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How to hire engineers for your startup (2023)

Raymond Guo
Jan 29, 2023
How to hire engineers for your startup (2023) image

Hiring your first engineer can be challenging. As a founder, you’re stretched for time and financial resources. Traditional recruiting methods that are used by larger tech companies might not be as effective for your early-stage startup.

As a founder, there are many competing demands on your time, including fixing bugs, closing deals, and addressing other issues. Finding time for hiring can be difficult, and the process can be quite tedious.

One thing to remember is that hiring decisions often involve trade-offs, such as quality of hire vs speed of hire and the associated cost with each method. As a founder, you need to determine which trade-off is best for your company and stage.

Once you’ve created some job descriptions and included them on your website, it's time to start finding candidates. Here are methods I’ve seen being used at other startups as well as the methods used at my company Noon. I’m also ranking these options based on my experiences with each method.

Personal network

Finding the right candidate is difficult but leveraging your personal network is key. Of course, one of my favorite methods is to hire someone you have already worked with. Not only are you aware of how well you work together, but it’s a lot easier convincing someone who already trusts you personally and professionally.

Hiring from your personal network can definitely be uncomfortable as you have to relentlessly hammer through your personal network. A good place to start is to go through your LinkedIn network and start creating a list of the best engineers you know. To magnify your efforts, you can ask them for intros to other candidates and repeat the process to create a larger list of people to reach out to. This is definitely a tedious task so be prepared to spend a significant amount of time on this task.

I always tell founders that the first two to four engineering hires should be from your personal network. However, as your team grows, you should start supplementing with other hiring strategies, so your team has a strong diversity of thought and personalities.

Cold outreach

Sourcing candidates through cold outreach is the most sustainable way to get the exact talent you want. This method of recruiting involves sending emails or LinkedIn InMail to engineers and pitching them to your company. You want to make your message stands out by personalizing it to the individual by mentioning specific parts about their professional background that might make them a good fit for the role and company. To maximize response rates, it is often most effective to follow up multiple times, so you stay top of mind for them.

It is important to note that this approach can be time-consuming and draining, as the majority of messages sent may not receive a response. To optimize your efforts and save time, consider using tools like Noon or Gem which allow the automation of most of these processes. For instance, Noon is used by several of the most talent-dense startups from Retool to Replit to reach the exact candidates you want, at the scale you want, while highly personalizing each interaction.

Hiring marketplaces

Hiring marketplaces are platforms where candidates and companies can connect. These platforms offer job seekers more options and employers a faster hiring process. Typically, people who sign up on these hiring marketplaces are more actively looking. From my experiences using hiring marketplaces in the past, I’ve generally found the candidates to be lower quality since top talent are typically more passive and get poached through cold outreach before they even put themselves on hiring marketplace platforms. Additionally, marketplaces typically charge a fee for each hire, which can be quite costly for startups.

On these platforms, you will have to compete with other companies for the same candidates. Anecdotally, I’ve seen larger companies with more established engineering teams have more success than early-stage folks.

Despite these drawbacks, marketplaces can still be an important resource in your toolkit for finding engineers who are open to work. They provide quick access to a pool of candidates and some marketplaces also require candidates to do technical evaluations which can save time.

Hiring an internal recruiter

I generally don’t recommend that early-stage startups hire internal recruiters until they start hiring year-round. If you’re looking for a few engineering hires and then won’t be hiring for the rest of the year, the ROI of hiring an internal recruiter probably doesn’t make much sense.

If you do choose to go down this route, you should find recruiters that work on a contract basis. For instance, you can agree on a rate per hour, how many hours they'll work per week, and for what period of time. Then, if they're consistently bringing in candidates, great! If not, you cancel the contract. Before working with a contract internal recruiter, make sure you've invested time in training them on how to pitch your company well. If I was in this position, I'd give them all the information they need on the company, give them a day to prepare, and then ask them to pitch it back to you. If they do well, hire them!

Recruiting Agencies

From my experience, recruiting agencies are hit-or-miss. There are a couple of reasons why I’ve ranked agencies last - many of which definitely stem from my own personal experiences working with a few agencies in the past. I’ve found that agencies tend to give companies candidates that are not as highly sought after in the job market. I’ve found that the best engineers usually aren’t interested in working with these firms and the ones that do, are usually speaking with multiple companies at the same time. I’ve come across very few startups that have successfully made their first engineering hire through an agency, and usually, the time and money invested in working with an agency don’t pan out. A quick clarification though: I do think agencies are a great way to make executive-level hires for later stage companies.

Conclusion

Hiring is one of the biggest challenges every founder has to face. A good way to think about hiring is to take a similar approach to fundraising. You want to refine your pitch and match the message to candidates. Generally, you should focus more on the interesting product challenges that come with the startup vs pitching the market size to investors.

Once you have a good understanding of what resonates with engineers about your company, you can then double down on that message and your outreach. As with everything in the world of startups, you’ll face lots of rejection at first, and it will certainly be a grind. But it will be all worth it once you find that superstar teammate!

If you're currently hiring engineers and would like to try out Noon, use this link to sign up, and you’ll get a 45-day trial!