Convincing Engineers to Join Your Team

Harj Taggar</a> is cofounder and CEO of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://triplebyte.com//">Triplebyte (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC.\n<hr />\nOnce you’ve found an engineer you want to hire, the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and convincing them to accept it. This post offers advice for increasing the percentage of the offers you make that are accepted. Since working on Triplebyte I’ve been surprised by just how much variance there is in this rate among companies. Companies that use Triplebyte have acceptance rates ranging from as low as 10% to as high as 90%.\nGenerating an offer for an engineer is expensive. It takes time to source good candidates and then hours of your engineering team’s time doing technical phone screens and onsite interviews. You’ll likely need to complete five onsite interviews to generate a single offer (the industry standard onsite interview to offer rate for engineers is around 20%). Assuming six hours of engineering time spent interviewing that’s 30 hours of engineering productivity lost. Given this cost it makes economic sense to work as hard as you can to get your offers accepted.\nThe work to increase your offer acceptance rate begins well before presenting the offer itself. It starts with designing a great candidate experience at each step leading up to the offer. Every interaction a candidate has with you must balance your need to extract signal from them while still getting them excited about joining. This begins with doing something seemingly simple – being responsive.\n<h2>Speed</h2>\nRead this <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-or-how-to-find-a-job-as-a-software-engineer.html/">blog post</a> to get an engineer’s perspective on the importance of speed and responsiveness in their job search process. Being fast and responsive seems like obvious advice and yet we still see companies move slowly and miss out on good people. There’s two reasons this happens.\nThe first is entropy. Maintaining an organized system for managing candidates is hard. It will naturally trend towards disorder unless you work really hard against it. This is especially true for larger companies with more people and processes. As a smaller startup speed is a huge advantage you have over them when competing for engineers.\nMake this easier for yourself by using software to manage and track the status of your candidates. At first you can use something simple like a spreadsheet or Airtable. As you grow and need to setup interview panels to gather feedback from interviewers you should graduate to a real ATS (Applicant Tracking System) like <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://lever.co//">Lever. Make it clear who has responsibility for reviewing and acting on candidates every day.\nThe second reason is psychological. It’s easy to believe that candidates who drop out because you were slow weren’t interested in your company anyway. This is bad reasoning and will make you miss out on good candidates. Managing a job search process quickly becomes overwhelming, especially for the best candidates with the most options. To even have the chance to close the best candidates treat every candidate dropping out before you replied them as a failure, not a lucky escape.\nWith an organized and responsive process in place you can now focus on optimizing the quality of each candidate interaction. This starts with the first call.\n<h1>First Call</h1>\nThe first call with a candidate typically lasts for about 25 minutes. I’d recommend the following agenda:\n<ol>\n<li>Introduce yourself, the company and what you work on.</li>\n<li>Ask the candidate to introduce themselves and talk about what’s important to them in their next role (if you did the initial outreach and they’re not actively looking, you can soften this to e.g. “how do you think about developing your career and skills in the future?”).</li>\n<li>Ask questions about their skills and experiences to see if they match with what you’re looking for.</li>\n<li>Pitch the work being done at the company and why it’s an exciting time to join now.</li>\n<li>Finish with answering any questions they have and explain what the next steps in your hiring process are.</li>\n</ol>\nIt’s common to leave asking the candidate what they’re looking for until the end of the call. I think that’s suboptimal because you miss the opportunity to tailor your pitch around it throughout the call.\nIf you’re an early stage company (less than 20 people) a founder should always be doing this call with engineering candidates. Commonly you’ll have one technical founder and one non-technical/sales founder. I’d recommend the sales founder do these calls even if they can’t speak in detail about the technical challenges. This gives the technical founder more uninterrupted time to build (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html/">maker vs manager schedule</a>). The sales founder should at least have enough sales ability to convince engineers to meet the technical founder in person to learn more about the technology.\nAs you grow you’ll hire a recruiter and typically they’ll do these calls. I’d recommend doing the following to best set them up for success:\n<ol>\n<li>Ask your recruiter to send you a monthly report on number of first calls they’re doing and the % that opt’ed out of coming onsite. Have your recruiter keep a list of reasons why candidates said they wouldn’t move forward and continually review these with them to improve the pitch.</li>\n<li>Assign one engineer to train your recruiter on how to talk about the interesting technical challenges at the company. Have them listen to mock pitches, give feedback, and repeat. I often see companies give their recruiter no help in learning how to best pitch the company and then complain when they see low conversions. That’s not fair to them nor optimal for you.</li>\n<li>Asking technical vetting questions is difficult for recruiters as they’re usually not technical. This is usually the most awkward aspect of the interactions between engineers and recruiters. Give your recruiter support and structure so they can do this well. I’d advise giving them specific technical questions to ask. One idea I’ve seen companies use to good effect is making them multiple choice format so the recruiter can read out the answers and ask the candidate to pick one that fits best. This helps your recruiter feel confident and provide a better candidate experience.</li>\n<li>If you’re working on a deeply technical product that doesn’t yet have marquee customers or traction, I’d actually recommend having an engineer do these first calls, at least for particularly promising candidates. In this case your main selling point is the depth of your technical challenges and it’ll be very hard to find a recruiter who can pitch those well.</li>\n</ol>\n<h2>Technical Phone Screen</h2>\nIf the first call goes well you’ll usually move the candidate forward to a technical phone screen with an engineer (companies that use Triplebyte will skip these phone screens and move straight to the onsite). These phone screens are usually 45 minutes of the candidate working through a coding problem and screen sharing. I’d recommend allotting one full hour for the phone screen. 45 minutes for working through a technical problem and up to 15 minutes for a conversation between the candidate and engineer to ask each other questions.\nIdeally you want to select the engineers who are best at pitching your company for these phone screens. There are also ways to make the experience more candidate friendly e.g. letting them pick from several problems to solve during the call. This creates some more work for you but if a candidate can show their strength on a problem they enjoy they’ll have a more positive feeling towards you. You can also let them code in their own environment and screen share with you instead of using an artificial environment (though some of these e.g. Coderpad do have advantages of better collaboration and recording features).\nIf the technical phone screen goes well, the next step is the onsite interview.\n<h2>Onsite Interview</h2>\nThe onsite interview will be the first time a candidate meets your team in person. Their experience throughout the day will be a huge deciding factor in where they end up. It’s important to think through the details of the candidate experience when setting up your onsite. Start with the basic logistics and be sure to:\n<ol>\n<li>Send an email ahead of time with clear directions to the office.</li>\n<li>Assign someone to greet them when they arrive</li>\n<li>Have somewhere they can hang out if they arrive early (even if it’s just a spare desk and chair)</li>\n</ol>\nA standard onsite interview agenda will typically look like this:\n<ol>\n<li>Quick welcome and talking through the agenda for the day (5 minutes)</li>\n<li>Technical interview 1 (1 hour)</li>\n<li>Technical interview 2 (1 hour)</li>\n<li>Lunch (1 hour)</li>\n<li>Technical interview 3 (1 hour)</li>\n<li>Technical interview 4 (1 hour)</li>\n<li>Behavioral / culture interview (45 mins)</li>\n<li>Closing Q&A for them to ask about the company (25 minutes)</li>\n</ol>\nIf you’re early stage I’d recommend having at least one of the founders involved in the closing Q&A. It can also be a good idea to include a demo or roadmap section here at the end. Give the candidate a sneak preview of a new feature you’re working on or talk through the most exciting upcoming projects so they finish the day feeling excited about your future momentum.\nWe asked engineers using Triplebyte what caused them to have bad experiences during onsite interviews. Almost all the replies centered on their interactions with the interviewers. The top three complaints were interviewers being (1) unprepared and not knowing anything about them (2) not being familiar with the technical questions they asked and (3) being determined to prove their intelligence to the interviewee.\nIt’s unlikely an engineer will accept your offer if they had a bad interaction with an interviewer. I’d make the importance of providing a good interview experience a part of your company culture. You can start by writing a simple interviewing guide for your team that emphasizes the importance of being on-time, prepared and friendly when interviewing. You can also only pick the engineers who are friendliest and best at representing your company as interviewers.\nFor question familiarity, have a centralized question bank that interviewers work through together before using them on candidates. For more ideas on the kind of content and questions you can use in technical interviews, my co-founder Ammon wrote a detailed post on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-to-interview-engineers/">how to interview engineers</a>.\nIt’s also great to do something that makes lunch a chance for the candidate to get to know the team. At Triplebyte we Slack our team in the morning that a candidate is interviewing and ask people to head over to the lunch table at the same time. Our office manager introduces the candidate to the team and we do an icebreaker where the candidate gets to ask a question which everyone goes around and answers (we tell them to think of this ahead of time and make it lighthearted). It’s a good way for them to get to know the team and is usually quite fun. We’ve had candidates tell us this experience was the deciding factor in joining.\n<h2>Making The Offer</h2>\nAfter a successful onsite you’ll make the formal offer and the work to get it accepted really starts. The first step is making sure you actually present the offer details. A complaint we hear from Triplebyte candidates is being asked how likely they would be to accept an offer before knowing the actual offer details. The reality is that compensation details are a large factor in where people decide to work and you can’t expect someone to know if they want to work for you without giving them that data.\nCreate a formal offer letter template that includes these details:\n<ul>\n<li>Salary and benefits</li>\n<li>Signing bonus details (if applicable)</li>\n<li>Health insurance details (include a link to the policy documents)</li>\n<li>401(k) details, if any</li>\n<li>Vacation policy details</li>\n</ul>\nEquity\n<ul>\n<li>Total number of shares/stock options presented</li>\n<li>Total number of shares outstanding</li>\n<li>% ownership that represents</li>\n<li>Exercise price for options</li>\n<li>Vesting schedule details</li>\n</ul>\nWhen presenting the offer I’d recommend doing things in the following order:\nStep One: Call to tell them they’ll be receiving an offer\nHave the hiring manager (if you’re early stage that’s the founder) call the candidate as soon as possible after the onsite. Do it the same day if you can. Tell them the day went really well and you’d love to make them an offer to join the team. Mention specific reasons why you’re excited about them joining the team and reference what they did well during the day. You could even have multiple people on the call and ask each of them to mention a specific reason they’d be excited to work with the candidate. Tell them the next step will be you (or a recruiter) calling them back to talk through offer details.\nStep Two: Call with offer details\nCall the next day to talk them through the offer details. Explaining salary and benefits is fairly straightforward. For equity, before giving any details, ask them how familiar they are with equity concepts like stock options or RSUs.\n<ul>\n<li>If they have little familiarity, do not overwhelm them with information on the call. Give them a quick explanation of how equity works. Talk them through the numbers of your offer and tell them you’ll send them some resources on equity to read through on their own time.</li>\n<li>If they’re experienced with equity, then go straight into the numbers and ask if they have any questions about the details they’d like you to talk more about.</li>\n</ul>\nTell them you’ll be sending through the formal offer letter, documenting all these details, via email shortly. They should take some time to digest that and the next step would be a follow up call to talk through their thoughts. Offer some times for that call right then.\nIt’s tempting to push hard for a decision on this call. I’d recommend not doing that to avoid the candidate feeling pressured. This will make it harder for you to stay engaged with them as they go through the decision making process. It’s fine to ask them if they have any initial thoughts or questions and then move on if they seem hesitant to go into details. It is also ok to ask them about their decision making timeline if you haven’t discussed that already.\n<h2>Culture</h2>\nNow the offer has been presented it’s time to focus on closing. To be effective at closing candidates you need to work hard at selling them on the most exciting reasons to join. This sounds obvious but there is a temptation to stop if the candidate doesn’t seem immediately excited or asks probing questions about your business. The reality is that working at your company will seem more exciting to you than the candidate because you’ve had time and data to build up that excitement. Now you have to pull out all the stops to transfer that excitement.\nIt’s common at this stage for candidates to start probing more deeply into questions about your company culture. They’re trying to build a picture of what it will be like to work with you on a daily basis. We’ve observed at Triplebyte that most companies use fairly generic descriptions of their culture. This is optimal for not offending candidates but won’t make your company stand out. To use your culture as a differentiator you’ll need to take some risk. You could try describing your culture with tradeoffs e.g. don’t just say you’re “collaborative”, say you’re willing to trade the upside of collaboration (better ideas and execution) for the downsides (reduced personal autonomy to just do things).\nDepending on the content you choose, being different in describing your culture could backfire or it could give you a hiring advantage with the right candidates. Whichever approach you take, make sure you and your team are prepared to talk in detail about this with candidates. Sounding unprepared about culture is itself a negative signal about how much the company cares about and values its team.\n<h2>Closing</h2>\nMake sure to get your team involved in the closing process. Ask everyone who met the candidate during the onsite to send them a follow up email with specific reasons they enjoyed it and offering to talk with them again. If you’re small it’s ok if this is literally the entire company. If you have multiple teams and you already know which team the candidate would be working on, make sure that team reaches out. Encourage them to talk about the details of what the first two weeks would look like and who would help get them ramped up. Nitty gritty details will make the offer feel more real and we’ve seen this be the deciding factor for candidates.\nIf you’re early stage, include your investors in every engineering offer you make. Then become selective as you grow and the hiring pace picks up. Choose the investor you think will be most likely to effectively sell that candidate and give the candidate context on why you thought that in the intro email. Don’t pick an investor who isn’t up to date and familiar with the details about your company.\nAlso think about more than just closing the candidate. Think about their personal circumstances and other decision makers involved. The best recruiters we work with at Triplebyte are continually taking notes about this and referring back to them to take action. I’ve seen a great recruiter learn early on that the candidate’s wife was reluctant to move location because she was worried it’d negatively impact her medical career. The recruiter spent time researching places she could work, gathered contact information and compensation data, and asked to speak with the wife to share it. The candidate accepted the offer shortly afterwards.\nWhat matters most during the closing process is how long its been since your last communication with the candidate. You need to strike a balance between proactively following up without being overbearing. It’s good to find reasons to reach out again that aren’t asking “have you decided yet?” even if you both know what the real agenda is. For example you could send them links to recent news stories you think they’d be interested in based on what you learnt about them during the onsite. If you’re doing team events send them an invitation to join. Your goal is to stay near the top of their mind as they’re deciding but not suffocate them.\n<h2>Exploding Offers</h2>\nOne tactic companies use for closing is putting an aggressive deadline on the offer e.g. we need a final decision within a week. I’d advise against this because good candidates with multiple options will push back. It’s also something an experienced recruiter at a competing company can use as ammunition against you. If a candidate tells them about your deadline they might respond well I’d question the culture that company is trying to build if they only want to hire people who can decide quickly. We want everyone to be sure this is the best place for them over the long term and would never pressure someone into rushing their decision.\nA softer version you can try is an expiring signing bonus. We’ve seen this be effective and have used it ourselves with success at Triplebyte. The way I’d present this would be We want you to take all the time you need to make the right decision for you (and your family). At the same time we can’t leave offers hanging out there indefinitely as things can change rapidly at a startup. If you are able to make a final decision by X date, we’d be able to offer you a $X,000 signing bonus.\n<h2>Big Company Competition and Bay Area Relocation</h2>\nThere are two common scenarios that present unique closing challenges – competing against big companies (Facebook and Google especially) and candidates considering relocation to the Bay Area. I’ll talk through some advice on handling both.\nAs a startup it’s hard to compete with Facebook and Google compensation packages, especially for senior engineers. Unless you’re also a public company, you won’t be able to compete on total compensation. Still, you can win – we’ve seen startups successfully compete against them on Triplebyte. These are the arguments we’ve found are most successful:\n<ol>\n<li>Learning: You learn the fastest by being given real decision making responsibility. Large companies won’t give you this kind of responsibility for years, they need to have checks and balances in place to ensure no single person – especially a new hire – could cause too much damage. Fast growing startups don’t have this luxury and you’ll be thrown straight into making decisions that could materially affect the trajectory of the company.</li>\n<li>Career Progression: Silicon Valley and the technology industry are unique because you can rise up through the ranks of a company faster than anywhere else (e.g. the Chief Product Officer of Facebook ($500bn market cap) is 36 years old). This only happens by joining a startup that grows fast and keeps throwing more responsibilities at you. Give the candidate examples of how this has already been happening for people at your startup and paint a specific picture of how the candidate could progress over the next few years with you.</li>\n<li>Opportunity cost: At any point in time there will always be the safe option of working at a public technology company. The names might change but the experience of working at one is fungible. The experience of working at startups can vary wildly and you should present your startup as a unique opportunity right now because of the team and market. They can always go back to the big company experience if it doesn’t work out.</li>\n<li>Mentorship: One concern engineers, especially juniors, can have about working at a smaller startup is they won’t learn best practices and the “right” way to do things. It will help a lot if you have experienced engineers on your team who would be willing to provide mentorship. If you do be sure to tell the candidate this.</li>\n</ol>\nFor candidates who would need to relocate to the Bay Area, they may be frightened by the cost of living, which has both increased in dollars and frequency of press coverage. While this is ultimately a personal decision for the candidate I have been surprised by how often even engineers don’t take an analytical approach to running the numbers to be sure what their actual cost of living would be. You can be proactive about this. Don’t assume that when a candidate says they don’t think they can afford to live in the Bay Area that they’ve run through the numbers. If you really want them to join then spend time helping them think through this. You can create a spreadsheet template with cost of living assumptions and work through this together with them to figure out what their real monthly income would be. We also wrote a <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://triplebyte.com/blog/does-it-make-sense-for-programmers-to-move-to-the-bay-area/">blog post</a> talking through the pros and cons in detail that you could share.\n<h2>Feedback and Iterate</h2>\nNo company has a 100% offer acceptance rate and you will inevitably miss out on closing candidates you really wanted. That’s an inevitable part of hiring and it sucks. Use every rejected offer as an opportunity to gather data on how you can improve your hiring process and pitch. Do a quick exit interview with each candidate and ask for feedback on why they made the decision and their general feedback on the quality of your hiring process. Review these regularly with your team and use them to iterate and improve your interviewing and closing process over time.\nIf you treat optimizing this process like you would optimizing your product you will see improved conversions and have more success hiring. Good luck!\nIf you’re hiring engineers and would like to try Triplebyte, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://triplebyte.com/tblog/express/">use this link</a> to sign up and you’ll get a special $15,000 hiring fee for your first hire\n","comment_id":"1102829","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-09-07T04:20:17.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:04:49.000-07:00","published_at":"2018-09-07T04:20:17.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71094","name":"Harj Taggar","slug":"harj-taggar","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Harj.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at YC. He was previously founder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15) and Auctomatic (YC W07), which was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/harj-taggar/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71094","name":"Harj Taggar","slug":"harj-taggar","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Harj.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at YC. He was previously founder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15) and Auctomatic (YC W07), which was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/harj-taggar/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-your-team/","excerpt":"Harj Taggar [https://twitter.com/Harjeet] is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte\n[https://triplebyte.com/] (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work\nat the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and\neffort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC.\n\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nOnce you’ve found an engineer you want to hire, the final step is presenting\nthem an offer to join your team and co","reading_time":15,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},"mentions":[],"related_posts":[{"id":"6348578e2184dc0001eebf80","uuid":"e6a0a134-b255-40e8-b7be-01494afbabe8","title":"Learnings of a CEO: Matt Schulman, Pave, on Hiring","slug":"learnings-of-a-ceo-matt-schulman-pave","html":"Welcome to the third edition of Learnings of a CEO. You can read previous editions <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog?query=learnings%20of%20a%20CEO\%22>here.

Pave helps companies plan, communicate, and benchmark employee compensation. Today, the company has 160 employees, more than 3,500 customers, and is valued at $1.6B. Founder and CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/matthewschulman?lang=en\%22>Matt Schulman</a> has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community. We sat down with Matt to hear his insight on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/pave-2/">building a team</a> in the early stages of his company and today as a CEO of a growth-stage company. Many of the first Pave employees were hired as a contractor before converting to a full-time employee. Would you recommend this strategy to founders? I strongly recommend the contract-to-hire setup in the early days of a startup, as it led me to have a 100% close rate with the candidates we wanted to convert to full-time. This strategy worked for two reasons: 1) By the end of the contract, the contractors had poured weeks of energy into the work – learning the code base and investing their time – and getting to know potential coworkers. This escalated their sense of commitment.2) I was flexible on working hours – open to them working nights or weekends. This made it easier for the candidates who were busy with full-time employment to say yes to working with Pave and earn extra income on the side. To convince people who were employed to work for Pave as a contractor on top of their current job, I framed the process as a mutual evaluation. This is an opportunity to evaluate the company and come to a mutual decision at the end of 2, 4, or 6 weeks together – no pressure. We paid them a fair market rate, and as mentioned, we were flexible on working hours. One contractor worked their day job until 5:00pm and then on Pave from 6:00pm-2:00am, for example. They were excited to be able to build something from the ground up and work closely with me at the earliest stage of the company – which is another strategy I used to encourage people to work with us. Before Pave, I was an engineer at Facebook and regularly worked on side projects. These projects were my fun, guilty pleasures because when I built something from the ground up, I felt an emotional attachment to the work. Usually engineers at large companies feel part of a machine, but when they build something full-stack from the ground up, there’s a magical allure to that work. I gave those contractors ownership over the work and often jammed out with them – working side by side at all hours. (One note: I did not have the contractors touch customer PII.) Within weeks, we’d both know whether Pave would be a good fit, and if so, we were already committed to each other.What were you looking for in early employees? When starting to build out the team, I was given a tip that the first 10 hires would set the tone for the next 100. Because of this, I personally recruited 100% of the early Pave employees. I sourced people, took phone screens, went to dinner, coffee, and on walks with candidates, and spoke with them for hours on Zoom and Facetime. It was an all-encompassing process. But I found that early advice to be accurate: The first 10 employees are the most important aspect in the company’s life cycle – other than finding product-market fit – and recruiting has to be the founder’s priority.When recruiting for the first ten employees, I wasn’t looking for experts in specific areas but generalists with rapid career growth, passion for our mission, and a hunger to work. Those early employees readily tackled whatever fire we were facing that day from engineering work and sales to back office and HR. I also had a deep level of trust with those first ten hires, as they were all in my network. Today, I still look for mission alignment and hunger but there are times I need to hire a specialist. I identify the tightest set of criteria for the role and only talk to people who fit that criteria. This is very different from the early days when I was solely looking for generalists who could fill multiple roles.How did you convince those early employees to join Pave? I always found ways to continue our conversation even when I could sense the candidate wanted to turn down the offer. I would do this by scheduling future conversations – saying that I needed to share something new with them – and then I would get to work writing a Google Doc that showed how I planned to invest in their career. We still use this strategy at Pave today, but it has evolved and is now affectionately called the collaborative Google Doc.The collaborative Google Doc is shared with the candidate and used throughout the entire interview process. The document outlines expectations for the role and frames the interview process in stages, communicating which stage the candidate is in at any given time to ensure we are working within their ideal timeline. We encourage the candidate to comment and add their thoughts to the document, including feedback for me and their thoughts on the interview process.As we get further into the interview process, I get more specific about what I’m looking for in a candidate. And when we get even deeper, I write multiple pages on what I’ve learned about their career aspirations through our conversations and backchanneling, and how I’m going to support them. When it comes to backchanneling for potential executive hires, I try to talk with at least 10 people and ask, “If I have the privilege to be this person's manager, I want to set them up for the utmost success. What are your specific recommendations about the best ways to set this person up for success and unleash their full potential?” This 360 review is shared with the candidate right before I deliver the compensation package. I outline what I learned about their strengths and weaknesses, and specific ways that I’ll push them and support them.When I communicate compensation, I lay out all the facts, including cash amount, equity (shares and dollar amount), and the benefits package. In addition, we also share:<ul><li>The salary band for the role (and implicitly their position in it).</li><li>The level that the employee will be in the organization, along with more information on our leveling framework and what each level means.</li><li>The methodology for determining the compensation, like the market data we use (75th percentile for similar stage companies).</li><li>Broader information on compensation philosophy, including how someone moves through the band, gets promoted, etc.</li><li>Additional info on equity: current preferred price, current post money valuation, details on vesting, PTE window, 409A price, and more – essentially everything they need to determine the actual value of the grant.</li></ul>We’re ultra transparent about compensation because compensation should not be a guessing game; people deserve to understand every aspect of their compensation package and how it was derived. I then offer to meet live to answer any questions or discuss feedback – or ask them to leave their comments in the Google Doc. Most candidates will ask questions in the document, as it can be more approachable.For every open role at Pave, a Slack channel is created to drive urgency and ensure no detail goes missed. Tell me about this process. As a seed-stage company, I was creating Slack channels for every role. Today, Slack channels are created for roles that I’m involved with – like hiring a head of finance or VP of engineering. The process still looks the same, however. I create a Slack channel for that role and add relevant stakeholders. Every morning I ask for an update. What’s the movement? Have we sourced any more candidates? Have we talked with candidates X, Y, and Z? I do this to keep the process moving forward every day. I also post updates – sharing with the team when I spoke with a reference, for example. When we extend an offer, I use this Slack channel to encourage stakeholders to reach out to the candidate through text messages or Loom videos. Loom videos are an interesting medium. If you’re a candidate and receive six Loom videos from different people at the company, it may feel bizarre and a bit overwhelming. But the videos show we are excited about the candidate and also gives insight into our energetic culture. You also review email copy and do drip campaigns for candidate outreach. Tell me about this. We have a pre-written email sequence that is sent from me or the hiring manager depending on the context, and then we use <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gem/">Gem to automate this. The response rates for these campaigns are much higher than if the emails were coming from a recruiter. Before the emails are sent out, I’ll spend 30 minutes personalizing 30 emails (one to two sentences at the onset of the email) that will be sent to target profiles. And then it’s important you do a drip. If you only send one email, most of the time the candidate won’t respond. I find sending a third email with a short message like, “Hey, any thoughts?” leads to the most responses. How do you think about where your job ends and your team begins when it comes to recruiting?Today, if I’m not the hiring manager, I delegate and come in only at the end of the process for a sell call. The process looks vastly different if I’m the hiring manager. I spend a lot of time reviewing resumes and identifying the top 25 profiles in the space. Every outreach to them is very personalized, and I have time to do this because I focus on quality over quantity of candidates. Quality over quantity was a big lesson for me, actually. At first, I would look at all inbound resumes and thousands of applicants. But I have come to realize that I have more success when I map out the market and find the top 25 candidates in the space. Then I'll find a way to get one of them in the door.Describe the ideal candidate for senior-level positions when Pave was a smaller company. As a company of 35 people, we didn’t need managers who delegated – which has merit at a later-stage company. We needed people who would personally take on the hard work. Often, first-time founders hire someone senior for optics reasons. Instead, you should look for someone earlier in their career who has grown at a crazy high slope – often referred to in the tech industry as a high-slope candidate versus a Y-intercept candidate. There is a time and place for both types of hires, but as a 35-person startup, almost always go for the slope, not the high Y-intercept. And in some cases, you may meet exceptional candidates with both high slope and high Y-intercept. This is the dream case!Another mistake first-time founders can make is rushing hires by trying to squeeze them in before a term sheet. Don’t try to meet some arbitrary deadline or cliff date. If it takes six months or a year to hire an executive, that’s ok – wait for the right person.* *This answer has been updated to clarify the founder’s intention behind the statement.","comment_id":"6348578e2184dc0001eebf80","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/10/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--8-.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-10-13T11:23:10.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-10-26T08:44:29.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-10-17T09:00:11.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Pave Founder and CEO Matt Schulman has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71158","name":"Leadership","slug":"leadership","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/leadership/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71170","name":"Startups","slug":"startups","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startups/"},{"id":"634d76fe3f2ab90001338eb9","name":"#21831","slug":"hash-21831","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/learnings-of-a-ceo-matt-schulman-pave/","excerpt":"Welcome to the third edition of Learnings of a CEO. You can read previous editions here.","reading_time":7,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71af6","uuid":"686e1e7d-ad94-4ba6-9b90-31137e273ce7","title":"Hardware AMA with YC Partner Eric Migicovsky","slug":"hardware-ama-with-yc-partner-eric-migicovsky","html":"YC Partner <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/ericmigi/">Eric Migicovsky</a> recently did a Hardware AMA with Startup School founders. It was so good that we wanted to share it here.\nEnjoy!\n<hr />\nSoftware is easy to release and sell as a beta, but we’re worried it will be hard to sell our hardware if it looks too “prototype-y.”\nHow can Hardware startups sell product as early as possible?\nAre preorders usually required, or is there a way to can sell product before setting up high-volume manufacturing?\nI could help more if you describe what you’re working on. But in general, you should try to be as hacky and prototype-y as possible. I wrote about this here: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware//">https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/

For example: \n– Buy off the shelf hardware (eg RasPi + USB camera) and enclose it in a 3D printed case. Sell it. Many YC companies have done this in the past (eg Flock’s first gen device was exactly this – <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.flocksafety.com//">flocksafety.com, and Piccolo) \n– Buy a device that already does 90% of what you want it to do, then work with the manufacturer to customize the last 10% (I explained it a bit in that TC post)\nYou can sell preorders but I find it easier to simply build 2-3 units then actually sell them to early users. Then use the profits from that to build more units, sell them, repeat. That’s what we did for our first gen watch, inPulse. It worked great, we manufactured the first 1000 units one-by-one in the garage. Secondary benefit: you can immediately incorporate improvements into the product as you assemble them. Of the first 20 units we shipped – 4-5 were completely destroyed during shipping. We fixed that asap and never had the problem again.\nPlease tell your top must-read books for Hardware Startup entrepreneurs?\n<ul>\n<li>\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.amazon.com/Piloting-Palm-Handspring-Billion-dollar-Handheld/dp/075678798X/">Piloting Palm</a> is the best, most accurate book about starting a consumer electronics company. A bit dated, but still highly recommended.\n</li>\n<li>\n+1 for <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Hacker-Adventures-Making-Breaking/dp/159327758X/">The Hardware Hacker by Bunnie</a>.\n</li>\n<li>\nAlso <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122//">Pirates of Silicon Valley</a>!\n</li>\n</ul>\nWhat tools/resources did you use to develop and manufacture prototype?\nOur first prototype was just an Arduino (atmega) plus a screen from a Nokia 3310 smartphone. See the first proto here: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVZDx86Ft0o\%22>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVZDx86Ft0o For the next gen (called inPulse), we made the watch case out of CNC milled aluminium and designed a custom PCB. We actually manufactured this in our garage and sold several thousand units.\nWhat did you change in your product after YC W11?\nBiggest feedback we received from inPulse users was: longer battery life (was 24 hours), outdoor readable display, needs to work with iPhone, support for fitness tracking apps. We took the feedback and incorporated it into the first Pebble watch\nWould be great if you share your YC Application\nSure, here it is: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CemwTH8UpInp6wqyv822Usu_PQR_Ho8s/view?usp=sharing\%22>https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CemwTH8UpInp6wqyv822Usu_PQR_Ho8s/view?usp=sharing

How much did you spend on the Kickstarter campaign?\nWe spent $5k on prototypes for the first campaign. Borrowed a camera and filmed the video ourselves. No other spend.\nWhen did you find the market fit, and how did YC and Kickstarter help you and your team with this?\nYC heavily encouraged me to talk to my users more. I had definitely been bad at this before YC. We also moved much quicker during YC. PG asked why we didn’t have an SDK for devs to write apps for inPulse. I gave all kinds of excuses but eventually he just asked ‘how long would it take to write one?’. We said 2 weeks, and he convinced us to just f’n do it. We did and it turned out to be a critical part of product development that lead us towards Pebble (which reached product market fit).\nTopic: How to be defensible?\nI applied for HAX accelerator and they rejected me saying: “Your product is good and innovative but not defensible. It can easily be copied”.\nMy product is a completely mechanical wheelchair. How to proceed in this case for being defensible. Anything other than patents that can help me here?\nAs without any electronics/codes/app I can’t go for achieving network effects. And being completely mechanical product, anyone can reverse engineer it.\nThere also comes the fear of getting copied by someone in the market (soon if the product starts selling good).\nOne thing I’ve learned about rejections: listen to the ‘no’ but not the ‘why’. Often times investor (including YC) have no idea whether a company is going to be successful or not, but it’s easier to reject than accept. We come up with vague reasons why we shouldn’t fund the company and then move on. From the entrepreneurs side, it’s hard to understand because usually the reasons sound logical but the crazy part is the VC probably will not fund you even if you fix the problems that they outlined.\nDefensibility is my view is the ability to build some sort of moat around your product that either: \na) disincentivizes customers from leaving for a competitor or \nb) reduces/eliminates competition. There are many ways to build this into hardware companies: \n– strong brand or great customer service \n– hw built on a software platform \n– access to a better supply chain, or cheaper/faster logistics \n– many more…\nIn your case, I bet the most defensible thing you could do is truly care about your customers base and move quickly to build products or features that your customers want. While this is not perfectly defensible, you’ll be surprised by how few companies actually do this 🙂\nAssuming that your MVP is a SaaS that receives feedback from a few devices: what are your thoughts on going to market with a hardware solution where your core piece is a commercial single-board computer (Raspberry Pi Zero W)?\nYou are on the perfect track. Do exactly that. I wish more people would follow your exact plan! There is a ton of money to be made by using off the shelf hardware, writing great software and solving a real business need.\nI build a scripting framework for bash which may have use cases for companies building systems on embedded Linux devices. Where can I find companies or strategic partners that are building hardware/IOT products on embedded Linux?\nI recommend reading about some past attempts in this space. Most recently the $9 computer people (Next Thing Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer) tried to do this and it didn’t work out. Probably because they were making customer chips though.\nHonestly most hw companies are very resistant to using off the shelf software in their custom builds. Might be an extreme case of NIH. I am always surprised by few companies there are that make sw libraries or modules specifically for embedded systems.\nYou can find potential customers on subreddits for embedded development, or on podcasts like EEVBlog or hackaday.\nWe’re a hardware startup building an interactive learning robot for kids. In the current funding environment, how much weight do you feel seed stage investors are assigning to a crowdfunding campaign?\nI personally assign a lot more value to a company that has shipped something to paying customers. Doesn’t matter how many units, 1 is a great start! Shipping a product means the founders have: \n– developed an idea into an actual solution to a problem \n– figured out some basic marketing and found potential customers \n– convinced those customers to part with their hard earned cash \n– built and manufactured at least one working unit \n– figured out the logistics of shipping and doing customer support \n– have a happy customer\nIt’s actually a lot cheaper (generally) to do this rather than execute a potentially expensive crowdfunding campaign. The best companies I’ve seen actually do the above, sell 50-100 units and then use the knowledge that they’ve gained from that process to create a fantastic crowdfunding campaign. They learn what potential customers actually want out of their product and how to correctly market it.\nAs you know, hardware startups are expensive. We are currently raising a SEED round and our ideal funding amount sometimes feels higher than we are comfortable asking for. When you are pitching your MVP product with a small number of users, how do you justify asking for the money required to take your hardware product from MVP to CVP? Especially when a software product can do it for so much less?\nIf you are already selling your product, why raise a seed round at all? Why not continue selling units to customers and grow your business organically off the profits from your sales? Raising money is super distracting from building product and talking to customers. I would recommend focusing on that.\nHardware startups in general are slightly more expensive that sw startups, but actually not that much more. It does depend on what you’re making of course. We started shipping the first hundred units of the inPulse watch on total spend of less than $50k CAD in 2010.\nWe are also working on prototype of fitness band(Patch). We already released android fitness activity tracker app for the same with few active users.\nI want to know how to reduce the expenses while building an MVP & how to reach potential customers.\nAnother question is what are the key points we have to consider while designing a hardware product?\nWhat expenses do you have right now? Presumably not many. Hard to know what to reduce without knowing what you’re currently spending 🙂\nKey points: same as with a software product. Are you building something that people want? This above all is the most important thing you should be working on. Finding product-market fit. Everything (literally) else is secondary to this all important goal. Often times HW founders think that cost optimization, or beautiful industrial design, etc etc is important…at an early stage – it’s not. The only thing that truly matters is ‘do people want to pay for your product and do they like using it’\nWe are developing a 3Door device using 3D face reconstruction and recognition technology. 3Door will have features like video doorbell, video interphone, security camera and smart access system. In a one-liner, you will be able to unlock the door of your property using your face. We developed algorithm and now we are working on a hardware development. We have a prototype but now we are looking how to make it more <code>consumer friendly/fancy</code>.\n1) Do you have some advice on how to find a vendor for electronics and printed board instead of using Raspberry Pi3 or you think that Pi3 will work well in our case?\n2) Also about the design of hardware, do you have a suggestion how to find the person that can help us with that task and anything else (advice/suggestions) related to this part will be very helpful for us.\nCool! I love smart door stuff. I’ve had a Lockitron on my door since Sept 2011 and haven’t carried a key since then 🙂\n<ol>\n<li>\nSounds like a Pi would be great for your use case. Just 3D print a nice case and make sure it can’t be easily stolen 🙂\n</li>\n<li>\nwhich part of the hardware design do you need help with? You could try posting on this forum, another startup may know someone who could help. For example there are many industrial designers who can do case design remotely\n</li>\n</ol>\nAre there any resources you could recommend for quality control and do you have any tips for sourcing and working with manufacturers?\nI have an electronics client and they have ~10% return rate. Last batch they had a 24% return rate supposedly due to a defective batch. How can you tell between defective hardware and bad design? For QC, they have a team in China that checks random x items to determine the defect rate, but is there a way to automate the QC testing process, or more sophisticated and better ways for QC? Or is the only way having someone on the team there at the factory?\nIs this an enterprise (b2b) or consumer product? Each group has different standards. If they are seeing 24% return rate, they have a big problem. One way to solve this is to institute 100% QC at the factory – meaning one of their team members, or someone they trust (not a factory working) is in-line at the factory checking each unit as it’s prepared. It’s a huge time sink and annoying but sometimes this is the only way to fix problems at the factory.\nDo we need to get validation that the problem we are trying to solve is ‘hair on fire’-type before building the MVP? We are building an IOT cushion to correct user posture and increase physical activity. People we to talk so far don’t believe it as there is no product to show.\nWhen looking for potential markets for a product I consider a venn diagram of 3 circles: \n– severity of problem (how much money can be earned or saved) \n– frequency of problem \n– spending power (does the person with the problem have the power to buy a solution)\nThe best hair on fire problems are people at the centre of all 3 circles. You can test your potential market by talking to customers and determining how willing they are to spend money to solve their problem. People with ‘hair on fire’ problems should be willing to prepay for a solution to their problem.\nOutsourcing Advice: Which part of that hardware startup, one can be better off by getting it done by a third party and not necessarily from a founding team?\nWhich one is preferred: Learning the activity self, and trying it first hand with the higher risk of failure at implementation or outsourcing it to a third party with the risk of beind dependent on outside at cost of some leverage?\nThings like Supply Chain, Web design, Industrial design, Aesthetics, Legal compliances etc.\nThis was a lesson I learned at the beginning of Pebble: it’s impossible to pay someone enough to care about your startup. You and your cofounders are the only ones who actually care. You are the ones who get up in the morning and throw 110% of your energy into making your vision come true.\nIn the early days, I thought I could get by with contractors doing things but they invariably failed, charged too much (and then failed) or did shitty work. The most helpful non-founders were friends of mine who I con(vinc)ed into doing odd projects, helping with the early assembly line and such. Looking back, I wish I had offered to make them cofounders and encouraged them to come on full-time.\nIn the early days, when money is super tight, founders have no choice but to do literally everything themselves. And that’s a good thing. Learning how to do something makes you better at outsourcing it later. Your naivety will also be an advantage – you may not know that something is ‘impossible’ and accidentally create a novel solution that an expert may have written off a long time ago. I benefited from a number of these situations.\nThe one area that I would recommend cultivating is a network of advisors and startup founders that are a few years ahead of you in the process. These people are the best sounding boards for questions like ‘who should I use for FCC testing’ or ‘should I use Shopify or build my own ecommerce site?’ (answer: USE SHOPIFY).\nI’d like to know the strategies you used to boost the success of your kickstarter campaign. If you had to do it all over again would you still go for crowdfunding (why/why not)? Thanks for your time.\nPeople tend to overlook the fact that I started Pebble in 2008, shipped several thousand units of inPulse in 2010-2011 and only launched Pebble on Kickstarter in 2012. That was 5 years later. We learned a ton in those early years, improved the product and figured out how to market it. That’s the real reason why our Kickstarter was so successful in 2012. There are no silver bullets.\nIf I were to do it all over again, I would definitely focus on shipping a working albeit alpha product to customers first, then only after shipping many units of that would I move onto a crowdfunding campaign.\nIn your experience, what is the minimum level of fidelity that a seed or an investor wants to see in a prototype/MVP? Any way to know it before pitching? Any recommendation? What was yours?\nBreaking the chicken and egg is really difficult, and wasting time on useless twitches is a very real problem for a hardware startup. But a fugly MVP seems to get you nowhere…\nAs a seed investor, I look first to see if the startup has shipped product to a paid customer. That’s the gold standard – if you can do that, you’re ahead of 99% of all other hw startups. So try to do that – don’t build a prototype just to impress investors.\nA fugly MVP with paying customers is no longer a prototype…it’s a real damn product with a market!\nI and my friend are both web developers. Recently, we’re so passionate about the idea of autonomous robot charging. We know that it involves high technology of AI and Robotic, but we believe in the vision and so start learning AI and Self-driving, which has a lot of similarity to our idea in tech aspect. We really want to bring in another cofounder who has decent knowledge in tech.\nHow do you bring in cofounders or hire technical people in these highly expertised engineering field?\nSince the learning curve is super steep, should we keep learning until we build a prototype to be more easily pitch in a new cofounder or go networking right the way, by just pitching the concept to try to bring in a new cofounder?\nSince you both are already technical, you could consider researching and studying the technology and work to build it yourself. I’d recommend this route as it’s entirely within your control – you don’t rely on any outside forces to make it happen. Alternatively you could consider bringing on another cofounder, especially if you happen to have a friend or past colleague in the space! But oftentimes I find that technical and problem solving ability beats experience in a particular domain.\nI’m a software engineer. I have 2 hardware product ideas but I don’t have the expertise on electronic/electrical field. What are the good ways I can find a like minded hardware expert as co-founder to research and bring out a product?\nSounds cool! What are the product ideas? Best way is to start by sharing your ideas with practically every person you meet. You never know who will be a) interested in the same stuff and b) have a complementary skill set that can help you make it a reality.\nThe key problem that I have right now is a manufacturing management. We got 6 months delay at the first batch and 4 months delay on the second production batch. Yes, we are still alive but I’m looking for a new manufacturer. I’m afraid that the problem is not in manufacturer but in my incompetence in managing them.\nQUESTION: Is there a proper way to deal (manage) with suppliers and manufacturers to get the product on time and with the expected quality?\nI know that we can set strict terms in a written contract/agreement, to cover the risks, but the manufacturer increases the price and increase the lead-time. Also, because the manufacturing cost is 2x-3x lower than the MSRP, I can’t assign the direct delay losses to the manufacturer as an equation MSRP * PO Quantity = Fines.\nWe had the same type of problems with Pebble – long lead time components really constrained us. If I were to do it again, I will try to design products specifically with easier to source components.\nHave you traveled to visit your supplier in person? Sometimes it takes in-person pressure to kick people into gear. Contracts will never have the right effect, they have to sense that you care and will stop at nothing to get it done. So it might be time to get on a plane and camp out at the factory until they get moving.\nDo you have any advice on pitfalls hardware startups should avoid as they mature? I’m not sure if it’s a subject you want to broach as Pebble had a large sales success but was sold to Fitbit. There are also a lot of consumer electronics companies that do IPO but struggle to maintain financial success afterwards (notable exceptions exist).\nI just would like an idea of what to expect on the road ahead of a hardware startup after prototyping, manufacturing, and sales no longer become issues to contend with. Much thanks!\nReally depends on the type of company. Consumer or enterprise? One-time sale or recurring subscription? The best advice for early stage companies is ‘how not to fail’ by Jessica Livingston <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-not-to-fail//">https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-not-to-fail/ and ‘how not to die’ by PG <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html/">http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

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Hardware startups usually die for the same proximate cause as non HW cos: they run out of money. It’s exacerbated for HW startups because they have inventory which locks of their cash early in the sales cycle. If I were to recommend one thing for hw startups – understand your cash conversion cycle and make sure you have the right ‘business model to company’ fit, which is just as important as PMF for hw companies.\nMy question is about the ethics of manufacture: Do you have any insights on how we could be more mindful of product impact on a long term basis?, the possible impact it could have on the planet, the ethics of the suppliers & manufacturing processes and long term repercussions, are there any tangible ways (you may have found) to measure or calculate the future impact of a product so it can be negated right at design stage? any resources would be very useful, as it is my goal to make my company among the most ethical on this planet.\nModern design thinking is centered around something called ‘cradle to grave’ product design. So you consider the materials going into your product and how the user will deal with the product after it’s lifespan is up. The easiest way to build this into your product is to design it to last and to be repairable. Then the user can continue to use it long into the future.\nWhat’s the best way to outsource embedded electronics prototyping? Also, what resources do you recommend when looking for a manufacturing partner in China?\nI wrote a post precisely about this: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware//">https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/
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It seems to be a catch-22 situation for a new company, as protecting product IP internationally, including design patents, brand IP etc, is cost-prohibitive at an early stage, yet without these in place, launching a product puts the founders in a non defensible position. How would you recommend tackling this challenge especially when your focus is creating a strong international ‘Brand image’?\nI would not worry about IP in the early stage except for a very specific set of products (mainly pharmaceuticals). If you really care about patents then file a super broad provisional patent for $500 to $1000. This gives you 1 year period to file a full patent for anything that you actually end up building.\n“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”\nMy company is working on remote control cars for car sharing companies. We’re remotely piloting cars so that there’s no need for an in car driver. Right now we are in the very early stages of development but we had a few questions.\n1. Our team eventually will need to recruit someone with a mechanical engineering background as my co-founder and I are a bit weak in that department, but we’ve been debating on if that person should be an early hire or a founder. Do you have any advice on how we should evaluate that distinction?\n2. Right now we’re bootstrapping development and we believe we have enough savings to get to an MVP though it might be cutting it close. Is there an ideal time to start the fundraising process?\n<ol>\n<li>\nEssentially the first 4-5 people at any company are cofounders. Sometimes they have the title, sometimes not. But they effectively are and should be treated as such with large amounts of equity. Think of it this way – if the first 4-5 people aren’t spending every waking second thinking about how to make the company a success, who else is going to? If you are relying on them to do this, they should be compensated as such. Some people need to make more money for personal reasons, that’s okay but the important thing is they still have a large % of equity. Don’t be stingy with equity to someone who is putting in 20% of the effort to make your company a raging success.\n</li>\n<li>\nNo, fundraising basically always sucks. I would try to optimize for earning revenue over trying to time fundraising. If you earn revenue you have cash to fund further growth and the happy side effect of making investors want to invest in you!\n</li>\n</ol>\n1. How essential is it to figure out the manufacturing aspect very early on versus just making an MVP prototype as soon as you can?\n2. Where can we go to read/learn about hardware startups and their product-market-fit process, and especially, how they scaled effectively? (including Pebble)\n<ol>\n<li>\nSpeed speed speed! The one thing a startup needs to accomplish is prove that they have product market fit. Everything else is secondary. So make the MVP asap!\n</li>\n<li>\nThis is a great blog by a friend of mine. Fellow HW founder: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://marcbarros.com//">http://marcbarros.com/
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What is your opinion in engaging product design companies if we can’t build the complete hardware all by ourselves? What are the documents needed to protect our IP?\nFirst I would try to build it all yourselves without working with product design companies. Not because of IP, but because they’ll bleed you dry with fees and are generally slow. Now I don’t know what you’re trying to build (feel free to share!) but in general, I’d recommend pursuing a path more like this: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware//">https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/
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Harj Taggar is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC.

Once you’ve found an engineer you want to hire, the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and convincing them to accept it. This post offers advice for increasing the percentage of the offers you make that are accepted. Since working on Triplebyte I’ve been surprised by just how much variance there is in this rate among companies. Companies that use Triplebyte have acceptance rates ranging from as low as 10% to as high as 90%.

Generating an offer for an engineer is expensive. It takes time to source good candidates and then hours of your engineering team’s time doing technical phone screens and onsite interviews. You’ll likely need to complete five onsite interviews to generate a single offer (the industry standard onsite interview to offer rate for engineers is around 20%). Assuming six hours of engineering time spent interviewing that’s 30 hours of engineering productivity lost. Given this cost it makes economic sense to work as hard as you can to get your offers accepted.

The work to increase your offer acceptance rate begins well before presenting the offer itself. It starts with designing a great candidate experience at each step leading up to the offer. Every interaction a candidate has with you must balance your need to extract signal from them while still getting them excited about joining. This begins with doing something seemingly simple – being responsive.

Speed

Read this blog post to get an engineer’s perspective on the importance of speed and responsiveness in their job search process. Being fast and responsive seems like obvious advice and yet we still see companies move slowly and miss out on good people. There’s two reasons this happens.

The first is entropy. Maintaining an organized system for managing candidates is hard. It will naturally trend towards disorder unless you work really hard against it. This is especially true for larger companies with more people and processes. As a smaller startup speed is a huge advantage you have over them when competing for engineers.

Make this easier for yourself by using software to manage and track the status of your candidates. At first you can use something simple like a spreadsheet or Airtable. As you grow and need to setup interview panels to gather feedback from interviewers you should graduate to a real ATS (Applicant Tracking System) like Lever. Make it clear who has responsibility for reviewing and acting on candidates every day.

The second reason is psychological. It’s easy to believe that candidates who drop out because you were slow weren’t interested in your company anyway. This is bad reasoning and will make you miss out on good candidates. Managing a job search process quickly becomes overwhelming, especially for the best candidates with the most options. To even have the chance to close the best candidates treat every candidate dropping out before you replied them as a failure, not a lucky escape.

With an organized and responsive process in place you can now focus on optimizing the quality of each candidate interaction. This starts with the first call.

First Call

The first call with a candidate typically lasts for about 25 minutes. I’d recommend the following agenda:

Introduce yourself, the company and what you work on.

Ask the candidate to introduce themselves and talk about what’s important to them in their next role (if you did the initial outreach and they’re not actively looking, you can soften this to e.g. “how do you think about developing your career and skills in the future?”).

Ask questions about their skills and experiences to see if they match with what you’re looking for.

Pitch the work being done at the company and why it’s an exciting time to join now.

Finish with answering any questions they have and explain what the next steps in your hiring process are.

It’s common to leave asking the candidate what they’re looking for until the end of the call. I think that’s suboptimal because you miss the opportunity to tailor your pitch around it throughout the call.

If you’re an early stage company (less than 20 people) a founder should always be doing this call with engineering candidates. Commonly you’ll have one technical founder and one non-technical/sales founder. I’d recommend the sales founder do these calls even if they can’t speak in detail about the technical challenges. This gives the technical founder more uninterrupted time to build (maker vs manager schedule). The sales founder should at least have enough sales ability to convince engineers to meet the technical founder in person to learn more about the technology.

As you grow you’ll hire a recruiter and typically they’ll do these calls. I’d recommend doing the following to best set them up for success:

Ask your recruiter to send you a monthly report on number of first calls they’re doing and the % that opt’ed out of coming onsite. Have your recruiter keep a list of reasons why candidates said they wouldn’t move forward and continually review these with them to improve the pitch.

Assign one engineer to train your recruiter on how to talk about the interesting technical challenges at the company. Have them listen to mock pitches, give feedback, and repeat. I often see companies give their recruiter no help in learning how to best pitch the company and then complain when they see low conversions. That’s not fair to them nor optimal for you.

Asking technical vetting questions is difficult for recruiters as they’re usually not technical. This is usually the most awkward aspect of the interactions between engineers and recruiters. Give your recruiter support and structure so they can do this well. I’d advise giving them specific technical questions to ask. One idea I’ve seen companies use to good effect is making them multiple choice format so the recruiter can read out the answers and ask the candidate to pick one that fits best. This helps your recruiter feel confident and provide a better candidate experience.

If you’re working on a deeply technical product that doesn’t yet have marquee customers or traction, I’d actually recommend having an engineer do these first calls, at least for particularly promising candidates. In this case your main selling point is the depth of your technical challenges and it’ll be very hard to find a recruiter who can pitch those well.

Technical Phone Screen

If the first call goes well you’ll usually move the candidate forward to a technical phone screen with an engineer (companies that use Triplebyte will skip these phone screens and move straight to the onsite). These phone screens are usually 45 minutes of the candidate working through a coding problem and screen sharing. I’d recommend allotting one full hour for the phone screen. 45 minutes for working through a technical problem and up to 15 minutes for a conversation between the candidate and engineer to ask each other questions.

Ideally you want to select the engineers who are best at pitching your company for these phone screens. There are also ways to make the experience more candidate friendly e.g. letting them pick from several problems to solve during the call. This creates some more work for you but if a candidate can show their strength on a problem they enjoy they’ll have a more positive feeling towards you. You can also let them code in their own environment and screen share with you instead of using an artificial environment (though some of these e.g. Coderpad do have advantages of better collaboration and recording features).

If the technical phone screen goes well, the next step is the onsite interview.

Onsite Interview

The onsite interview will be the first time a candidate meets your team in person. Their experience throughout the day will be a huge deciding factor in where they end up. It’s important to think through the details of the candidate experience when setting up your onsite. Start with the basic logistics and be sure to:

Send an email ahead of time with clear directions to the office.

Assign someone to greet them when they arrive

Have somewhere they can hang out if they arrive early (even if it’s just a spare desk and chair)

A standard onsite interview agenda will typically look like this:

Quick welcome and talking through the agenda for the day (5 minutes)

Technical interview 1 (1 hour)

Technical interview 2 (1 hour)

Lunch (1 hour)

Technical interview 3 (1 hour)

Technical interview 4 (1 hour)

Behavioral / culture interview (45 mins)

Closing Q&A for them to ask about the company (25 minutes)

If you’re early stage I’d recommend having at least one of the founders involved in the closing Q&A. It can also be a good idea to include a demo or roadmap section here at the end. Give the candidate a sneak preview of a new feature you’re working on or talk through the most exciting upcoming projects so they finish the day feeling excited about your future momentum.

We asked engineers using Triplebyte what caused them to have bad experiences during onsite interviews. Almost all the replies centered on their interactions with the interviewers. The top three complaints were interviewers being (1) unprepared and not knowing anything about them (2) not being familiar with the technical questions they asked and (3) being determined to prove their intelligence to the interviewee.

It’s unlikely an engineer will accept your offer if they had a bad interaction with an interviewer. I’d make the importance of providing a good interview experience a part of your company culture. You can start by writing a simple interviewing guide for your team that emphasizes the importance of being on-time, prepared and friendly when interviewing. You can also only pick the engineers who are friendliest and best at representing your company as interviewers.

For question familiarity, have a centralized question bank that interviewers work through together before using them on candidates. For more ideas on the kind of content and questions you can use in technical interviews, my co-founder Ammon wrote a detailed post on how to interview engineers.

It’s also great to do something that makes lunch a chance for the candidate to get to know the team. At Triplebyte we Slack our team in the morning that a candidate is interviewing and ask people to head over to the lunch table at the same time. Our office manager introduces the candidate to the team and we do an icebreaker where the candidate gets to ask a question which everyone goes around and answers (we tell them to think of this ahead of time and make it lighthearted). It’s a good way for them to get to know the team and is usually quite fun. We’ve had candidates tell us this experience was the deciding factor in joining.

Making The Offer

After a successful onsite you’ll make the formal offer and the work to get it accepted really starts. The first step is making sure you actually present the offer details. A complaint we hear from Triplebyte candidates is being asked how likely they would be to accept an offer before knowing the actual offer details. The reality is that compensation details are a large factor in where people decide to work and you can’t expect someone to know if they want to work for you without giving them that data.

Create a formal offer letter template that includes these details:

Salary and benefits

Signing bonus details (if applicable)

Health insurance details (include a link to the policy documents)

401(k) details, if any

Vacation policy details

Equity

Total number of shares/stock options presented

Total number of shares outstanding

% ownership that represents

Exercise price for options

Vesting schedule details

When presenting the offer I’d recommend doing things in the following order:

Step One: Call to tell them they’ll be receiving an offer

Have the hiring manager (if you’re early stage that’s the founder) call the candidate as soon as possible after the onsite. Do it the same day if you can. Tell them the day went really well and you’d love to make them an offer to join the team. Mention specific reasons why you’re excited about them joining the team and reference what they did well during the day. You could even have multiple people on the call and ask each of them to mention a specific reason they’d be excited to work with the candidate. Tell them the next step will be you (or a recruiter) calling them back to talk through offer details.

Step Two: Call with offer details

Call the next day to talk them through the offer details. Explaining salary and benefits is fairly straightforward. For equity, before giving any details, ask them how familiar they are with equity concepts like stock options or RSUs.

If they have little familiarity, do not overwhelm them with information on the call. Give them a quick explanation of how equity works. Talk them through the numbers of your offer and tell them you’ll send them some resources on equity to read through on their own time.

If they’re experienced with equity, then go straight into the numbers and ask if they have any questions about the details they’d like you to talk more about.

Tell them you’ll be sending through the formal offer letter, documenting all these details, via email shortly. They should take some time to digest that and the next step would be a follow up call to talk through their thoughts. Offer some times for that call right then.

It’s tempting to push hard for a decision on this call. I’d recommend not doing that to avoid the candidate feeling pressured. This will make it harder for you to stay engaged with them as they go through the decision making process. It’s fine to ask them if they have any initial thoughts or questions and then move on if they seem hesitant to go into details. It is also ok to ask them about their decision making timeline if you haven’t discussed that already.

Culture

Now the offer has been presented it’s time to focus on closing. To be effective at closing candidates you need to work hard at selling them on the most exciting reasons to join. This sounds obvious but there is a temptation to stop if the candidate doesn’t seem immediately excited or asks probing questions about your business. The reality is that working at your company will seem more exciting to you than the candidate because you’ve had time and data to build up that excitement. Now you have to pull out all the stops to transfer that excitement.

It’s common at this stage for candidates to start probing more deeply into questions about your company culture. They’re trying to build a picture of what it will be like to work with you on a daily basis. We’ve observed at Triplebyte that most companies use fairly generic descriptions of their culture. This is optimal for not offending candidates but won’t make your company stand out. To use your culture as a differentiator you’ll need to take some risk. You could try describing your culture with tradeoffs e.g. don’t just say you’re “collaborative”, say you’re willing to trade the upside of collaboration (better ideas and execution) for the downsides (reduced personal autonomy to just do things).

Depending on the content you choose, being different in describing your culture could backfire or it could give you a hiring advantage with the right candidates. Whichever approach you take, make sure you and your team are prepared to talk in detail about this with candidates. Sounding unprepared about culture is itself a negative signal about how much the company cares about and values its team.

Closing

Make sure to get your team involved in the closing process. Ask everyone who met the candidate during the onsite to send them a follow up email with specific reasons they enjoyed it and offering to talk with them again. If you’re small it’s ok if this is literally the entire company. If you have multiple teams and you already know which team the candidate would be working on, make sure that team reaches out. Encourage them to talk about the details of what the first two weeks would look like and who would help get them ramped up. Nitty gritty details will make the offer feel more real and we’ve seen this be the deciding factor for candidates.

If you’re early stage, include your investors in every engineering offer you make. Then become selective as you grow and the hiring pace picks up. Choose the investor you think will be most likely to effectively sell that candidate and give the candidate context on why you thought that in the intro email. Don’t pick an investor who isn’t up to date and familiar with the details about your company.

Also think about more than just closing the candidate. Think about their personal circumstances and other decision makers involved. The best recruiters we work with at Triplebyte are continually taking notes about this and referring back to them to take action. I’ve seen a great recruiter learn early on that the candidate’s wife was reluctant to move location because she was worried it’d negatively impact her medical career. The recruiter spent time researching places she could work, gathered contact information and compensation data, and asked to speak with the wife to share it. The candidate accepted the offer shortly afterwards.

What matters most during the closing process is how long its been since your last communication with the candidate. You need to strike a balance between proactively following up without being overbearing. It’s good to find reasons to reach out again that aren’t asking “have you decided yet?” even if you both know what the real agenda is. For example you could send them links to recent news stories you think they’d be interested in based on what you learnt about them during the onsite. If you’re doing team events send them an invitation to join. Your goal is to stay near the top of their mind as they’re deciding but not suffocate them.

Exploding Offers

One tactic companies use for closing is putting an aggressive deadline on the offer e.g. we need a final decision within a week. I’d advise against this because good candidates with multiple options will push back. It’s also something an experienced recruiter at a competing company can use as ammunition against you. If a candidate tells them about your deadline they might respond well I’d question the culture that company is trying to build if they only want to hire people who can decide quickly. We want everyone to be sure this is the best place for them over the long term and would never pressure someone into rushing their decision.

A softer version you can try is an expiring signing bonus. We’ve seen this be effective and have used it ourselves with success at Triplebyte. The way I’d present this would be We want you to take all the time you need to make the right decision for you (and your family). At the same time we can’t leave offers hanging out there indefinitely as things can change rapidly at a startup. If you are able to make a final decision by X date, we’d be able to offer you a $X,000 signing bonus.

Big Company Competition and Bay Area Relocation

There are two common scenarios that present unique closing challenges – competing against big companies (Facebook and Google especially) and candidates considering relocation to the Bay Area. I’ll talk through some advice on handling both.

As a startup it’s hard to compete with Facebook and Google compensation packages, especially for senior engineers. Unless you’re also a public company, you won’t be able to compete on total compensation. Still, you can win – we’ve seen startups successfully compete against them on Triplebyte. These are the arguments we’ve found are most successful:

Learning: You learn the fastest by being given real decision making responsibility. Large companies won’t give you this kind of responsibility for years, they need to have checks and balances in place to ensure no single person – especially a new hire – could cause too much damage. Fast growing startups don’t have this luxury and you’ll be thrown straight into making decisions that could materially affect the trajectory of the company.

Career Progression: Silicon Valley and the technology industry are unique because you can rise up through the ranks of a company faster than anywhere else (e.g. the Chief Product Officer of Facebook ($500bn market cap) is 36 years old). This only happens by joining a startup that grows fast and keeps throwing more responsibilities at you. Give the candidate examples of how this has already been happening for people at your startup and paint a specific picture of how the candidate could progress over the next few years with you.

Opportunity cost: At any point in time there will always be the safe option of working at a public technology company. The names might change but the experience of working at one is fungible. The experience of working at startups can vary wildly and you should present your startup as a unique opportunity right now because of the team and market. They can always go back to the big company experience if it doesn’t work out.

Mentorship: One concern engineers, especially juniors, can have about working at a smaller startup is they won’t learn best practices and the “right” way to do things. It will help a lot if you have experienced engineers on your team who would be willing to provide mentorship. If you do be sure to tell the candidate this.

For candidates who would need to relocate to the Bay Area, they may be frightened by the cost of living, which has both increased in dollars and frequency of press coverage. While this is ultimately a personal decision for the candidate I have been surprised by how often even engineers don’t take an analytical approach to running the numbers to be sure what their actual cost of living would be. You can be proactive about this. Don’t assume that when a candidate says they don’t think they can afford to live in the Bay Area that they’ve run through the numbers. If you really want them to join then spend time helping them think through this. You can create a spreadsheet template with cost of living assumptions and work through this together with them to figure out what their real monthly income would be. We also wrote a blog post talking through the pros and cons in detail that you could share.

Feedback and Iterate

No company has a 100% offer acceptance rate and you will inevitably miss out on closing candidates you really wanted. That’s an inevitable part of hiring and it sucks. Use every rejected offer as an opportunity to gather data on how you can improve your hiring process and pitch. Do a quick exit interview with each candidate and ask for feedback on why they made the decision and their general feedback on the quality of your hiring process. Review these regularly with your team and use them to iterate and improve your interviewing and closing process over time.

If you treat optimizing this process like you would optimizing your product you will see improved conversions and have more success hiring. Good luck!

If you’re hiring engineers and would like to try Triplebyte, use this link to sign up and you’ll get a special $15,000 hiring fee for your first hire

Speed

First Call

Technical Phone Screen

Onsite Interview

Making The Offer

Culture

Closing

Exploding Offers

Big Company Competition and Bay Area Relocation

Feedback and Iterate

Author

Harj Taggar