How to hire a lot of talented people, very quickly

http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/23990414000/how-to-hire-a-lot-of-talented-people-very-quickly

by wwdevries • 14 years ago

123 86 14 years ago

ryanleecarson.tumblr.com

bflesch2• 14 years ago

I like this approach, it is very straightforward and allows for easy internal collaboration. Obviously, buckets visualize the amout of people in different stages of your hiring process very well. If I had to hire people, I'd try this instantly.

Edit: I have to apologize. I overlooked that the names are made up, so the following statement is incorrect. Sorry Ryan!

Sadly, I have to whine about some privacy issues: I don't approve of Ryan Carson's publishing the names of his applicants how it can be seen in the screenshot at [1]. I'm quite sure these are real names beloging to their applicants, and I wouldn't like to see my name published when I'm applying for a position at this company. On top of that, I would feel sad to see that my name had been greyed out but Person XY has advanced to the next stage.

Perhaps it is better to anonymize the information as I suspect it was not Ryan's intention to publish these names.

[1] http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4s36gOUJz1rneiz8.png

commondream6• 14 years ago

As someone with access to the Treehouse's real hiring board I can say that those aren't real names :)

bflesch2• 14 years ago

Oops, sorry for the mistake. Its time to get off the computer I suppose :) Thanks!

pinko• 14 years ago

He says, "I’ve created a public example that you can view, copy and then edit." [1] and the names there match his screenshot. They also include ringers like "Jenny Craig" and "Billy Jean". How/why are you "quite sure these are real names"? If you're right, I agree with you, but it seems hard to believe.

[1] https://trello.com/board/hiring-process/4fc4942316b650d22d09...

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

Those are just fake names ;)

cheap• 14 years ago

Money, it grows on trees and its great for balling up and hurling toward people.

lucian1900• 14 years ago

Nice benefits indeed.

cridal• 14 years ago

First of all, I'd like to congratulate Ryan Carson on the idea of 4-day work week. Hopefully this would start the ball rolling on the whole discussion of work/life balance here in the states. It is such a great concept and I'm sure will attract a lot of top talent.

The only thing is, it needs validation. I hope the company does really well in the long run, and therefore puts 4-day work week on the table for others to follow. Wouldn't that be great...

salimmadjd• 14 years ago

I'm not sure how sustainable this 4day work week will be. Will it last the acquisition? Imagine buying a company that either makes your existing employee unhappy, make you lose the talent you just got, or forces you to convert the entire company into a 4 day week operation.

mey• 14 years ago

Two comments, you assume they intend to be acquired, and why optimize for something that late stage when you are trying to remain an competitive edge? (The edge in this case is a skillful happy workforce)

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

Thanks for the kind words :)

We've been doing a 4-day week since 2007, so it's been five years and thankfully we've been successful.

trustfundbaby2• 14 years ago

Hi Ryan, I've never worked at a place that had a 4-day week and I'd love if you could one day do a blog post about it (forgive me if you you've already done this before). The things that changed, adjustments that needed to be made, how it has affected productivity. I would like to run a company like that someday, but it feels so scary to lose 8 hours of paid work a week.

rmc• 14 years ago

You could take validating from the original 5 day week (instead of the then norm of 6 day week) which Henry Ford introduced about 100 years ago.

benpbenp• 14 years ago

I don't follow. If validation of the 5 day week implies the validation of the 4 day week, then... well, I am sure you see where this is going.

scottshea2• 14 years ago

Additional step: Write a post like this and have it make the front page of Hacker News

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

Guess that always helps :)

scottshea2• 14 years ago

I have to admit it caught my interest and I am not even really looking at the moment

ltcoleman• 14 years ago

I'm very happy to have found your blog. I'm also happy to see a company focusing on what's important... gaining that elusive talent.

I am currently just starting to use treehouse to train a group of new grads for the company I work at. I'm very impressed with the site.

@Ryan : if I was in your region, I would so be applying for a job ;)

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

Thank you! :) We're working really hard to improve the service as fast as we can.

djb_hackernews2• 14 years ago

Interesting they don't hire any technical talent it seems, or am I missing something?

    Product
    Marketing
    Sales
    Teaching
    Video

If that's the case (which I'm now doubting considering what they teach) I can only see the bottle neck being onboarding. It can take a lot of effort and time to get one developer up to speed, never mind dozens of them in a matter of months.

jyu• 14 years ago

Product encompasses the overall engineering / design talent.

commondream6• 14 years ago

That's correct - product for us includes development, design, and support.

djb_hackernews2• 14 years ago

Interesting. Hope that leads to a new blog post, how to bring all of these talented engineers up to speed at the same time while keeping the product on track.

heliodor3• 14 years ago

I don't think the 4-day week makes sense. Once everyone switches to 4 days, what then? 3 days?

I think limited hours per day makes more sense. People can be laser focused for 5 or 6 hours per day if you give them a good work environment. Once you move to the usual 9 or 10 hours per day, personal life gets in the way and people goof off, achieving as much productivity as in the focused 5 hours.

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

We don't work a 9-10 hour day. I've written up the whole thing here if you're curious: http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/21708810513/4-day-week

heliodor3• 14 years ago

Well, your blog post says 9am-6pm, which is 9 hours, lunch included. But I wouldn't expect anything less if you're going to do 4 days per week. I'd much rather work five days a week, 11am-5pm or 12pm-6pm, without a lunch break. Can you really put off your personal life every day from 9-6? I think the two biggest interruptions to a programmer's concentration are lunch (or other food) and meetings. Basically, anything that's on the clock.

If you want to reduce the total hours per week, doesn't it make more sense financially to work fewer hours per day but for five days and be able to pick up your kids at an earlier time each day? I would think that would be the case for most family folk. Don't your kids get off school or child care at somewhere around 3pm? Who takes care of them between 3pm and 6pm and how much does it cost you?

Finally, what a family person wants differs from what a single 20-something year old wants. 9am works great for a family man. 9am does not work fine for a 20-something year old, but in the majority of companies the family man is the boss and dictates the 9am start time.

daenz• 14 years ago

> I don't think the 4-day week makes sense. Once everyone switches to 4 days, what then? 3 days?

You could say the same about lowering prices: "why should I lower my prices to $X, what's next, $X-1?" If it gives you a competitive advantage, and yet you are still able to profit and succeed, then the economics of it make sense.

skeletonjelly2• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope ?

sebslomski2• 14 years ago

I would prefer to have to be 5 days a week in the office, but only have to work for 4 days. One day should be dedicated for your own projects. Whatever you want, but, in the office.

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

That's no good for people who have interests outside of the office. For example, I have two young boys and I want to spend my time with them on a Friday, not in the office.

sebslomski2• 14 years ago

Well, it should't be a day off, you should do something that has to do in general with what you do at work if possible. I haven't though about it that much, it was just an idea. If you get the day off, most people would probably just do what they want and "waste" the day (which means not being productive).

atyi• 14 years ago

The problem is who is going to own the project built on that one day?

commondream6• 14 years ago

At Treehouse at various times we've had quite a few developers use their Friday for personal projects, but they just develop their own open source and personal projects on their own time on Friday (or whenever they choose to work on them during the week).

elmuchoprez2• 14 years ago

Let me start by saying that I don't know anything about Treehouse or their profitability... but based on that benefit list, they're either REALLY profitable or they've got a bunch of upfront investor money to burn through.

Given how young they are and that their investor list includes the likes of Kevin Rose and Reid Hoffman, I'm going to go with the latter.

I operate a small ecommerce company with about 15 employees that include everything from developers to warehouse workers. There's no way I could sustain such benefit list and I know none of my competitors could either. There's just not a high enough margin (and we're in a high margin business).

The answer might be that a company whose product is "knowledge work" might be in a different boat, but it really makes me wonder if you can sustain that kind those kinds of benefits when you're standing on your own two feet.

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

We were profitable before we raised any money.

Now that we've raised $5m, we can increase our burn to outpace our revenue to speed up customer acquisition and product development.

elmuchoprez2• 14 years ago

Well then congrats to you sir. When a company can manage that kind of profit, it's nice to see them using those resources to invest in serious talent for the long haul.

flyosity• 14 years ago

Back in November, Ryan Carson revealed that they were earning ~$150,000 in revenue per month and growing rapidly. Venture capital money + revenue money = lots of money to pay benefits.

http://mixergy.com/treehouse-ryan-carson-interview/

cft• 14 years ago

I am running a bootstrapped start-up (by choice). We pay salaries to 5 people (three MIT EECS grads, one Berkeley CS). I think these people are very good. From my prospective, if you operate without VC money, I.e. from the actual revenues that you get, what's described in the post is irrational exuberance. It's a sign of a VC investment bubble. We absolutely could NOT work 4 days a week and remain competitive ( we could not even run the existing service that way, with user all complaints, attack threats, vendor interactions, hardware failures).

commondream6• 14 years ago

I'm a member of the product team at Treehouse, and was employee #3. We don't go around talking about the 4 day work week because it's something that we think is a great gimmick that we were fortunate enough to be able to pull off because we hit the VC lottery. It's something at the core of who we are as a company and something we've seen help us compete - not only in hiring but also in productivity. We see a huge benefit in rest, fresh thinking, and a healthy balance between our work and the rest of our lives. The 4 day work week builds that into who we are. It's not the only way to achieve those goals, but one of the primary ways we pull it off.

We've been working the 4-day work week far longer than we've had VC money. Our first investment came in the fall of 2011, long after we existed as a company, and we were profitable prior to raising VC.

ericson578• 14 years ago

I think it's great that you guys are trying out new ways to work. I'm an entrepreneur myself, and while I don't have employees yet I'm open to new business models. I wish more companies, funded or not, would be more daring.

tsuraan• 14 years ago

So how do you address the points made in the GP post? Specifically, attacks, hardware failures, other issues that immediately impact customers? I assume that you don't wait until monday to address a failure that occurs thursday night, right?

tatsuke952• 14 years ago

Spot on.

Look, I know little about Treehouse, but I read the blog when things appear on HN. It looks like a useful product, and seems to be run by sincere guys. But you're talking about attracting good talent when you're able to offer amazing benefits, salaries and a 4 day work week. That is only possible because you're swimming in cash, and you're only swimming in cash because this space is still riding the upswing of the business cycle. The market will sort this out, and one only has to look around to see that. It's unsustainable. How old is your business? Let's see if you're still working 4 day weeks in five years.

That said, it's probably a great place to work. Kudos for sharing the wealth with your employees.

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

I've been running businesses that work a 4-day week since 2007. Two of those businesses were acquired (one in 2008 and one in 2011).

I'd say that's pretty good proof that it's not just sustainable, it's also very smart.

tlogan• 14 years ago

You might be right or you might wrong for bootstrapped companies but in my experience working at different small and big companies working long hours really don't translate into profitability and productivity.

In general I saw that developers working on "a secret sauce" (i.e., engineers in Oracle working on RDBMS, etc.) are not working more than 35 hours a week while developers working on some generic CRUD crap work all days and night.

Now the challenge is to hire developers which can work on or develop your "secret sauce"... which is point of this post.

ctl• 14 years ago

You should consider the possibility that you are wrong.

As I understand it, Henry Ford chose a 40-hour work week because he found that it maximized the total output of his employees. Computer programming is (minute-for-minute) considerably more demanding than working an assembly line. Maybe an average programmer maximizes her total output when she works substantially less than 40 hours a week. In fact I'd be surprised if that weren't the case.

And of course you could still run the service if you guys worked four-day weeks. Just make sure somebody's working on any given day.

kbedell• 14 years ago

Have you ever worked on an assembly line (or in a factory of any kind)? It's hard, backbreaking work that from my experience sucks much, much harder than any programming job I've ever had.

Hacking code may be more mentally taxing, but if you need to take break (for the bathroom or whatever) you can do it on your own schedule -- not on your lunch break like a lot of factory workers.

benjaminwootton• 14 years ago

It's great that they are having success with the 4 day work week.

However, one thing that would still appeal to me more though as a developer would be the ability to work remotely.

It's surprising even to me that I'd rather do 20% more work for the same money if it's at home!

I also suspect this would make it easy to 'hire talented people, very quickly' as it opens up the whole world to you in terms of candidates.

What are your thoughts on this Ryan?

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

A lot of our Product and Marketing Team Members work remotely. The only folks required to be at our Orlando office are the Video Pros and Teachers.

skeletonjelly2• 14 years ago

How often are they required to travel to your head offices for face to face meetings?

zerop• 14 years ago

Spend VC money like this, work 4 days a week and then finally go down. !! :(

michaelpinto• 14 years ago

Reading this post makes me fear for a bubble -- when I read stuff like this it brings me back to 2000 all over again: "401(k) contribution matching, 100% matching up to 6% of your salary + Full coverage for medical, dental, and vision". I'll grant you that this isn't quite on the level of "your own private sushi chef" but it makes me uncomfortable that a company that's a startup would do this. I realize that good talent is hard to find, but this scares me...

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

What's more expensive?

1) Paying $20k-$50k to a recruiter, per person 2) Taking good care of your team so you get tons of applications for every job opening, from very talented people

Keep in mind that there's also a huge cost to attrition. Every person that leaves your company, because the culture is so-so, costs you a huge amount in time and cash resources to replace

WildUtah• 14 years ago

"401(k) contribution matching, 100% matching up to 6% of your salary + Full coverage for medical, dental, and vision"

Those are normal benefits in corporate America. The 6% 401k match level is an IRS safe-harbor threshold most large employers try to meet each year. Even the vacation time (18 days) is modest for your European competition. I don't see where any of that is getting bubbly.

clevep3• 14 years ago

> we’re about to hit 40 people at Treehouse and we’ll be at 60 in three more months. There was only seven of us 12 months ago, so we’ve grown very fast.

For a small company that's growing this quickly, it's probably going to take more than 12 months to know for sure if a hire is good or not. Declaring them as good does not make them so. I'd be interested to see a follow up post 12 months from now giving an update on retention rates and any hiring process updates they've subsequently made.

ryancarson17• 14 years ago

Treehouse is my fourth company and I've been running a 4-day week with all my teams since 2007.

I have a pretty good sense, based on experience, whether someone is a good hire or not. You often know within 30 days.

clevep3• 14 years ago

Major props on pulling off the 4-day week. I hope it catches on.

My criticism was limited to your early declaration of victory on your hiring binge. The bottom line is that you can't know if someone is going to end up ROI positive until they actually get there. After 30 days you can tell if someone is a good dude and they can get stuff done, but you can't tell if some other company will come along in 2 months and poach him. Shit happens.

By building a strong culture you are taking good steps to minimize the chances of losing people, but you won't really know if you've succeeded with these hires until they are a net positive.

michaelhoney• 14 years ago

We've been doing four-day weeks since 2008, with two offices in Australia and remote team-members in Berlin and the Phillipines. Apart from the obvious 50% more weekend for 20% less work, and the flexibility to work from anywhere, doing it this way has a less-tangible benefit: it requires and inculcates discipline and responsibility. Your attention is like a gas: it'll diffuse to fill the space available. Timeboxing your energy provides more work potential -- and your downtime is more productive too.

It's also a great talking point with clients. The 4DWW is gaining traction in the wider world: I was interviewed this week on dot-au national television to talk about it.

rdl2• 14 years ago

Also, move to a "developing" startup market, like Portland, where a Treehouse is one of the top 5-10 startup employers, vs. SF or Silicon Valley, where you are competing with a lot more startups, and where the Giants (FB, Google, Palantir, ...) are stronger competition than the giants in Portland.

(and living on 50-60k in Portland is fine even if you have kids; it is poverty unless you're either long established (own a home from the 1990s, or cheap rent), or alone. This opens up a lot more potential hires for non engineering roles)

jasonlotito• 14 years ago

Everyone is competing with Silicon Valley for talent, regardless of where you are.

rdl2• 14 years ago

True for the high end (where it's worth relocating), but not for any of the jobs I've seen posted on treehouse's site.

checkorbored• 14 years ago

How does the 'Project Trial' work for people who have full-time jobs already? I am sure it is great for evaluating those who are able to commit to such a thing, but aren't you leaving potentially valuable team members unable to pass muster due to time (rather than lack of fit) reasons?

How to hire a lot of talented people, very quickly

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