A Startup Guide to Sourcing, Interviewing, Hiring, and Retaining Engineers in the Bay Area
In June of 2014, my wife and I packed up our three kids to head west from Philadelphia to the Bay Area so that I could lead engineering for a Series A startup, RealScout. It ended up being an incredible learning experience — a crash course in building great teams.
With the immense help of many great minds at RealScout, I built a pipeline of nearly 1000 candidates, conducted over 200 phone screens, ran 60 onsite interviews, extended 13 offers, and hired 8 engineers with 100% retention.
The following guide is everything I learned growing and cultivating the RealScout engineering team.
I hope it helps you on your path to build an incredible team too.
-Chris
As a new, relatively unknown startup, hiring great engineers in the Bay Area is tough.
There are startups with impressive teams of Stanford grads, Google alumni, and repeat entrepreneurs. There are big companies such as Facebook that offer very attractive compensation packages. Not to mention the organizations with insane growth trajectories paired with intriguing technical challenges.
In short, there is a lot of competition.
All is not lost though of course. With a good bit of perseverance, attention to detail, and time, you’ll have a cohesive team of engineers chomping at the bit to help you build a great company.
This guide is organized into four sections — Sourcing, Interviewing, Hiring and Retaining — along with a prerequisite chapter to kick things off:
- PREREQ — STANDING OUT. This is by far the most important thing you need to get right. Before you start sourcing and interviewing, be sure to take inventory of everything that makes your company attractive to engineers, so that you can start to hone your sales pitch. You will use this in all four areas below. (chapter link)
- PART 1 — SOURCING. In this section, I’ll show you what techniques and sources you should focus on to build the 1000+ engineer pipeline you’ll need to garner 10 hires. (chapter link)
- PART 2 — INTERVIEWING. At a startup, the interviewing process is an evaluation and sales pitch from both sides of the table. In the second part of this guide, I review what did and didn’t work during hundreds of interviews, so that you can efficiently evaluate and sell candidates on joining your team. (Coming January 3rd — Get notified via Twitter or Email)
- PART 3 —HIRING . You’ve just completed the final interview with a stellar candidate — what now? How do you craft the offer to convince the candidate to join your company? (Hint: It’s not compensation and an offer is much more than a PDF document.) This chapter shows you how to capitalize on your work during sourcing and interviewing to beat out competing offers that your top candidates are guaranteed to have. (Coming January 17th — Get notified via Twitter or Email)
- PART 4 — RETAINING. The median tenure at small companies could be as low as 18 months. Eighteen months! You’ve just spent months building pipeline, interviewing candidates, and actually convincing some of them to join your crazy startup — don’t tell me you want to do it all again in a year and a half. In this section, I weigh in on some factors that will help keep your engineers around for the long run. (Coming January 31st— Get notified via Twitter or Email)
Acknowledgements. Hat tip to Andrew Flachner for introducing me to many of the ideas in this guide. Thanks to Dawn Conley and Andrew Flachner for reviewing and improving these drafts.