Ask HN: What is a talent acquisition like?

Talking about a meeting with YouTube in public may impact your prospect.<p>My best advice: get a lawyer after initial meeting when you know more about what they want.

From my experience, what occurs during a talent acquisition depends on what your product is and how you will be integrated to the larger company. No integration means a good payout, plus a legacy-free transition into the new company. Then you just have the usual things of culture change, having a boss again, etc. If you were passionate about your product this may be hard (see Dodgeball).<p>If there's any sort of technical part of the acquisition, depending on the type of technology it can be pretty rough. I was part of a team that was acquired for talent and technology, and as such we needed to integrate our search engine from Trovix to Monster.com. It was interesting, but not fun.

Seems like it depends. The Dodgeball guys clearly hated the transition.<p>Then there's FriendFeed. Bret Taylor became CTO of Facebook very quickly after the acquisition and is now the second, and arguably better, public face of Facebook. His talent level is clearly off the charts though.

I've been through it with YouTube, drop me an email if you have specific questions.<p>I'd love to be able to share our story with everyone, but we are bound by confidentiality agreements. I couldn't even tell my friends what was going on until the day we closed.

It's 100% about the culture (for lack of a less buzzy term) of the organization you're going into.<p>If you'll be working on exciting projects and the people there love what they do, it will be wonderful. That is how my first 'talent acquisition' went.<p>If, however, they are working on boring projects and are acquiring you to 'inject some life' into their organization, run away.

I was part of the Powerset acquisition which was largely for tech/talent. The transition has been a long slow death march to try and reach our bonus payouts.