As a start-up CEO in the hiring-efficiency space, I get to see a lot of company's hiring process in gory detail. Anyone who's been around new start-ups (and old guys, see: Google) has seen a great candidate withdraw from a req due to long response time. In a larger organization these inefficiencies can be handled by adding more schedulers, sourcers, recruiters, but in a small start-up you need a top-down commitment to speedy processing of candidates.<p>As a company gets larger (~series A) there comes a sudden crunch wherein you need 10 developers, yesterday. At that moment, if you haven't laid down the ground work for a successful recruiting/hiring strategy you can experience a very lossy hiring process. You'll miss out on great opportunities to companies who have spent the time, money and effort to make their process efficient.<p>To the articles recommendations, I would add the following:<p>- For top tier talent, recruiting is more like sales: you need to sell your company to the recruit, not vice versa.<p>- For each requisition do the following: decide what the relevant skills/requirements for the position, decide who on the interview team will assess each of those skills, train your interviewers to spend 1/2 their time selling the company and why they love working there and 1/2 their time grilling the applicant on their focus area. This forces you to think critically about what you're looking for (forces understanding of the org chart) and gives each person agency in the process (I'm in charge of sussing out algorithmic ability).<p>- Corollary to the above: train your interviewers. Make sure they know what they're looking for both culturally and technically, and make sure they have the ability to assess those properties (or lack thereof). Interviewers are your company's brand emissaries (and the source of many candidates) if they can't communicate well the recruits will come away with a bad experience.<p>- Track things: I think of recruiting like sales. If a VC asked you how your sales was going you wouldn't say something like "OK", you'd have numbers, metrics, graphs, funnels, pipelines, etc etc. Though this can feel a bit overkill in the beginning, getting in the habit of monitoring your candidate pipeline is extremely important as you scale. Small inefficiencies become enshrined as 'best practice' and as you scale they can turn into huge holes for your organization. This is exactly the type of problem we're trying to mitigate/measure by bringing the traditional applicant tracking system into the inbox at www.foundryhiring.com.
<i>"If you can't pull the process together to make a quick decision, you're not only going to lose people, but you're going to signal that you can't move quickly on other decisions as well, whether or not this is really the case."</i><p>This one is important. Recruitment leaves impressions on the candidates. You better make sure the impressions are positive ones, because they matter a lot.<p>The world is small. An unsuccessful candidate might get successful elsewhere. Their opinion about your company might soon affect its future. Other candidates passing on your offer because they heard your process sucks is just the most obvious and immediate way, obviously there are others.
The problem is compounded by the fact that many companies will not give a "no" to candidates that are a pass due to legal reasons, social convention or whatever else... it puts candidates who want to be persistent in a weird position, because you "don't want to be pushy," but you don't know whether the company is trying to send a message, taking their time, undecided or just incompetent.
Yes, this has been maddening for me as well. For all of the people on this site claiming the market is "red hot", job hunting in the bay area has been <i>slow</i>. I have dealt with a couple of really well run companies that made it through the process quickly, but others have all kinds of HR filters and take weeks to even get a phone screen.<p>In contrast, I was able to join a start-up within three weeks of beginning my search in 2010 in Beijing... and that was before I had any professional experience. They made the decision on the basis of a couple of interviews and a couple of retro flash games I'd done as a hobby project.<p>Incidentally, if anyone in SF is looking for someone who can code and a proven record of hustle, my contact info is on my profile page.
Many companies I've dealt with seem to forget that the person they're interviewing probably isn't interviewing with just one company.<p>The last place I worked for (government) was maddening in this respect. We'd find a great candidate and HR would delay or otherwise jerk them around, and then have the gall to be shocked when the person accepted another offer.<p>In my recent job search the company I joined had a written offer to me within a day or two. Others contacted me weeks later with offers, even after I told them I was considering multiple offers at the time.<p>I don't think most candidates will tell you that, but that's likely the case. You snooze, you lose. There aren't many reasons you can't make an offer within a week after an interview.
I experienced the exact same thing last time I was looking for a job. I had companies go completely silent, then contact me weeks after I had already accepted another position. With the dearth of available iOS developers in the valley right now, I don't know how these places hire anyone at all, let alone good devs.
This is, in my opinion, one of the largest issues startups face today. OSS and a culture of blogging have significantly reduced the barriers to entry for many technical issues including, but not limited to, scaling, data processing, and even general development.<p>What's still just as difficult is building the right team - my personal pain point is university recruiting, but it's bad across the board. If you're a startup that's expanding beyond the second or third round of technical hires the ability to draw on your network becomes increasingly limited as you've likely tapped out all your personal connections at this point, and your team's calendar still resembles one of the world's worst games of Tetris [1].<p>Traditional recruiting agencies are poor at matching technical hires with opportunities that are interesting to them because most recruiters are non-technical. GitHub profiles are worthless if the hiring manager (Read: /founders?/) have no time to read them, and dealing with phone screens and in-person interviews and arranging travel for candidates is a huge distraction from what they should be focusing on, building their business [2]. There's a huge potential for upset in the space, and I look forward to seeing a managed hiring provider that manages the scheduling, very initial matching of candidates, and once a hire is made follows-through with assistance on all of the ensuing paperwork and documentation.<p>[1] <a href="http://media.edge-online.com/files/imagecache/article/tetris_aa.png" rel="nofollow">http://media.edge-online.com/files/imagecache/article/tetris...</a><p>[2] Hiring is one component of building a company, one of the most important even, but it is a distraction. In an idyllic world perfect employees seek you out and apply ;)
Is any of this different because the person in context is a business role?<p>In my personal experience, smaller, tech-heavy focus startups are quick to make an offer for technical candidates.<p>However business roles take much longer, partly because its not clear if the company needs a full-time person running marketing, sales or business development, and because the new hire can add to "product-market" fit noise.