How not to recruit for a startup

Recommendation: Neither the word 'career' nor the word 'job' appear anywhere on your front page. The best I can see is a contact us page. I had to do a google search to find your jobs page:<p><a href="https://www.wepay.com/about/jobs" rel="nofollow">https://www.wepay.com/about/jobs</a>

This recruiter's blunder gave you a great hook for this blog post, which is certain to bring in some well qualified applications. So, in some sense, this was a successful relationship.

You need to closely screen and supervise your recruiters. Start with an open-ended question: "how would you go about sourcing candidates for XXX position", "how would you screen them", "how would you entice them"? Listen closely to what they say and if you do not feel comfortable this would yield you the candidates you are looking for, fire the recruiter and look for one that would understand your needs.<p>Recruiters, like any other service professionals, are always trying to sell you on their experience, but you owe it to yourself to closely inspect their claims and methods. If recruiter is any good they won't be offended and would cooperate.<p>Contingency fee recruiters are especially renowned for sloppy work. If they only get paid when they place a candidate their only incentive is to sell you the first warm body they find. This type of attitude you have to nip in the bud.

I think the reality is that recruiting firms suffer from the same market dynamics as SEO consultancies and, I suppose, startups in general. The good ones are so valuable and so lucrative that they can be selective about their clients and have virtually no need to do outbound marketing.<p>Which means that any recruiter you can reasonably expect engage on a tactical basis is going to be drawn from the adverse selection pool.

Employees that you gain through a recruiter, you will probably lose through a recruiter.<p>Building a company is hard, hiring lots of good, loyal people in a short time is a lot harder than scaling some software.

At a previous job, when they kept sending crap candidates, we told them we would stop working with them if they didn't filter them properly.<p>We did that to 3 recruiting companies. 2 of them shaped up and only send decent candidates. The other lost our business.

This is so funny. A while ago recruiter (expensive one) which was working for me to fill up a senior position in my team (I was a dev manager in a big company) sent me an email trying to recruit me...<p>Regarding design candidates, there are some very very good designers working in big corporation and they don't have online portfolio or personal site (in many cases because HR does not allow it). For example, as far as know, designers working at Apple (which are probably people you want to hire) will not have online portfolio or personal blog site.

An open ended question I've wanted to ask for a while: when a startup (all of a sudden) needs to hire a bunch of engineers, what kind of things do those engineers work on? What requirements change so rapidly that doubling headcount becomes necessary?

If you really want to get some amazing results from the recruiter do this:<p>1. Go into their office and sit down and do some database searches with them. Sift through a mountain of resumes and then show them what to look for and what to ignore. Be sure to note down searches that bring back decent results.<p>2. If you have existing staff that you want more of give the recruiter their resumes and sit each of them down to do an interview with the recruiter so they can be profiled.<p>3. Once you have a stack of perfect candidates that they can use as a reference do some analysis and look for the previous employers that are statistically significant and add all of these to a list for headhunting. Also add any special skill sets that someone in the past may have which would predispose them to having skills you are after now.<p>4. Sit down and write the recruitment ad together with the recruiter so it "calls" to the candidates you want. Make sure they CC every resume that comes in so you can quickly flick through them and ask them to screen any that look interesting. Recruiters will often reject perfect candidates because they do not fit the profile exactly or they miss something interesting.<p>The recruiter should now have a pile of information and reference points that they can use to seed numerous searches that have a much higher likelihood of delivering candidates of interest. If a submitted candidate is not right make sure to give feedback that can be used to further refine the search.

I had seriously considered applying there 6 or 8 months ago, until I read this:<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf-joins-group-payments-startup-wepay/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf-...</a><p>I've had enough professional nightmares as a result of Rasmus' technical decisions in the past, so I didn't pursue it further.<p>Food for thought for anyone considering working there (if indeed he's even still there - I haven't kept up).

I've yet to meet a startup that had a good experience dealing with recruiters, at least when it comes to finding designers. I think the problem is that a lot of designers are self-taught and the ones that have the best credentials might not always produce the best work.<p>So I think design recruiting should be done by designers, and that's why I built Folyo (<a href="http://folyo.me" rel="nofollow">http://folyo.me</a>). Companies that have submitted an offer have received an average of 8 replies each, and they're all from good designers with solid portfolios.<p>(By the way, if you're wondering WePay was one of the early users of the service, but the designers who replied were not in the US, and the visa issues proved to be too big an obstacle)

This is so true. Having been on both the hiring and hired side, I take any requests from recruiters that are sourcing candidates for small companies with a gigantic grain of salt. It's unfortunate, but I know so many recruiters that, while well-intentioned, are just clueless about great candidates.<p>It's a litmus test I use for early-stage companies: who is doing the recruiting? At early-stage companies, having the right people is ultra-critical. It's not work to be outsourced at that stage.

First, on the mail to the existing employee: get it, ha ha, recruiter so stupid. It's generally kind, though, to make room for the capacity for human error: it seems like a safe bet that the recruiter made a mistake and didn't think that would actually work. People make mistakes, even recruiters(!), especially when they send a fair amount of mail each day (which every one does, some smart and targeted, some dumb and spammy).<p>We're a boutique shop, we're super-careful, and we still make mistakes: one of my recruiters sent a mail about Client A to an employee of Client B. She screwed up - she saw an old resume that didn't have Client B's name, and didn't double-check on LinkedIn. The employee was pissed, Client B was pissed, I was pissed, my recruiter was embarrassed, but we all got over it, because we're adults.<p>Second, on finding an agency you like, I wrote a blog post on this a month back: <a href="http://roosterpark.com/blog/hiring-a-recruiter-how-to-choose-your-staffing-firm/" rel="nofollow">http://roosterpark.com/blog/hiring-a-recruiter-how-to-choose...</a>. dmk23 is right that you should be asking real questions: I've included some examples in the post. (I've never even submitted this to HN before. Wonder why.)

Recruiters really aren't the best route for hiring designers anyway, but you know this. ;)

So after trying to use a variety of recruiters at tastylabs, we have discovered that the vast majority of recruiters do no recruiting, but instead just do sourcing and leave it up to us to actually filter and recruit.<p>So far as I can tell, they just get resumes off linkedin and make calls all day. Very low-value for us.

It's more likely the recruiter just didn't realize that the employee had already been placed at WePay. For whatever reason, communication at recruiting firms is terrible. I suspect it has something to do with recruiters not wanting their coworkers to steal their commission.

Recruiters are playing a numbers game and don't have the bandwidth to be filtering candidates. The "only send me candidates with a portfolio" criteria is completely objective. Imagine a recruiter trying to decide if a programmer is any good? (e.g.: "I'm sorry, but the client [for this job writing java software] is looking for a candidate with Oracle 9i experience"...when my previous job had been using Oracle 8i. It wasn't a DBA position and SQL had not changed much, and both companies were using ORMs anyway!)<p>For a startup, I think your early employees are so critical that you have to do the recruiting job yourself. I know it is seductive to think that you can outsource it, but you really can't.<p>These days you've got an entire social network -- LinkedIn -- designed to have people help refer other people for jobs.<p>Further, it was very early in my career that I just completely gave up on working with recruiters, and long before social networks even existed. I think that other good programmers probably are the same way-- why send your resume to people who will retype it with typos just to remove your name, lie to you, and send it randomly to hiring managers without talking to you first?<p>Perfectly good blog post and amusing story. But I think that the startup culture would do well to evolve away from using recruiters and rely more on networking.

"First, if the candidate didn’t have an online portfolio, personal site, or blog, I didn’t want to see a resumé. "<p>The author is an idiot.<p>ETA: I had a program manager who thought that having a blog meant the developer was an accomplished/published author. The developer quit for having to work 10 hour days after the first week and a half. Again, idiot.