One of the biggest challenges of a startup is hiring and we're facing this exact challenge right now. Many have said that hiring is not an unique challenge and it doesn't matter where your startup is located.<p>My startup is one year old, mostly bootstrapped and raised a small seed round < $50k to get us started, and we've been profitable for the past 3 months. Now we are getting ready to bring on board our employee #1. Yay!<p>That's great but we're also not getting great results with our recruiting effort. We did the usual things, like posting on craigslist, posting on FREE job boards such as startuply etc. Our startup is located in Pittsburgh, so it's a mid size US city with a great university, CMU, producing awesome engineers. So why can't we find the ideal candidate?<p>1) Google and a few other big boys have offices here and we're competing against them.<p>2) Most graduates just wants to go to the valley/SF to work for Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.<p>We spent some effort going to local technology meetups that we're using and talked to developers and people at these meetups but again the effort wasn't fruitful.<p>The last resort now is working with HR recruitment agencies. This is almost the last option on our list and typically HR agencies charges 20%. Is this an industry standard rate? of course there's always room for negotiation but that's what we were told to base off.<p>So I hoping we can use this post and gather a list of suggestions and ideas for finding that first hire that is so important at this stage of every startups. Or even share how much are you paying the HR agencies if you did work with one and hired a referral.