What's your biggest challenge in hiring developers for your startup?
Joseph Abraham
12 replies
This is an open-ended question, it will great to great some candid feedback to learn about your challenges. Helping a friend who building something on the same lines.
Replies
Lev A. Leontiev@lev_a_leontiev
I am hiring people in the startup . The biggest challenge is to explain first yourself , and then - grade A candidates why they should join your startup . In other words - marketing .
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@lev_a_leontiev Do you know how I do it?
I record myself explaining the startup's mission, goals and tasks.
And then talk more about the position.
Then a simple tasks needs to be solved in a specific timeframe.
All per video.
IF the candidate is really interested, they will solve the tasks and contact you.
works every time for me.
@lev_a_leontiev : Agree, there is an urge to sell the big why and it all goes back to the origin story 😬
@lev_a_leontiev @valilus : That works great if you are hiring for very junior positions, otherwise they want to feel the vibe and talk to the founder.
None!
That's the process I love the most when I build startups!
Hiring!
I automatize pretty much the entire process.
Every developer has a concrete tasks to reduce the hiring time.
So it's amazing!
I'd say that as someone who works at a bootstrapped startup, one of the things is compensation.
We'd love to pay talented devs similar amounts to that of a FAANG or Big Tech company, however, it's not always fiscally possible. So in that respect, we need something valuable beyond monetary compensation. And that's growth potential, impact, autonomy and ownership over your work, product and time.
The hardest thing is to find a person who is both interested in development and business. In such case, you get a specialist who knows exactly how to solve a problem and why they are doing this, how it will influence the business. Most developers are focused only on coding and their programming language and know nothing about other processes happening within a startup.
I've been coaching a bunch of startup founders in the portfolio of my startup's VC, and in my experience, founders seem to struggle to must with finding qualified candidates.
Early-stage startups have no existing employer brand, can't offer Google-level salaries, and usually have no recruitment skills in their core team.
I wrote a summary of some things startups can do to improve their success in hiring, hope you find it insightful: https://blog.hireproof.io/3-tips...
@maxkorpinen Hi Max, this is precisely the problem we've been trying to fix! We talked with so many startup founders, and they have so much value to offer within the company, but they lose precious time in parsing through tons of candidates they deem affordable. It's a monstrous task that takes the joy out of everything!
Instead of being creative in spotting skills and talents, why not be creative in spotting good instincts and attitudes? Let AI like do the grunt work for you.
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For my last startup, we used a creative approach:
We hired fractional developers.
Our senior developers already had full-time roles at AT&T/IBM/Oracle, but they contributed 20-30/hours per week to our startup.
Why?
- The extra compensation was nice (we couldn't pay them their full half time rate, but they were cool to accept a slight haircut since this was supplemental to their FT salaries).
- They wanted be part of something bigger than their 9-to-5
In 2021 we exited with a 40% fractional developer team.