In late 2009, I created an online persona named Pete London – a self-described JavaScript ninja – to help attract and hire the best JavaScript recruiters. While I never hired a recruiter from the experiment, I learned a ton about how to compete in today’s Silicon Valley talent war. Based upon two years of non-scientific research, here’s what you should know…
The Recruiting Crisis
In late 2009, my desk was piled with JavaScript resumes. Our homegrown JavaScript framework edged us over competitors but maintaining our technical advantage meant carefully crafting a lean, delta-force Web team. Though I averaged two interviews a day, we had only grown the team by three-four engineers each year.
However, in 2010, that had to change. It was our first year with a real revenue target and also the first time we planned to pivot from our original IM product. We charted our end-of-year goals, quarterly milestones, and eventually backtracked to our team and hiring priorities. To meet our 2010 goals, I needed to double the JavaScript team in just one quarter. If I didn’t, innovation would stall and without revenue, our business would be in serious jeopardy.
I had very little more to give. Over the previous four years, I had already spent my personal networks, seeded every nook of the Web with job descriptions, and experimented with guerilla recruiting tactics like hosting JavaScript meetups across the country, planting hand-written congratulatory notes on the seats of CS Stanford students who’d just finished their finals, coding a spidering engine to find online JavaScript resumes, and even buying Google AdWords for relevant terms like xmlhttp, opendatabase, and localstorage.
But then my recruiting problem went from serious to heart-stopping dire. In the final months of 2009, every female on Meebo’s recruiting team became pregnant within a month of each other. We were searching for contract replacements but as winter crept closer, finding someone who could temporarily step up to our extraordinary JavaScript challenges during our most critical hiring quarter looked unlikely. I was truly on my own.
PETE LONDON IS BORN
I needed amazing recruiters desperately. After the third expectant mother relayed her good news, I sunk into to my chair overwhelmed with urgency and stared blankly at my monitor thinking over and over, “Oh my god, what do I do now?” My first impulse was to look at the recruiters in my Inbox – specifically those who had pinged me for a Javascript role and presumably had prior Javascript recruiting experience. However, I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder.
The honeypot idea emerged slowly, “If only I weren’t a founder! Which recruiters would have contacted me as an engineer?” I stewed on the idea of posting my resume online with a fictitious name for days and then one sleepless night, without telling anyone, I woke up and posted a small three-page website with an about page, resume, and blog for a supposed Pete London whose interests and engineering persona mirrored my own except he wasn’t a founder. I swapped out my post-graduate experience with my husband so it wouldn’t be too easy to trace back to me. I returned to bed with a small glimmer of hope – I had been hunting for recruiters for months but now the recruiters would come to me!
LAST RESORT – LINKEDIN
My hopes sank pretty quickly. PeteLondon.com sat alone in Internet ether for weeks with absolutely nada activity. I was about to pull down the entire site when I thought – I’ll just post the resume on LinkedIn as a last resort.
Bam. It was as if I’d finally stumbled upon the door to the party.
On December 10th, 2009, the first LinkedIn message arrived from Google. Mozilla followed on December 15th. Ning and Facebook followed in January. Since then, Pete averaged a recruiter ping every 40 hours and saw 530 emails from 382 recruiters across 172 organizations.
* Q1 2009 and Q2 2012 data are not complete. Data collection began December 10th, 2009 and ended June 1, 2012
WHAT I LEARNED
After two and a half years, I learned less about recruiting recruiters and more about recruiting engineers. Here are my eight biggest take-aways to finding the best talent online…
Lesson 1: Recruiters rely exclusively upon LinkedIn
You might be thinking, “Really? This is obvious!” But understand the context. I was interviewing tech recruiters who said they had “moved beyond LinkedIn.” LinkedIn was a “crutch for everyone else” but them. When I asked what techniques they used to fulfill JavaScript roles, they’d describe complex Boolean queries, highway 101 billboards, and obscure search engines. I ate it up! But at the same time, I wondered, “Wait, if this is all true, why hasn’t anyone found Pete London yet?”
To further my confusion, LinkedIn wasn’t how Meebo found its initial superstar JavaScript team. From 2005-20011, only one JavaScript team member was hired via LinkedIn – the rest came from personal networking, meetups, blog scouting, and other guerilla recruiting approaches.
I also assumed that a professional who made their living from recruiting, would want to optimize their response rate and would seek out ways to contact Pete London beyond LinkedIn. Though Pete London’s website and personal email address were just one click from his LinkedIn profile page, the majority of emails still arrived via LinkedIn – especially from larger companies.
Surprisingly, very few recruiters tried more than one communication channel.
TIP #1: If you’re a start-up who always feels like you’re scraping the bottom of the LinkedIn barrel, you’re probably right – LinkedIn is incredibly competitive. Recruit latent talent off the grid.
TIP #2: Recruiters flock to LinkedIn first, if not always. To increase your personal opportunities, join LinkedIn.
Lesson 2: Fear the Silicon Valley long tail
When I wrote to potential engineers, I always imagined my email landing next to recruiting giants like Google or Facebook. As a result, I was careful to emphasize Meebo’s unique start-up learning opportunities, amazing culture, and the opportunity to make impact.
However, my strategy was misguided. The Silicon Valley companies that drew TechCrunch headlines from 2010-2012 (i.e. Adobe, Amazon, AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Microsoft, Mozilla, Skype, Twitter, Yahoo, Zynga) only represented 15% of the landscape.
But I should have been more scared than I was – the emails from start-ups and mid-sized companies sounded nearly identical (my own included), “We’re a fast-growing start-up disrupting a lucrative space where your talents will shine and your efforts will be amply rewarded.” By emphasizing the classic start-up experience, everyone sounded exactly the same:
Larger companies employed an entirely different strategy and anecdotally, I saw more terse, canned emails from larger companies than start-ups. To quantitatively compare strategies, I went through all emails and noted whether the recruiter included role details, company information, or if the email was personalized specifically to Pete. I was incredibly lenient and gave points whenever I could. By almost every metric, the larger companies performed weakest: smallest word count (114 vs. 148 words per email), least likely to describe the company mission or personalize email, and least likely to use a personal email address. However, large companies hired triple the number of recruiters and made up for their shortcomings in volume. Pete heard from an average of 1.4 recruiters at each start-up and 4.6 recruiters at each large company.
You might assume that with more internal recruiters, big companies would do better than start-ups who depend more upon external recruiters. After all, big companies have had more time, resources, infrastructure to make this a key strategic asset. But it turns out you don’t want to emulate the big guys and you also don’t want to assume they are your stiffest competition.
TIP #3: Your real recruiting nemesis is the start-up down the street. Pitch your job opportunities with more specificity than “fast-paced, innovative startup.”
Lesson 3: The recruiting landscape isn’t just filled with recruiters
Only 97% of the recruiting emails can be attributed to traditional recruiting. So who represents the remaining 3%?
Surprise! VCs – specifically early-stage angel investors.
* Q1 2009 and Q2 2012 data are not complete. Data collection began December 10th, 2009 and ended June 1, 2012
Though they are a small lot, they are a super lethal bunch with an eye on your jugular artery – your revered first engineers who built your system from scratch. The charming VCs know that your prized engineers could fulfill a similar role at their future portfolio companies and set their hooks early. In most cases they don’t have a specific company or role in mind but are just proactively networking and hoping to be top-of-mind in the future. Given how interconnected and fast-moving the start-up world is, this might be inevitable but woah! good to know.
Your experience is exceptional and you have the type of background that should be apart of the network. If you are interested in learning more I would love the opportunity to speak with you in more detail. What we are looking to establish is a “go to” network of top notch individuals that would be a value add to our portfolio of companies. I hope to hear from you soon.”
TIP #4: Keep your engineers happy (i.e. free food, great people, & amazing challenges). When the VCs come knocking, make sure your MVP’s are glued in.
Lesson 4: Can a start-up rely upon external recruiting?
As a start-up, you are inevitably resource-starved. When you have the good fortune to gain traction, you have the setback of suffering infrastructure growing pains while realizing the only way to get ahead is to find time to recruit, interview, and close candidates. In the early days, external recruiters appeared on Meebo’s doorstep and promised to screen and pass along qualified candidates so I could turn my attention back to Friday’s release – it seemed like a dream come true!
However, the first people you hire set your engineering and cultural DNA for the lifetime of the organization and while you desperately need to hire well, can you depend upon external recruiters to step up to the task? Once the scaling challenges strike, does it make more sense to proactively hire a superstar in-house recruiter or to rely upon external recruiters to scale the engineering team?
The answer is surprising – external and internal recruiters perform similarly in start-up environments. Internal recruiters are 14% more likely to describe the position but 14% less likely to personalize the email.
However, larger companies don’t have a viable external recruiting option. External recruiters at the top companies were much weaker overall – 340% less likely to include a description of the role, 140% less likely to personalize their email, and 88% less likely to include detailed company information. Though larger company recruiters were relatively weak overall, in-house recruiters are their only viable option.
Given this significant performance difference, it’s no surprise that larger companies also employ far more internal recruiters than start-ups.
TIP #5: As a start-up, you can sleep easier knowing that external recruiters are a fantastic resource. Find your superstar engineers first and your superstar in-house recruiters second.
TIP #6: Contingency recruiting farms are financially incentivized to hire for less selective companies. For difficult roles, a dedicated contract recruiter may be your only realistic option.
However, before you get too excited about external recruiters, read further…
Lesson 5: Be careful whom you invite into your house
Unfortunately, it’s not all about the numbers. Though external recruiters perform well for start-ups, there’s another side to this story. It pains me to write this but I think it’s important to share…
Meebo employed lots of external recruiters when we were getting off the ground. We had standard 18-month no-poach restrictions with all of our contractors that specified that those recruiters were not allowed to contact Meebo employees within 18 months of our contract expiring. Most of those contracts expired in 2008-2009.
However, every recruiter and firm we’d worked with who was still in the recruiting business tried to poach Pete London.
Every single one!
It’s impossible to know whether our former recruiters were pinging employees during the no-poach period prior to 2009 but I wouldn’t be surprised. However, I doubt they were being malicious – it’s more likely they were just disorganized and didn’t communicate an off-limits list to their staff.
In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends! When I didn’t respond, they repeated the stunt again six weeks later. I got wind that they’d sent recruiting emails to everyone on our Engineering teams and I called them on it (without referencing Pete London). I never heard from them again.
“Hi Peter,
I am a recruiter who works with high-growth, top-tier start ups and industry leaders. I came across your information and was impressed with your background. I’m guessing you may not be actively looking for a new job right now, but I’m sure you plan on continuing to advance your career in the long term, and would be open to hear about opportunities that may accelerate that advancement.
I’d like to get a better idea of your interests and goals, so that I can identify and present to you a few of the most attractive opportunities in the market both now and in the future. You may be pleasantly surprised at what is out there for you. Let me know a good time and number to call you…”
“Hi Elaine,
I’m a recruiter… We specialize in the placement of technology professionals. I’ve been working with many excellent candidates from the space and researching companies for them. meebo came up in my search as a good company to consider, so I’d like to present some of these candidates to you for interviews.
Please call me or email me a good time and # to reach you…
Thanks and I look forward to working with you!”
The second case that made me uneasy involved a contractor recruiter who worked from Meebo’s office for nearly a year. During this time, the recruiter went to lunch with the team, participated in hackdays, and became close with many folks. Two years later, that recruiter poached Pete London and a few hours later, showed up at Meebo’s informal Friday happy hour! I was definitely in a queasy gray zone where there wasn’t a strong divide between our personal and professional relationship. Technically, it was hard to nail down any real grievances, but I was certainly aware that our teams were constantly under former recruiter attack.
External recruiters are an inevitable necessity for start-ups. But after seeing all of the emails that those external recruiters generated in subsequent years, I wish Meebo had switched to in-house recruiting sooner.
The external recruiters you work with today are good but they will learn your strengths, your team, and you’ll probably be uncomfortably top of mind later on.
TIP #7: External recruiters are a mixed blessing – be selective and switch to internal recruiters as soon as you can.
TIP #8: Push for at least 18-month no-poach policies with external recruiters.
Lesson #6: The most common little white lie is…
With very few exceptions, recruiter emails were well-written, smarmy-free, and didn’t smell of phishing. I expected far worse. However, if a little white lie is going to sneak into an email, it’s going to look like this…
Little white lies appeared across all recruiting groups and generally took the form, “I was referred to you” or “I’ve heard very good things.” While even unfounded flattery feels good, I learned to be suspicious of vague recruiter compliments.
TIP #9: Flattery will get you everywhere! Take recruiter praises with a healthy pinch of salt.
Lesson #7: It’s time to buy more hoodies
If you are a JavaScript engineer, you know that the talent market is increasingly competitive and you are inevitably feeling the pull of San Francisco. The demand for engineers has intensified over the last two years and recruiting activity has exploded in the foggy north.
* Q1 2009 and Q2 2012 data are not complete. Data collection began December 10th, 2009 and stopped on June 1, 2012
It’s impossible to ignore the momentum that is growing in San Francisco. If I were a start-up getting off the ground today, I would start in San Francisco. In 2011, Meebo saw more of its JavaScript engineers hailing from SF than from Mountain View for the first time. While it’s exciting that there are more geographic options to start a tech company, it’s also time to recognize that companies need strategies for geographically dispersed teams and for recruiting from different areas of the Peninsula.
TIP #10: As the city of Palo Alto or Mountain View, I would make sure that resident tech companies are happy and that public transportation is a top priority.
TIP #11: When writing to candidates, specify where your office is located – it’s no longer assumed that an opportunity is south of San Mateo unless otherwise specified.
TIP #12: The entrepreneurial epicenter is no longer Palo Alto. If you’re south of San Mateo, figure out your SF strategy now.
Lesson #8: Who’s the best in the valley?
You are.
There were 19 emails from managers, execs, founders, and board members who presumably had no professional background in recruiting. However, those non-recruiters collectively outperformed every other professional recruiting segment – scoring just as high or higher by every metric: email quality, outreach technique, and word count. No matter how many recruiters you hire, there is no substitute for a heart-felt note from a future manager.
However, managers have responsibilities beyond recruiting and it’s not realistic to spend eight hours a day reading resumes and penning candidate emails – professional recruiters are a necessity. However, most managers probably hope to hire a recruiter who does the job better than themselves. Of all of the emails Pete received, only 40% of the recruiter emails scored better than the average manager who actively sought out Pete London. And within this top 40%, there were proportionately more start-up recruiters than any other segment.
TIP #13: Look for recruiters with start-up backgrounds rather than large companies.
TIP #14: Hire the best recruiters and treat them like gold. If a product is only as good as its team, then the product is only as good as its recruiting team.
SUMMARY
Of the 382 recruiters, there was only one recruiter who actually figured it out. To do so, he did one thing that no other recruiter did – picked up the phone and called someone who should have been connected to Pete to ask for an introduction. And that’s where the ruse unraveled. If there were one recruiter I would have partnered with during my toughest hiring crunch ever, it would have been him.
However, that recruiter had also recruited for Meebo the prior year and he shouldn’t have been poaching Pete London from our team. He apologized. In the end, the honeypot ended up identifying the one amazing recruiter I already knew about but couldn’t justify working with again.
Ultimately, our recruiting challenge was solved by hiring more JavaScript managers who could help recruit too.
In the next blog post, I’ll examine the “best recruiters of silicon valley” more. With their permission, I’ll list the top five recruiters and a few email snippets.
Stay tuned!
169 responses to “the recruiter honeypot”
Great write up, thanks! I’ve sent it along to some of our portfolio companies.
Elaine, what a diligently and well written post. Thank you. It’s a great story. The recruiting model is clearly incestuous and just does not work… until now. I would absolutely love to get your feedback on our company, http://Geekli.st please feel free to reach out rkatz (at) geekli.st – truly, this is a wonderful explanation of just how bad it really is.
While you say that your research isn’t scientific, it’s more useful than any ‘scientific’ research. It’s logical, justified, useful and trustworthy. Thank you!
Oh my gosh – thank you so much for the kind words Indradeep, Reuben, and Rob. Happy to share the insights and hopefully this will help folks strategize their team-building efforts.
Meebo recruiters spammed everyone too 🙂
“I was intrigued reading this to see what my inbox would say about Meebo’s recruiting.
In May 2010 a recruiter spammed the Hadoop mailing lists with a “Data Engineer (Analytics)” in MV. A month later I was blessed with an email from the same recruiter for the same job sent to my @apache address. Another month later he posted the job on LI’s Hadoop group.
Fast-forward one year, a new recruiter spammed the mahout user mailing list saying he was looking for “Engineers with Machine Learning expertise”.
Finally 2 months later I got an email sent to my @apache address from the second recruiter for a “Data Engineering Lead” position.
So it seems that they haven’t used LI a lot and mostly rely on those “other channels” and direct emails. I personally find it disrespectful to send recruiting emails to user mailing lists but I guess recruiters don’t know/care about it.”
Wow, great article elaine, i am a BI consultant who is just about to switch from my current job.. this gives me nice picture as to what i should and what i shouldnt be doing :_
wow, what a great post! I am just about to start recruiting (as the hiring manager) for a startup I’m working on and knew things were heated, but had no idea they had reached this level of piranha-tank frenzy. thanks for going into such detail. BTW, I love the line drawings– do you do those yourself? Nathan
Tremendous post, thank you so much for gathering, analyzing, and sharing such a trove of data. Love the Thurberesque illustrations too.
The point that that sticks out the most to me is the level of reliance on LinkedIn. They’re great and all, but there are so many other sources of professional data online (hello, Github!), as well as services that aggregate and analyze a broad spectrum of sources (self-serving link: like my own company, Entelo). You’d think that at least some sliver of the recruiting world would seek advantage by expanding their horizons.
Hey Elaine, great analysis and recommendations on Pete London’s experience with recruiters. I am a recruiter and use LinkedIn extensively and make no bones about it as one of my main research and communication vehicles to candidates. The one piece of advise I would augment is to ask recruiters to give clients a 3 year no poach guarantee. 18 months is too soon and any start up recruiter worth their name would provide a longer term hands-off provision.
Surprising how many folks have created an online “alter ego” to help with recruiting. I thought I was the only “one”, until I heard from 3 other friends. Mine was a young php and Ruby developer in India. I must post my insights as well. Your post is very good Elaine.
Wow. This was a really interesting read. Thank you!
I’m a developer and tried going through a recruitment agency a while back per the suggestion of a coworker at the time. I did not like it. Seemed like they were going with the ‘throw everything including the kitchen sink at the wall and see what sticks’ approach.
Someone on Hacker News had an interesting comment on your article:
“I think recruiting is an industry thats ripe for disruption, especially for tech contractors and i’ve got a theory on how to do it, one day i’ll write a blog post on it but the basic premise is, instead of a sales strategy, i’d like to see a talent agent strategy.”
What are your thoughts on a “talent agency” for developers?
[…] on the demand side, check out this interesting graphic from Elaine Werry, co-founder of […]
@Charles: there was just such an agency for developers in the game industry, “Digital Arts Management” that treated its recruits as “talent”, and its product management teams were presenting their respective client companies’ jobs to me on a regular, almost daily basis.
Amusingly, half the positions they presented were on a “no-shop no-poach” agreement with my then-current company, and I had to send them my regrets about it. One dude presented three different New England-area companies, and hit the trifecta… all three were verbotten.
DAM is now a shadow of its former self, since the capital markets locked up in 2008 and most funding for MMO-style games dried up.
Hi Elaine, this is one of the most useful post about recruiting in the Valley that I have ever read. I am starting a new project and this advice has been very welcome 🙂
Elaine, thanks for this incredibly insightful and detailed post. I’m an early user of Meebo and as a developer/entrepreneur myself, I’ve always been interested in the stories behind the company.
It’s great to hear a bit more about how you were getting creative behind the scenes in ways I never would have expected from the outside.
Thanks again!
I think you would be better off without “no poaching” requirement.
If your relationships with your engineers are good – they will not quit, and if not … number of recruiters you ever worked with is nothing in comparison with number of recruiters that never gave you “no poaching” guarantee.
Awesome article, and thanks for pointing out the power of LinkedIn. Gonna use it when I’m unemployed 😉
Very good article, other than the usual California BS. Sorry, but California is regularly and consistently ranked the worst state in the country in which to start and run a business. I’ll pass, thanks, and stay in a state that wants my business there.
Hi Elaine! This is pretty awesome, thanks for writing it!
I do have one concern… I believe the label on a typical honeypot describes the contents of the jar–typically “honey.” cf this illustration: http://www.clipartguide.com/_named_clipart_images/0511-1010-0413-1168_Cartoon_of_a_Bear_Holding_a_Honey_Pot_clipart_image.jpg (for the point at hand please disregard the adorable bear).
My concern is that your jar is labeled “recruiter,” and, well, I guess I don’t want people to get the wrong idea.
Mark, you crack me up. Thanks for sharing your concern and I’ll keep an eye out for any unintended confusion.
Elaine, solid write-up. Thanks for sharing! FWIW the geo-searching capability on Github is a great way to find talent. Pre-quals them to be passionate enough to be doing side projs and better than a resume to be able see the work product they’re capable of:
https://github.com/search?q=+location%3Asan_francisco&repo=&langOverride=&start_value=1&type=Users&language=JavaScript
Freakin’ awesome post. Just digesting and sending out to my whole team now.
Hi Elaine,
This is such a great post. I’ve worked with a couple of internal recruiters at Meebo they were awesome. I still remember talking to them about when they went on maternity leave at the same time. It must have been rough but it’s awesome that you guys pulled through 🙂
This pretty much summed up my experience and similar research. I was an engineering director and was frustrated with trying to find the right talent for my company. As a developer, I also saw this from the other side. Constant contact from recruiters on Linkedin, bad intro e-mails, jobs I wasn’t right for, etc. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a better way to do this. Like a true engineer, I set out to go do something about it.
@charlesh, I’m building a company trying to disrupt the recruiting business.
Very interesting post! I have been working as a recruiter in Silicon Valley since 1997, and have used LinkedIn and other tools extensively to hire software talent for Salesforce, Symantec, & 10+ start-ups. Hiring right now is as competitive as I have ever seen it, and it is really hard to hire software talent.
Some thoughts:
1) The “no poaching” for 18 months should be a no brainer for any recruiter. I never talk to candidates as long as they are working at client companies, even if it is 5+ years. Companies pay me a fee to find them talent, not to pull their top developers.
2) LinkedIn is an ok tool, but has a very low hit rate, whether you do a personalized e-mail or a bulk mail/form letter. I used to spend lots of time on individualized inmails, but the extra time spent did not result in better candidates. I now send out a form letter which gives a general overview of what I work on, and invite people to contact me if they want more details.
3) Engineering managers who interview 50+ candidates and do not hire would be better served by a retained search firm, where a fee is paid up front. If I am working contingent search, I stop working with managers who chew up and spit out qualified candidates, usually for superfluous reasons. It is impossible to make a living as a contingent recruiter if your clients do not hire some decent percentage of your candidates.
4) Internal recruiters (most of the time) do not work hard unless given an per-hire incentive and usually drive mediocre results. Moreover, they have very limited tools compared to agency recruiters. My first step in recruiting is to contact thousands of people about the job with a brief letter. It literally would take 6 months for an internal recruiter to contact as many people. Quantity is not quality, but getting the word out to as many qualified people is part of the job.
5) My best results for today come from the work I did in 2005-2009. Gosh, those entry level candidates that I did data entry on from 2005 are now engineers with 7 years experience!
6) Anyone who complains about recruiters spamming them haven’t been on the other side of the hiring fence. I regularly get complimented by hiring managers for hitting up their “ghost” profile on the web. If you were hit up 4+ times by Meebo recruiters, that is just a sign they were doing their job.
7) It is really, really hard to not inadvertently contact people from client companies. I have a database with 30k+ engineers in the Bay Area and it is impossible to not both be recruiting for a company and sending e-mails to employees in it as well. It is quite possible to accidently contact engineers – which can be misconstrued as poaching.
8) The best hiring managers will have incredibly close relationships with very few recruiters/agencies. If you want good results, go with one or two good recruiters, and hire the best people from them. When you have a strong recruiter sending you their best people, good things happen for both parties. Recruiting the right people takes time, and burning through recruiters is a waste of time/energy for all involved.
But a good post – very interesting to hear what hiring managers have to say about recruiters!
-Mark
Mark — Thanks for sharing your perspective and I appreciate hearing how different practices make sense for different circumstances. I thought your retained search tip was especially interesting. I’ve seen retained search work well with exec-level roles but not with engineering or design roles. Am I mistaken? We tried retaining an amazing recruiter early at Meebo but were burned when that recruiter virtually disappeared after the upfront payment. Perhaps we were too gun-shy after that?
Has picking up the phone become obsolete? Yes, I send a lot of email and was one of the first 2000 linkedin users but i still call candidates every day.
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One of the best blog posts I’ve read all year. Thank you for taking the time to write and publish this. Thank you.
Woah – that’s a huge compliment. Thank you so much Oren! Happy to do it!
One of the best blog posts I’ve read all year. Thank you for taking the time to write and publish this. Thank you. And if someone else has already posted these thoughts, well, you deserve to get more love, so I’m posting this again. 🙂
What a great article! I know you might not be actively looking for a job right now, but I’d love to talk to you about an opportunity for which I think you’d be a great fit…
Seriously though – relentless! Very enjoyable read.
Elaine – really enjoyed this post. Thanks for sharing.
This is one of the greatest summaries of startup recruiting that I have ever read. If a startup is relying upon recruiters whom are using LinkedIn to recruit their team, they’re DOA. The communication channels in LinkedIn are all but snuffed out. Too many opportunities to look at (almost by the minute) and not enough engineers to look at them. The email/inmail blackhole is officially upon us. Anyone remember how great DICE was back in the day? Until every dipshit recruiter on the planet started using it and then the profiles when dark… no names, no contact numbers, no current company info, no email responses. LinkedIn is pretty much there for engineering recruiting if you’re using it to connect with potential recruits directly. Its main purpose now is a place for a prospect to do some research and find personal connections before the decide to engage with a company about an opportunity. Video is the recruiting tool of the new era. We’ve been using it effectively for over 2 years now because it is unique vs the standard canned email approach, they get much better responses, tell a succinct story, shows the company culture and opportunity better than a call from a recruiter (lets face it, engineers don’t want to speak with most recruiters in the first place.)
We’re still out there building teams effectively, its just that the game has completely changed. So too have the tactics.
Some other advice to startups… great recruiters are very few. And when you find one and engage, include stock options/equity as part of their incentive. For that reason alone, we will never poach from a current or former clients.
Great post Elaine. Bravo. Happy Hunting
I am really impressed with how well written the recruiter letters seemed to be. Unfortunately, a well written form letter is no substition for common sense. Thanks for the fantastic article. I am sure this will ignite a huge discussion in my recruiter network. And by the way, next time you need a terrific recruiter give me a call for recommendations. TW: @tiffsterr
Elaine, thank you for an incredibly interesting and useful post. Do you use any software to keep track of resumes, talks with potential engineers and notes about them?
Hi Andrey — We used Taleo at Meebo to track candidates with moderate success. Personally, I kept a separate notebook for interviews. I also experimented with using LiveScribe which made it easy to digitally archive hand-written notes. That worked well too. Good luck with your recruiting and hope this helps!
This is a terrific post. Thanks for sharing
Wow, wow, wow. I’m absolutely floored by today’s overwhelming response. Thanks so much to all of you who took the time to comment or tweet – it’s always nice to hear what does and doesn’t resonate with others and I appreciate all feedback. I especially appreciate the hackernews discussions about new ways to approach recruiting. I’d love to see more innovation in this area and loved following along in today’s conversation. Thank you again!
Wonderful post. I have been working in the business for many years and I have to say that this is really true story. I just would like to say that without LinkedIN recruitment was really “fun” and challenge. I know only a few recruiters who are innovative.
Inspirational
Why not just pay more and save yourself all this trouble?
I’m an independent recruiter in the UK and although we don’t suffer from the enormous competition on Linkedin as the Bay Area, it’s definitely heading that way….
My advice for start-ups in the Bay Area… try and get a recruiter from EMEA… our sourcing strategies need to extend well beyond Linkedin as a much smaller % of the population resides there…
That said, you can devise the very best social-media strategies and you could send 100’s of inmails/emails weekly… nothing beats a well thought out head-hunt call! 🙂
This blog is possibly the best blog post I’ve read ALL YEAR… well worth 20 minutes of my time!
Recruitment is tough… FACT.. if it was easy then everyone would be doing it! BUT, you can be the best recruiter in the world… you still need a company that WANTS to hire and by that I mean you need to work with managers who are willing to invest time and energy in the recruitment process… from my experience, that’s the biggest differentiator between getting someone good on-board or starting the process again!
Really great read!
Elaine, what a fantastic post. Well written and super educational. Thank you for sharing!
Ahh… I remember I discovered a “hidden” method of applying for jobs on your website once. I thought it was quite crazy and awesome. dont know if you had any success with it though.
Won’t disclose the method, in case you still have it.
I didn’t need the job 🙂
[…] the recruiter honeypot […]
This is a great blog & scientific enough for me. I’m not on west coast but I wonder how different the scene would be at east startup arena.
What about StackOverflow ? Does recruiting from there fall into the “hack” category ?
Or it’s not that high on the startup food chain ?
Best wishes though 😎
Great piece – it just shows that integrity is always something you should be teaching your recruiters just like in any other business profession. People need to be celebrating great ethics and relationships both internally and externally.
Good business is good business, hold on to the people you trust and respect and treat them right – especially recruiters.
The best recruiter in the Valley is Joanna Samuels of JOALT.
[…] Reflections on “the recruiter honeypot” Eddie Awad tweeted about Elaine Wherry‘s experiment with the recruiter honeypot. […]
Elaine, outstanding post! Very informative. I’ve been a hiring manager for over 20 years. It’s a great time to be in the software development biz!
Very insightful article indeed. As an external recruiter for 10+ yrs in the engineering space, there’s a lot to learn here about effective techniques. You also raise the ethical debate all contigency recruiters face at some point. Is it “poaching” when an engineer puts their resume out for public consumption? Blasting emails to your entire engineering team is absolutely a blatant, uneducated attempt to poach your folks. But a specific individual, i.e. Pete London, listing their resume, blog and interest to talk about the markets…isn’t that a bit different? The best engineers aren’t doing this anymore, but if Pete’s resume was loaded into Dice, would you expect all the agencies you’ve signed agreements with not to call him?
Recruiting is about relationships, right? 6 of your Jscript hires came through your team’s relationships/referrals. I’m always fascinated by the shifting definition of relationships in our business. The best recruiters are applauded for having a stable of strong relationships with talented engineers. You want access to that relationship when you agree to work with an external recruiter, and you’re thrilled when they deliver you a great candidate for the need. But then that relationship needs to cease to exist, immediately, and for an 18 month period thereafter. No phone calls. No emails. Really?
A disgruntled, unhappy Javascript engineer on the Meebo team today is going to find 6 offers by next Friday if they want to explore the market. If they contact me with their concerns and I know they’re starting a job search am I supposed to turn them away because I’ve done business with you in the past? You might be surprised to hear that my first question to that candidate would be to ask if they’ve exhausted all internal channels to remedy/improve the situation. If they haven’t lifted a finger to have a single conversation about their concerns, I’m staring a counteroffer situation square in the face and I want nothing to do with that. But if they have spoken to their management and the situation isn’t improving for the better, should I wish them luck on their search and move on to meet some new engineer I’ve never spoken to before?
I so often feel clients want to use recruiters in a strict “black and white” way, yet the reality of the entire business is set in a fluid, cyclical manner. Situations change (Meebo gets purchased and your product is shut down). People change (i’m tired of Javascript coding). The most effective recruiters are aware of these changes so it’s ironic how that knowledge can be so welcomed when a resume is submitted and then so castigated once an offer is accepted. The best recruiters never poach from their clients but they also never stop listening.
I expect to get slammed on parts of this post because of how many contigency recruiters are severely underqualified in our field. They are the ones who do send “check-in” emails at the 90-day mark with that week’s hottest new client. I’ll apologize in advance for any experience you have with that slice of our industry. I hope this post finds support from the group of us who try and toe the fine line between the “rules of engagement” and the actual reality of how life/business works. It is an important, delicate ethical balance but it’s a required balance if you’re going to be effective.
hi Elaine, great article, thanks for sharing! Really enjoyed reading it, especially tip#14 🙂
What a hoot! Where do I begin?
1. This “javascript engineer” (I call myself a “programmer”) isn’t even on LinkedIn. Tried it. Useless. I say Javascript/Python/C, recruiters spam me with lame-ass Java jobs.
2. Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Fransisco… there’s a difference? Not that I care… I came to Western MA to get away from big-city bullshit.
3. What’s with the marked decline in recruiting in Q1-Q2 2012… bubble 2.0 popping? Now I’m REALLY wary of silicon valley.
4. Most job postings are crap. Scams, even.
5. Hiring is even harder than finding a job (which is pretty damn hard, unless you’re an engineer in Silicon Valley). Here I am swamped with dev work, and I have to help my manager write job ads, screen resumes as they trickle in (I’m talking small companies in 1999, 2009), and help them interview the bullshitters who sneak past their untrained filters… CS and MBA grads (“software=$$$”), layed-off IBMers (“oh, I don’t actually write code”), cocky PHP noobs…. yeah, it takes 6+ months to find someone good.
6. Online recruiting decayed into buzzword matching years ago. On either side, referrals are the only way to go anymore… and then you’d still be wise to test the waters with contract projects.
7. Qualifications, schmalifications. The best programmers are the self-taught kids (once they’ve matured) and the ones who learned on the job. If they even have degrees, look for art, history, math, science, english… not the departments that scream “OUR GRADS EARN TOP DOLLAR!” 🙂
Elaine – You seem insane. The fact that you were trying to recruit JavaScript recruiters is crazy. What kind of world are we living in? I suggest you leave Silicon Valley immediately if you haven’t already.