes to hiring engineers.

I've personally focused a lot on spending time with companies, helping them think through their strategies for finding engineers and obviously getting the most out of TripleByte.

And Armand spent a lot of time thinking through the details of how do you evaluate an engineer, how do you evaluate their engineering skill, and answer the question of, are they a good engineer or not?

So we're going to share that and sort of have a divide and conquer strategy going on here.

The 4 main topics we're going to cover are where to look for engineers, and when you should start thinking about using recruiters, and that's what I'm going to start with.

Then we'll talk about evaluating technical skills, which Armand's going to cover.

And then I'll finish up by talking through the process of making offers and closing, which is getting people to actually join your team.

But before we start on any of that, I wanna just issue a warning and make sure you're well prepared for the fact that Hiring really well and truly sucks.

It's an incredibly painful process because for many reasons, which I'll describe in detail, the first is it takes a lot of time.

It takes a lot of time just to convince someone good to even have a conversation with you.

And as a founder, as you know, time is a very scarce resource.

There's bugs to fix, there's sales, customers to close, various things going on.

And hiring will never feel like it's your top most urgent priority, and it's very easy to procrastinate and push it back.

But if you do that for too long, you won't scale and you won't grow your startup and someone else will come along, do that and take the market.

2, hiring involves a lot of repetitive work.

So actually as Tyler was giving his presentation, I was talking to Jeff about this back there.

There's a lot of similarities between sales and hiring.

And actually, there's a lot of similarities between sales and hiring and fundraising and lots of things that you do as a startup founder.

A large part of it is effectively selling all of the time and selling, as Tyler pointed out, involves a lot of repetitive work.

This, so hiring will involve lots of messaging, it will involve taking lots of coffee meetings, lots of phone calls, lots of interviews, and most of those will result in the dead end and be a complete waste of your time, but you have to keep going.

And finally, you will get your heart broken.

You will inevitably end up getting rejected by people who you really wanted to hire who would have been the perfect fit to help you hit your growth goals, but it turns out they were never really that serious about leaving their comfortable job at a big company to join your exciting but risky startup.

And as you're thinking through building a hiring process, I encourage you to think about this as a funnel that you're creating that has 3 parts to it.

The top of the funnel is sourcing, and that's finding people who could be a good fit.

The second is screening, that's answering the question of, do you want to hire this person or not?

And The final part of the funnel is closing, making the offer and getting the offer accepted.

I'm going to start by talking through some strategies for building the top of your hiring funnel.

These are the 5 places I'd recommend that you look for making engineer hires.

I'll talk through the pros and cons of each of these.

They are personal networks, hiring marketplaces, LinkedIn, GitHub, job boards, and meetups.

I'll talk about how you can get the most out of each of these.

And this list is ranked, or it's sorted, in order of where I think you should start out focusing most of your attention and energy down to where you should focus the least.

In my opinion, personal networks are the best place to hire, especially when you're early and making your first few hires by far.

And the reason is, any time you're deciding if you want to hire someone, you're essentially asking yourself 2 questions.

1, does this person have the skills that you need for them to do the job?

And 2, can you personally work effectively with this person?

When you're a big company, you can mostly focus on answering just the first question, because you're large enough, there's enough people, there's enough teams that it's likely that someone, 1 team somewhere will be able to work effectively with anyone, But when you're small, that's not true.

Whether you can work effectively with someone or not is a big determinant of your success.

And if you hire the wrong person early on, that could literally be fatal.

So when you hire someone that you've worked with previously, or you hire someone that's worked with a person you trust, you de-risk the chances that you won't be able to work well together, which is a big thing to consider early on.

So that probably sounds like somewhat obvious advice, and yet I'm surprised by how often founders still don't really use their personal networks effectively when they're hiring.

The first is they don't use a process to exhaustively search through everyone they could potentially hire.

And the second is they don't actually make the ask.

That's usually comes down to being afraid of being rejected by your friends.

It's somewhat easier actually to be rejected by a complete stranger than it is to ask your best friend to come join you and they say, I'm not sure the idea is that great.

There's also like you can also worry about what happens to the friendship if the startup doesn't work out.

Like it's, there's sort of more that goes into it when you're talking to someone you know personally than when you're talking to someone you don't.

But the truth is you just have to sort of suck it up and do it.

But if you want your startup to be successful, hiring from people you know is a tremendously valuable resource and you just have to make that ask.

So I'd recommend you follow a strict process here and start with just making a list of every good engineer you know, whether you think they're available or not.

Like that's actually completely irrelevant.

Doesn't matter if they just sold their company for a billion dollars, put them on the list.

Then ping each and every 1 person on that list to meet up and commit to asking them if they would join you.

However crazy you think it is, however unlikely, commit to making the ask.

If they say no or they're hesitant, so de-risk a little bit and say, will you at least come by the office and see what we're working on?

If the office is your apartment, that's totally fine too.

But just keep sort of pushing until you've at least shown them something that you've done.

If it doesn't work out, if they say no, and you get a definitive no, then ask them if they were in your position, who would they try and hire?

Make a list and go out and repeat this exact same process with them.

Like I know public company startup founders, I won't go on startups, but public company founders who still do this on a daily basis.

Like this is just like a key thing you have to embed in yourself as a startup founder.

As your company does scale and grow and the team, you start putting the team together, you wanna start tapping into the personal networks of your team.

And the way I'd recommend doing this is team events, where people brainstorm potential hires.

And this is commonly referred to as a sourcing party.

The way I'd recommend going about this is get everyone together, send out a shared spreadsheet, and describe the role that you're hiring for.

So if it's an engineering role, describe in detail who you're looking for, who are examples, candidates, what are skills and qualities you'd be excited about?

And then literally have everyone spend 30 to 45 minutes going through their LinkedIn or their Facebook or whatever right there and then, thinking of everyone that could be a fit and putting them into the spreadsheet.

Once that's done, at TripleByte, I'll actually then personally follow up with anyone on that list who seems like a good candidate or not.

And we've made several really great hires doing this.

And you can kind of make it a fun thing, too.

So We'll do it at the end of the week, just before our Friday all-hands, food and drink.

And you can also offer referral bonuses to your team to incentivize them to do this.

So really make sure that you're sticking to an exhaustive process.

You're making the ask of people you know.

And then as you scale, tap into the personal networks of your team.

Once you're sure that you've exhausted your personal network for leads, the next place I'd start looking would be hiring marketplaces.

Hiring marketplaces are actually relatively new.

They've become more popular over the last few years as it's become harder to hire engineers by using traditional methods like reaching out on LinkedIn or GitHub.

The way I think about hiring marketplaces is they actually work a lot like dating sites.

The idea is there's engineers who create profiles, companies that create profiles, and both are advertising their best selves.

You message each other and you figure out if it's worth meeting up in person, And if it all works out, you make a hire.

The dynamics of the marketplaces though, is such that the demand for good engineering talent far exceeds the supply.

And so typically, it's the companies that are being a lot more proactive in terms of reaching out first to the candidates.

The candidates are getting multiple inquiries, and the candidates or the engineers are the ones that are choosing who they want to speak to and who they don't.

A big benefit of using a marketplace, especially in the early stages, is that they can help you hire very quickly.

Because everyone, most candidates who are on the marketplaces are actively looking for a place to move right now.

It's very quick to get on a phone call with them and start pitching.

And if you run a good closing process, you can significantly reduce the amount of time you'll spend as a founder on hiring, which is obviously great.

The downsides, though, are that they tend to be quite competitive.

So engineers are being reached out to do by multiple companies at the same time.

So you'll have to be very effective at convincing them to join if you want to make hires.

And the second is that they can be expensive.

So most marketplaces will work on a fee per hire basis, which can be 15 to 20% of the first year salary.

That's cheaper than a recruiting agency, but still a significant cost if you're an early stage startup.

I'm obviously biased here because TripWide is a hiring marketplace, but I'd say the 3 main ones that come up in conversations, at least when we're pitching customers, would be Triplebyte, Hired, and Vechery.

They're all free to use to get started, so you're welcome to try it.

I'd say, Triplebyte, the way we differentiate ourselves is essentially by having better candidates, and we measure that by what percentage of candidates that companies interview through Triplebyte do they make an offer to, and that tends to be twice the rate that they make through other sources.

And just as a general note, hiring is a funnel.

You're optimizing your funnel, so you should pay attention to what percentage of candidates are making it through each step in your funnel.

When you're early, you won't have that many candidates, so you can't be that scientific about it.

But start sort of capturing that data and just building that into the habits you have when you're thinking about hiring.

The third source that I recommend you go to and look at is LinkedIn and GitHub.

And these are effectively The biggest online directory of engineers in the world, and most of hiring that's done at big companies, is through teams of technical recruiters reaching out to engineers on LinkedIn or GitHub, finding the ones that fit certain keyword criteria, and sending them cold messages.

The reason they, and they go for a very high volume approach here.

So a technical recruiter may well send over 100 messages a day just in the hope that they get a few replies.

And a dynamic that's occurred, especially in the last few years, is as there's more technical recruiters, there's more messages going out on these platforms, so response rates are dropping for everyone.

Which means for early stage startups in particular, it's gonna require a lot of your time sending a lot of messages in order to get a few interested candidates.

So, making this work for you requires, in my opinion, not playing a high volume approach like a big company recruiting team would, and instead spending the time actually researching and reading the details of profiles, reading through someone's LinkedIn, looking through their GitHub, looking at the details of the work that they've done, and sending a smaller number of personalized, targeted messages, and emphasizing when you send the message, why would someone be a good fit for your company specifically?

And give them clear evidence that you've read their profile and you're interested in them as an individual, as opposed to sending a spam message.

But that doesn't mean the message has to be super long.

I'd still advise keeping it short and concise.

Just the key fact is, there's proof that you've read their profile.

And final note here is send emails instead of messages.

So if you sign up for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite, which is about $120 a month, that will give you access to Connectify, it's a Chrome plugin that makes it really easy to pull out email addresses from anyone's LinkedIn profile.

And you'll consistently see much higher response rates through emails than you will on messages.

The fourth place I'd start looking for engineers would be job postings or job boards.

The 2 main ones for startups are Stack Overflow Jobs and AngelList.

I haven't included Hack and Use Jobs on there because it's only available to YC companies, but Hack and Use Jobs is somewhat unique and just has a particularly high quality of engineer, And I'd rank it second on this list, actually, if it were a standalone source of engineers.

Job boards, in general, do suffer from a quantity over quality problem.

So what's good about them is you don't have to spend a huge amount of time posting to 1 of them.

The downside, though, is that the time suck can come in later, because most of the applicants you'll get will be vastly underqualified.

You'll get a lot of applications from people who aren't even really software engineers, and it will take a lot of your time reading through all of these resumes and applications to find the 1 or 2 good applicants.

So to maximize your return and maximize the number of good applicants you do get, I'd recommend focusing on making your job listings unique and interesting.

And bear in mind that the majority of job descriptions on the internet are written by someone in a recruiting or marketing department that's using corporate boilerplate language that especially isn't going to appeal to an engineering audience.

So as a startup founder, you can experiment to try and bring through a bit of your personality in the job listing.

So 1 thing you might try is write in the first person about the personal story for why you started the company, why you're excited about the mission, and make it seem like you get that excitement and passion across.

Other things you could try, is there anything unique about the culture?

Is there anything specific about the technical challenges or product challenges you're facing?

So if you put in more details, that again will stand out because big companies tend to be very generic and vague when they're talking about what you actually get to work on there.

The final source I'll talk about is actually just like physical in-person meetups.

So I don't think that these are actually going to be very effective, and they're sort of a long shot.

Like in-person meetups don't have that large of a number of people in attendance.

And the truth is, most of the time, people are there for free food and drink, more than trying to actively find somewhere to work.

So it's unlikely that you're going to find both a really qualified candidate who's actively looking to move, who's excited about your company, and you also personally need to be very effective at talking to strangers and convincing them of things in order for this to work at all, right?

So I've included on there because I do know startup founders who have had success through meetups, but they are few and far between.

If you do try this approach, I'd recommend focusing on technical meetups.

And by that, I mean the local Clojure programming group, where people come together and meet up and bring laptops and work on things, is more likely a better source of engineers than going to Dreamforce.

The final thing you could try here is hosting meetups at your own office.

So you could also combine this with the personal network hiring and use it as an excuse to have friends come by the office or have their friends who are engineers come by the office.

At TripleByte, for example, 1 of our engineers is a fanatical Emacs user.

And he hosts the Bay Area Emacs meetup at our office.

And it hasn't worked for us for hiring, but it is a good way to just meet and build a network of good engineers that could come in valuable at some point in the future.

So it's worth definitely worth considering.

Now I'm going to talk about when you should think about using recruiters.

Truth is, there's not really any hard rule on when you should hire a technical recruiter.

I've seen companies of less than 10 people hire 1.

I've seen companies wait until they're 50 people and plus.

It's sort of, I treat these are my opinions on when you should, and I treat these as a rule of thumb.

So first, I think you absolutely should wait until you've at least hired your first engineer before you consider bringing on a recruiter in any capacity.

The reason for that is actually, I think general startup advice applies here.

So 1 is just in general when you're hiring, it's good for you to do the job yourself for a bit, so you feel the pain and you understand it, and you sort of understand the details of what makes someone good at that role at your startup in particular, before you go and hire someone you'll be better able to assess them.

So if you feel the pain of recruiting yourself, I think you have a better shot at hiring the right recruiter for you.

And the second reason I say is just it's like sales.

It's actually good for you to go out and try and pitch and convince people to join your startup so you can just understand yourself what message works and what doesn't.

Because as a startup founder, you are always selling, and you never know when you might bump into someone who could be a really great hire.

And if you've already practiced the pitch for convincing engineers to join you, you'll have that ready to go.

So I'd recommend making sure you always make your first hire before you try and delegate this to a technical recruiter.

Second, I'd expect to have a good hiring cadence, so somewhere around hiring an engineer a month for the next 6 months or so before you start bringing on a recruiter.

Otherwise, it's likely they'll run out of work to do quite quickly.

And then finally, as a rule of thumb, if you're spending more than 50% of your time sourcing, that's like all the things I mentioned before, and doing initial phone calls and screens and getting people to come and meet you in person, over 50% is probably about the time where you want to start thinking about bringing on help because 50% is about the amount of time you want to be spending on hiring.

So recruiters themselves come in roughly 3 types.

You have contract recruiters who you pay by the hour and they can sort of do anything from just cold messaging on LinkedIn all the way to doing initial phone screens.

There's in-house recruiters, it's just hiring a full-time technical recruiter that works as a member of your team.

And the final would be agency, and agencies are essentially teams of salespeople that are paying lots of engineers on LinkedIn or wherever they can, and then sending their resumes out to as many companies as possible.

And they tend to charge 25 to 30% of first year salary if you hire an engineer's resume that they send you.

They do tend to be fairly high touch, so they're quite involved in trying to give you information that will help you close an engineer.

But they're also sending that information to multiple companies at the same time.

So my recommendations here would be when you get to the point where you feel it's time to bring on help or bring on a recruiter, start with a contract recruiter and have them focus on just the sourcing piece of it.

So have them just focus on reaching out to engineers on LinkedIn and GitHub, and their main deliverable for you should be filling your calendar with calls with promising candidates.

Then you're doing the pitching and practicing, or you're doing the pitching and convincing.

And when you get to a point where that becomes too much work for just you, then I'd consider hiring a full-time in-house recruiter and training them to do the pitch call.

So now they're both sourcing and doing the initial calls and setting up the onsite interview process for you.

So to sum up, my startup hiring plan, if I were just getting going and building an engineering team would be start by making sure you've exhausted your personal network, spend lots of time taking people out for lunch, coffee, making the ask.

2, experiment with the hiring marketplaces.

Your mileage will vary on these depending on how effectively you can pitch your company.

But even if you don't make hires from them, you'll get valuable experience pitching real engineers and real candidates and learning what resonates about your company to that audience.

Third, spend some amount of time doing personalized and targeted outreach to engineers on LinkedIn and GitHub, making those messages really personalized.

And then finally, treat job boards and meetups and meeting people in person as a background process you run where you're not expecting to make any hires from them, but you're sort of building a general pipeline that could be valuable in the future.

Amon's now going to talk about how to screen and evaluate the technical school of engineers, then I'll jump back in and wrap up with making offers and closing.

And before this, I started Socialcam with Michael Seibel, and I was an early employee at Twitch.

And I'm going to talk about just the screening step, so how to identify skilled engineers at your company.

So the first question here is just why you should believe me about any of this.

And 1 answer is that I've done a lot of interviews.

So since starting TripleByte, I've interviewed over a thousand engineers personally.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Building an Engineering Team by Ammon Bartram and Harj Taggar