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”
Love this post, thanks for sharing!
Another illuminating thing for me along the Pete London lines has been answering the phone for the public # on our site for the past week.
Recruiters call asking for our director of dev ops, data scientist, cto, designers etc. having no idea they are talking to the founder/ceo of the company. The volume of these sorts of calls has been staggering.
When I ask what their call is regarding they say some variation of “I just have a technical question for so and so” – I passed along the calls at the beginning of the week, just to confirm they were recruiters, but everyone got sick of it. I was very surprised at the volume and frequency (and hang ups) that I received by the end of the week when I started to press on what they were actually calling about. Been an illuminating week for me and reconfirms a lot of your points above.
Wow. As someone who has been recruiting software engineers for about 15 years, this is the most in-depth look into the recruiting world that I’ve seen from a non-recruiter perspective. The poaching element surprises me, as I would have hoped at least one recruiter would have showed some ethical standards. I’m guessing this post will also lead to dozens of recruiters vying for your business and telling you how different they are. Keep the faith that there are reputable, ethical, and capable recruiters out there – but unfortunately those recruiters may be harder to find than JavaScript talent.
Thanks Elaine,
This is one of the best post I have read, not only about the info, but the flow, design (love the images), analysis, and lesson/tip sections. Even for someone outside of programming/JavaScript world, this was something I could relate to (hiring) and the insight you provide was very usable.
Thanks again,
John Blue @TruffleMedia
I’ll second Dave Fecak – as a 15+ year recruiter it’s very disappointing to hear that not a single recruiter was able to keep themselves from poaching their former client.
I’m curious about some of your scoring criteria. If you’re scoring higher with greater word count, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good indicator. If an engineer is assailed by a wall of text when they open their email, the chances of them actually reading it are slim to none. Agreed that personalization is good, but less can be more.
-Chris
Thanks for the informative, insightful post on your experiences with recruiting and recruiters.
I really enjoyed this article. Very well written and impressed by the amount of time and analysis that went into the preperation. From my experience the findings are spot on.
This is a strong and thoughtful article. However (yes I’m a tech recruiter) there’s a really key part of what makes a good recruiter great and a company strong at recruiting and that is this: The Recruiter is Not Solely Responsible For Finding Great Talent. To quote a former colleague “our employees are our best recruiters”. ALL employees represent their company even if it’s just passively, and hiring managers need to have this as an expectation on their own job descriptions that they need to be partnering with the recruiting team to find great talent.
There needs to be a culture where this is encouraged:
* Having a great employee referral program is an obvious one (nothing under 4 digit bonuses, btw – remember these are taxed as bonuses so you can almost cut that bonus in half for the referrer).
* Then there are things I like to call “tag-teaming”:
– I don’t EVER go to job fairs without an engineer by my side – I can talk overall about the company, but he/she has the street cred and I’m not going to be cocky like some are to pretend I know exactly what it’s like to be an engineer. I’m going to take care of my candidates from start to finish, work with my technical team to create great technical prescreens and efficient processes, connect prospects and candidates with the right people, set up informational interviews so they can get a true idea of the company beyond the job posting/website, and give them great customer service (no matter who they know or don’t know at my company).
– My hiring manager has to OK the job posting and his/her team should look at it and say “yes, this gives a good representation of the work I do and why it’s cool.”
– Hiring managers and engineers need to be Tweeting – whether it’s RT-ing the recruiter’s job post tweets, or doing their own customized version, this (and LinkedIn, and whatever other social media sites) is huge. Think about it – I have about 250 followers, but my CEO? He has 2700. My engineers have 200-500. Do the math 🙂
– I partner with my hiring team when it comes to user groups/lists/etc. I know that my percentage of response could be less than my DevOps guy who posts the “talk to a real guy who does the work!” type of post. It’s not taking away from their work – it’s allowing them to be a part of the hiring process to make sure the candidates are a good fit for our team from the get go.
– Bringing the hiring team together and not being afraid to question how the job is being advertised or even the requirements we say we need. Are we not finding folks who meet all 15 of the requirements? Where can we be flexible? Can we grow someone into the role we need or MUST they be a rockstar? Would it be better to switch around the order of who talks to them first, how we interview, etc.? This is why recruiting is a partnership.
– Recruiting is PR. Whether you’re at an industry event, user group meeting, blogging, whatever, you and your team are billboards for your company. Check Glassdoor.com and see what people say about your process. It can be insightful.
It’s important that management understand the recruiter a business partner – not an administrative person. Respect what they bring to the table and educate them on what they need to know technically, and it can be a really beneficial partnership, getting you the people you need who are as obsessed about a great product and great culture as you are.
Hi Elaine, I agree with most of your post, but see recruiting from a different perspective.
Recruiters are best served talking to people. Someone’s resume may look great on the paper, but only when you talk with with the person can you determine if they are a great match for your company. The best recruiters don’t only understand the job requirements and what the hiring manager looks for, they get a feel if the candidate is a great cultural match. For a startup looking to grow, culture is as important as technical skills. External agencies can help generate candidate flow and build a candidate funnel, but internal recruiters should be experts on the company culture.
The easiest or fastest way to reach people is through LinkedIn. It might not be the most effective, but if your goal is to reach several people quickly, then it is very efficient. Since a recruiter needs to talk with several candidates to determine company cultural fit, they should use tools that allow then to reach several people. I’ve used TalentBin, Entelo, Bright, Gild, GitHub, StackOverflow, Quora, BranchOut, Facebook, Twitter MeetUps, etc. with ok results, but I keep going back to LinkedIn.
I feel this post would be more helpful in giving lessons on how to generate a funnel of candidates who match your company culture. If you know your companies culture and know where your employees are hanging out (Hacker News, Meetups, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) Then you can build a strategy around what is the best way to reach out to your company culture pool, who should send the message and what the message should be. By spending more time fostering relationships in this community will keep a steady pipeline of candidate. Nurturing this pool of people will enable your company to be proactive in recruiting and you won’t face the situation of being desperate for candidates. When you are reactive to hiring and desperate for candidates companies make more mistakes in recruiting.
Elaine, this is an incredible post. I love the images you used along with the treasure trove of data. This is one I will have to pass along to my portfolio companies.
Hi Elaine, I found this blog post very eye opening. It was refreshing for me to see a hiring manager/co-founder so interested in recruiting and seeking understanding through some very creative avenues. This blog post is the most insightful modern piece on current day tech recruiting I have even seen. It’s great to see that other co-founders appreciate the war for talent and that talent is one major key differentiator between a successful organization and one that fails.
Thank You
-Joe
This is a strong and thoughtful article.
However (yes I’m a tech recruiter) there’s a really key part of what makes a good recruiter great and a company strong at recruiting and that is this: The Recruiter is Not Solely Responsible For Finding Great Talent. To quote a former colleague “our employees are our best recruiters”. ALL employees represent their company even if it’s just passively, and hiring managers need to have this as an expectation on their own job descriptions that they need to be partnering with the recruiting team to find great talent.
There needs to be a culture where this is encouraged:
* Having a great employee referral program is an obvious one (nothing under 4 digit bonuses, btw – remember these are taxed as bonuses so you can almost cut that bonus in half for the referrer).
* Then there are things I like to call “tag-teaming”:
– I don’t EVER go to job fairs without an engineer by my side – I can talk overall about the company, but he/she has the street cred and I’m not going to be cocky like some are to pretend I know exactly what it’s like to be an engineer. I’m going to take care of my candidates from start to finish, work with my technical team to create great technical prescreens and efficient processes, connect prospects and candidates with the right people, set up informational interviews so they can get a true idea of the company beyond the job posting/website, and give them great customer service (no matter who they know or don’t know at my company).
– My hiring manager has to OK the job posting and his/her team should look at it and say “yes, this gives a good representation of the work I do and why it’s cool.”
– Hiring managers and engineers need to be Tweeting – whether it’s RT-ing the recruiter’s job post tweets, or doing their own customized version, this (and LinkedIn, and whatever other social media sites) is huge. Think about it – I have about 250 followers, but my CEO? He has 2700. My engineers have 200-500. Do the math 🙂
– I partner with my hiring team when it comes to user groups/lists/etc. I know that my percentage of response could be less than my DevOps guy who posts the “talk to a real guy who does the work!” type of post. It’s not taking away from their work – it’s allowing them to be a part of the hiring process to make sure the candidates are a good fit for our team from the get go.
– Bringing the hiring team together and not being afraid to question how the job is being advertised or even the requirements we say we need. Are we not finding folks who meet all 15 of the requirements? Where can we be flexible? Can we grow someone into the role we need or MUST they be a rockstar? Would it be better to switch around the order of who talks to them first, how we interview, etc.? This is why recruiting is a partnership.
Recruiting, whether it comes from a recruiter or another employee/manager, is PR. Whether you’re at an industry event, user group meeting, blogging, whatever, you and your team are billboards for your company. Check Glassdoor.com and see what people say about your process. It can be insightful. Get involved outside of traditional tech events. Ask your contacts if they have anyone they can recommend – your good relationship with them, even if they personally aren’t looking, can result in great referrals.
It’s important that management understand the recruiter a business partner – not an administrative person. Ask for what they’ve seen work at other companies as well as the rest of your hiring team. Find out what makes your recruiter successful and solicit their ideas. Respecting what the recruiter brings to the table in expertise & experience, while also educating them on what you need, can result in a really beneficial partnership, getting you the people you need on your team who are as obsessed about a great product and great culture as you are.
This is a strong and thoughtful article, but is missing accountability in one area – joint accountability for hiring.
However (yes I’m a tech recruiter), there’s a really key part of what makes a good recruiter great and a company strong at recruiting and that is this: The Recruiter is Not Solely Responsible For Finding Great Talent – not internal, not external. To quote a former colleague “our employees are our best recruiters”. ALL employees represent their company even if it’s just passively, and hiring managers need to have this as an expectation on their own job descriptions that they need to be partnering with the recruiting team to find great talent, and out there themselves looking for people, attending the events, etc.
There needs to be a culture where this is encouraged:
* Having a great employee referral program is an obvious one (nothing under 4 digit bonuses, btw – remember these are taxed as bonuses so you can almost cut that bonus in half for the referrer).
* Then there are things I like to call “tag-teaming”:
– I don’t EVER go to job fairs without an engineer by my side – I can talk overall about the company, but he/she has the street cred and I’m not going to be cocky like some are to pretend I know exactly what it’s like to be an engineer. I’m going to take care of my candidates from start to finish, work with my technical team to create great technical prescreens and efficient processes, connect prospects and candidates with the right people, set up informational interviews so they can get a true idea of the company beyond the job posting/website, and give them great customer service (no matter who they know or don’t know at my company).
– My hiring manager has to OK the job posting and his/her team should look at it and say “yes, this gives a good representation of the work I do and why it’s cool.”
– Hiring managers and engineers need to be Tweeting – whether it’s RT-ing the recruiter’s job post tweets, or doing their own customized version, this (and LinkedIn, and whatever other social media sites) is huge. Think about it – I have about 250 followers, but my CEO? He has 2700. My engineers have 200-500. Do the math 🙂
– I partner with my hiring team when it comes to user groups/lists/etc. I know that my percentage of response could be less than my DevOps guy who posts the “talk to a real guy who does the work!” type of post. It’s not taking away from their work – it’s allowing them to be a part of the hiring process to make sure the candidates are a good fit for our team from the get go.
– Bringing the hiring team together and not being afraid to question how the job is being advertised or even the requirements we say we need. Are we not finding folks who meet all 15 of the requirements? Where can we be flexible? Can we grow someone into the role we need or MUST they be a rockstar? Would it be better to switch around the order of who talks to them first, how we interview, etc.? This is why recruiting is a partnership.
Recruiting, whether it comes from a recruiter or another employee/manager, is PR. Whether you’re at an industry event, user group meeting, blogging, whatever, you and your team are billboards for your company. Check Glassdoor.com and see what people say about your process. It can be insightful. Get involved outside of traditional tech events. Ask your contacts if they have anyone they can recommend – your good relationship with them, even if they personally aren’t looking, can result in great referrals.
Something to remember? Internal recruiters get no incentive like outside agencies do – as someone who’s worked in both worlds, I am always curious why so few companies provide incentives for internal recruiters. Think about what kind of metrics you can create – not just quantity, not just time to fill, but quality of candidate experience, etc.
It’s important that management understand the recruiter a business partner – not an administrative person. Ask for what they’ve seen work at other companies as well as the rest of your hiring team. Find out what makes your recruiter successful and solicit their ideas. Respecting what the recruiter brings to the table in expertise & experience, while also educating them on what you need, can result in a really beneficial partnership, getting you the people you need on your team who are as obsessed about a great product and great culture as you are.
I have two brief points to make on the topic of poaching, including a question for Elaine.
1. When I worked as a tech recruiter at an agency on the east coast, we were strictly advised of “no poaching” rules and adhered to these rules all the time. Mistakes were made (rookie recruiters not knowing all the past client company names yet, etc.) on occasion but the ethics of recruiting were taken very seriously.
2. My question for Elaine is, if she interviewed an average of two candidates a day, and only hired four that year…when hiring ramped up, how many candidate interviews would it take, before an offer was extended? I’m wondering if, all the external agencies who were engaged, and spun their wheels producing candidate after candidate, simply tired out, and decided Meebo wasn’t worth it? Perhaps they came to the conclusion that it’s a better source to recruit from, than to recruit for.
My personal opinion, is that if you to talk to 10 or more candidates from one recruiting agency without extending an offer, you’re just abusing the contingency recruitment system. Contingency recruiters don’t make money that way. Currently, I have one startup client that has an HR Manager who has interviewed 10 of my engineering candidates, only to pass them all through to the development team, who will then request a code sample, and then, radio silence. I never hear back. And when I ask HR, they tell me they can’t get me feedback and don’t know what to say except to find “stronger” candidates. Ugh. To ensure I wasn’t completely wasting my time (though I already knew I was), I explained to HR that we needed to have a follow up conversation — but it seemed her lack of experience wasn’t helping the situation. And when I asked her if I could speak with the CTO, she just ignored my request. Clearly she doesn’t know what the heck is going on but there is nothing I can do to save the relationship, because every recruiter knows it’s the kiss of death once you go over HR’s head without their permission (and we already dislike each other). It’s a relationship gone bad, about to get worse….only a matter of time before I begin poaching their engineers for my other clients (my real clients, who actually don’t waste my time). Long story short, Elaine, I’m curious as to how many recruiting agencies you engaged, and of that number, how many actually produced candidates, and of that number, how many actually got paid by Meebo? It would take one, really, really stupid recruiting agency to poach from a paying client. But a non-paying client…. who just wasted their time….. that’s a different story!
As someone who has been on all the different sides of the recruiting fence (in-house, agency, contract, independent) I found this to be a fantastic article. I have always been tempted to post a dummy profile to see what the results look like. Thanks for taking the time to conduct this research. Most of this is not surprising, and is a neccessary reminder of best practices. I am also a believer in picking up the phone whenever possible. This is something I would prioritize when not working as an in-house recruiter. However, in my current role as an in-house recruiter, I find that I refrain from calling into other companies (unless I have a personal cell number) due to the ethical constrains and potential of receivng letters from corporate legal depts. I’m also sorry you have had such poor experiences with recruiters blatantly poaching back into your company. Unfortunately, the nature of the business, discourages meaningful business relationships. Especially when it comes to contingent search, where the recruiter takes on all of the risk and the hiring company takes on none. A successful relationship requires both parties to be commited to eachother and have some skin in the game. I have never been a fan of contingent because it’s so one-sided.
[…] basis. There was actually a story this morning on recruiters using LinkedIn almost exclusively: the recruiter honeypot*|*Elaine Wherry Quote + Reply to Thread « Previous Thread | Next Thread […]
Hi Elaine,
Excellent observations. They agree with what I and my employer have observed. I am a developer, but I’m also passionate about hiring. I wrote a book called Agile Hiring, that you might find useful. In it, I liken the external recruiter to a real estate agent the is representing both the buyer and the seller. There is a huge conflict of interest issue that few recruiters handle well (for either of the parties they represent).
I strongly agree with your point about hiring the best recruiters and treating them well. That goes for external recruiters. I’ve found it best to have a solid relationship with a high degree of communication and feedback regarding the candidates that are being provided.
Good luck on your hiring efforts. Things are pretty tough here in Salt Lake City. I can only imagine how rough it is in Silicon Valley!
Sean
Jeremy made my point – much more eloquently:
“Unfortunately, the nature of the business, discourages meaningful business relationships. Especially when it comes to contingent search, where the recruiter takes on all of the risk and the hiring company takes on none. A successful relationship requires both parties to be commited to each other and have some skin in the game.”
You make a big point about using in-house recruiters instead of contract recruiters because the latter will poach your people. Yet recruiting is a high turn-over field. I bet many in-house recruiters have similar job turnover characteristics to other recruiters (though perhaps not quite as bad as agency employees), which means chances are 18 months down the road your in-house recruiter will be working somewhere else, and be just as likely to poach your people.
Whoops my earlier comment didn’t post. What I was describing earlier, was a situation I am currently facing now as a contingent fee recruiter — one of my startup clients has been interviewing candidate after candidate, only to halt the process mid-way without even providing any feedback. (And I have been struggling with HR, a fairly inexperienced individual who has denied me access to the CTO and won’t offer or pass along any substantive feedback from the dev team, to ensure we’re moving in the proper direction or that might allow us to recalibrate.) My tenth candidate is currently in process, and I’m about to give up. I can’t be wasting my time like this. When a recruiter reaches his/her breaking point with a client, the recruiter will stop working on the search and face a new reality which is that the company does not have its act together, and as such, is probably a good place to find people who are similarly fed up. If HR doesn’t take the time to treat its external recruiters with respect, maybe the company isn’t treating HR with respect, and maybe the developers are feeling ignored too. It’s often a systemic problem when a successful recruiting relationship is not forged (and it’s not due to a lack of qualified candidates, because obviously they like who I’m finding because they keep interviewing them). That is when a recruiter turns into a poacher. When the client relationship ends, and never even got off the ground. But if a client has made placements with me, and put money in my pocket, I’m not going to bite the hand that feeds me.
This begs the question — how many of the recruiting agencies you engaged, actually made placements, and how many candidates would it take to result in one “deal”? If it’s more than 10, that’s your answer. No contingent firm will stick around for those odds. I’m suspicious because of the statistic you offered of interviewing two candidates a day, but only hiring four developers that year. Unless you made a dozen more offers that got kicked, those odds are pretty dismal for a contingent recruiting firm!
This is a scary statistic:
“Though I averaged two interviews a day, we had only grown the team by three-four engineers each year.”
Big agencies keep track of statistics like this. At my old recruiting firm, if we recognized that Company A was interviewing 10 candidates a week, for 2 weeks straight, without making a hire, we’d cut our losses and move onto the next client. Rule of thumb is 7 interviews should equal a placement.
Of course, recruiters always hope for better stats, but that’s the average. I don’t know what your average was….10/week x 50 weeks 500 candidates for 4 hires? Did it improve when you got agency recruiters involved? Did they benefit from the relationship? Or did you have too many agencies, splitting up the pie? If each agency is making 1 placement a year, but sending dozens of candidates per quarter…that’s hardly a worthwhile relationship one would want to maintain.
My advice would be to use only one or two reputable agencies.
Fantastic! This article was sent to me by one of my customers. He stately that I echo several things mentioned and asked if I had read it. I had not – I was on vacation during the last week. He forwarded it to me while we were discussing a role, recommendations, business plans, and management styles.
I found this article insightful even though itis slightly damning to my side of the recruiting desk. The commentary is equally amazing.
To Jeremy Reid – I plan to borrow some of that comment about risk. I will work to give you credit when I do so.
Wow. All I can say, if your company was so behind in what needed to be done to be successful, I wonder how much more successful it would have been if you had paid attention to “Engineering” and doing your job – and less time putting together this article?
The “honeypot” of recruiters come at a price. They are paid well to conduct themselves ethically and honestly. I feel that your article is intended to be demeaning to a segment of industry that provides/provided you and others with great service.
Consider this, your company makes software. A tangible real product. Recruiters wade through mountains of CRAP to get to the best candidates. Most of the time, we are doing this FREE for our clients, hoping we will get paid for that service.
Our product is people. People lie, say “yes” when they mean “no”.
Recruiters are expected to be mind-readers…looking for a job? Recruiters are awesome! Become a hiring manager with a budget and NEED a recruiter, all of a sudden we are pariahs? I don’t think so.
When Corporate America STARTS realizing they need to PAY for great recruiting and STOPS taking on recruiting companies that are the lowest cost, which gives you the lowest quality people (and representatives)….Then maybe there will be more quality to the industry.
Awesome article. Super interesting so hear about what goes on “behind the scenes”. And thanks for analyzing the data. It made it so much more interesting.
Very interesting read. I found this point the most interesting, “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.”
Brilliant stuff!
So true. Really tells my story as a Software Engineer.
Great post, I really enjoyed reading it.
“Though I averaged two interviews a day, we had only grown the team by three-four engineers each year.” – this sounds like a really bad ratio, are your standards ridiculously high or were you just interviewing random people off the street?
HI
just a small correction from a former veterinarian. The jugular is a vein. The closest thing to it that is an artery is the Carotid artery.
I found this interesting, though I’m a UK resident. It is insightful and well presented, though I’ll be honest I couldn’t read any of your quotations on my screen. The faded blue to black background with black text is totally unreadable and is quite out-of-balance with the rest of the pleasant style you use.
Great article. I agree with much of what Elaine says. I think that successful recruiters do rely on LinkedIn, but not in the way she describes. It is more of a “front door” to the world of talent; and needs to be used that way….otherwise it is a giant rat hole. A smart recruiter will use their entire body of knowledge as mental, contextual, scaffolding with which to navigate the world of LinkedIn. Then, use long and trusted relationships with the best and brightest to gain access to the rest of the non LinkedIn world, or those that are hidden on LinkedIn because the don’t have enough buzz words in their profile. Lastly, it is foolish to call anyone on LinkedIn without first somehow getting a reference on them. This way it is a warm call and not a call wasted on a marginal candidate. That’s my two cents!
[…] Valley recruiters more often than not appear to use LinkedIn for their recruitment needs. See The recruiter honeypot blog post by Meebo co-found Elaine Wherry and related Hacker News discussion for more on Silicon […]
Awesome post. Lots of insight for candidates too. If I was a javascript ninja (I’m not), I’d want to work for you.
Hi Elaine, Thanks for this – found via Joel Gascoigne at Buffer’s RT – a really interesting and detailed read. Whilst I am the other side of the pond, I’m nigh on certain that almost all of this holds true for the UK and European market too. To be completely honest there’s lots to mull over, but I’d like to reblog citing it and really look forward to next week’s article too; primarily to ascertain what precisely about their services made them stand out from the crowd. Thanks again, Steve
Great insight into the recruiting process and a good way to keep track of poachers!!
I would suggest a small correction in the article; the right term is “carotid artery” in place of “jugular artery”.
Interesting article. Here in Australia it would not be legal to have the non poaching rule AFTER someone has left your company. Surprised it is legal in the USA.
Nice piece of writing. It’s amazing how the web evens the playing field. So Meebo is sold to Google and then it is to be turned off on July 11th. Can we sublease your new Venice office for the summer? Hello Nimbuzz!
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Elaine – just wanted to say thank you for sharing these insights. This is the most eye-opening read I’ve seen all year – and I don’t say that lightly, working in the social recruiting space! I’ve shared with all my recruiter contacts as there’s so much in here for them to learn from. Thanks again for giving so freely of your insights and experiences.
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[…] in Miami. I would start looking for an interenship with some of those companies. Second, check out this article about finding a job in IT: In late 2009, I created an online persona named Pete London – a self-described […]
One of the best ways to make your company stand out when you want to hire and retain top level engineers is to offer top level benefits. Things like full time telecommute and unlimited PTO. These are advanced benefits that require advanced people managers to make them work properly; but offering them immediately places your company at the top of some rock star engineers’ “willing to consider” list. So many start ups fall into the cliched workplace model that they become interchangeable. The best way to make your start up attractive to superstar engineers is with superstar benefits.
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Excellent article, great readin – perhaps one of the most insightful articles I have ever read about my profession. Thansk!
I really enjoyed this post. I’ve encountered a lot of the same challenges with recruiters, including the supply and demand trick. LinkedIn is definitely swarming with recruiters and employers should expect that their employees are being contacted routinely. Keep them happy and you have little to fear.
Thanks again for sharing!
What’s the problem with a recruiter attempting to poach employees after the agreed to period has ended? Also, what’s the problem with poaching employee’s until the point of signing an agreement with a client? This article is biased and in the business of generating revenue unless there are binding contracts in place everything and everyone is fair game.
This is a great article. I learned a lot about what I have to do when it’s time for me to recruit tech talent.