Principles of Recruiting from Keith Rabois

http://blog.entelo.com/8-principles-of-recruiting-from-keith-rabois

by jonbischke • 12 years ago

45 12 12 years ago

blog.entelo.com

tptacek• 12 years ago

A lot of these sound like conventional wisdom (although "it should be reflected on your calendar" is smart), but the "Fifth Principle" --- "To be extraordinary at recruiting, it is crucial to be extra-ordinary at assessing candidates" --- is I think absolutely true, and not said often enough.

Jormundir• 12 years ago

I wish there was some lip-service to the actual interviewing process. The interviewing process seems to be the pain point in recruiting with the vast majority of startups I've been to.

Nothing telegraph's a company's poor management like a silly interview process. Make sure there's a purpose to each stage of your interview process, don't just throw your whole team, one by one, into a conference room with a candidate with no direction.

rdl• 12 years ago

I understand how to do a good, structured interview process for a role like engineer or tech ops. (Work sample, chronological walkthrough of history and "why did you do that vs. this" at each step, etc.; ideally aptitude tests and existing work samples as screeners.)

How do you run a structured process for roles like sales, PM, GM, etc.? I guess with sales, depending on the model, you have a much lower bar (easy to hire, easy to fire), but that's not the case for long-sales-cycle enterprise products. A bad GM/COO will almost certainly sink an an otherwise-strong company.

The best I've ever come up with is just agreeing on criteria beforehand and having people score those, and then also having people who have done the role involved in both creating criteria and evaluating candidates (e.g. having lots of engineers engineer sales = probably a waste of everyone's time).

In a large company, you can test the interview process itself by seeing how candidates who are accepted under different processes perform, but in a smaller company, a bad string of sales hires means the company is probably not going to need to worry about making more hires -- and even if you do have time to correct, hiring/firing to the point where it is obviously a high churn environment deters good candidates and may cause good current employees to leave as well.

withdavidli3• 12 years ago

Interview process at startups, never had the pleasure, but keep in mind that they are new by definition. It's arguable that many large corporations don't have a good interview process. Imagine a limited funded startup. The amount of time to train a person to be a good interviewer, coming up with relavent questions, calibrating what a typical answer actually is vs. the answers you think you'll get.

If the company is rapidly growing then they may require employees who never been an interviewer to become interviewers (hopefully some shadowing and training is involved).

arctansusan• 12 years ago

Interviewing a candidate well is a separate skill set from knowing how to code well. Most companies who select the interviewers confuse the two types of skills.

birken• 12 years ago

Sorry for this buzzkill comment, but this is one reason hanging out with startup founders can be intolerable in some cases.

Now I don't think focusing on recruiting or only going to events in which you are actively recruiting people is wrong, it isn't. You are more than entitled to do everything in your power to help your company succeed, and recruiting is obviously a major part of that. However, go too crazy with it and you start to get into the realm of people who knock on random doors and proselytize their religion.

peter_l_downs• 12 years ago

I was recently at a hostel on the other side of the world and received not one but two startup pitches from Bay-area "innovators". The exact type of behavior I had been trying to escape... absolutely ruined that evening in my mind.

withdavidli3• 12 years ago

Summary: Article about how everyone in a company should be recruiting.

Recruited/recruiting for some notable companies. Current managers are heavily engaged in recruiting and I'm quite lucky . Working with some other companies, managers were MIA(missing in action) for long periods of time. Example, present candidates, don't hear back from managers for over a month x_X.

For extremely large corporations the recruitment function is increasingly being outsourced, in fact a candidate might not even know they're talking to an outsourced company. Here's my post on this:

http://withdavidli.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-is-rpo-recruitm...

Use of agencies, RPOs, and high amounts of contracted recruiters gives a company more flexibility with their budget, as headcounts can change dramatically in any given year.

optimusclimb• 12 years ago

Maybe companies wouldn't have much trouble recruiting engineers if they tried to lure us with, gasp, higher pay, and not just free drinks, video game nights, and vapid promises.

When companies stop treating devs as juveniles, or people who desire to work "on cool problems" without care for compensation (while those working in sales/business roles, and founders, sure care about making money), they'll have an easier time hiring.

timr• 12 years ago

"When companies stop treating devs as juveniles"

The problem, of course, is that most devs are juveniles. At least in startupland.

Iftheshoefits• 12 years ago

I don't know about "most", but the target of most startups is definitely on the lower end of the age spectrum. It's easier pay and treat them worse, because they don't know any better and generally haven't sufficient experience to recognize that "the next big thing" they're working on isn't.

withdavidli3• 12 years ago

At the other side of the table as a recruiter. Most people that aren't interested, state that they are working on critical projects / something incredibly interesting. Very few are the ones that state money is the main motivation. For highly skilled workers negotiating higher pay at their current company shouldn't be much of a problem if approached correctly.

One of the reasons employers want people motivated by the work is precisely because they will be harder to be lured away by pure compensation.

Side Advice: When interviewing, don't say the reason you want to work with a company is just because it's a prestiges company or higher pay. You are interviewing with your peers, not the HR department. Last thing teams want is to hire a person that isn't interested in their projects in the slightest.

Principles of Recruiting from Keith Rabois

Related Stories