#11: Getting more candidates to hire
Unconventional activities to flood your interview funnel with great candidates
Throughout my career, I have recruited over a hundred people and grown teams from scratch at multiple startups.
Hiring early team members at a startup is critical. Yet many founders and managers struggle to find enough candidates to fill in the recruitment pipeline.
Unlike bigger companies, startups don't have a recognizable brand name yet. And we don't have an army of recruiters to help us scout.
So how can we unlock a flood of qualified candidates?
One of the most likely answers is just to work harder. But working harder without a clear plan will likely waste our efforts.
We have limited time but unlimited work, so we must prioritize high-leverage activities.
I learned the hard way and had to figure out what works best by trial and error after spending hundreds of hours.
But lucky for you, here’s here are eight high-leverage actions to get more candidates for your startup:
1. Ask your high performers to refer their top friends
Referrals are how great teams get built. It can get the ball running on your initial pipeline. And the quality of candidates from referrals is higher than candidates applying online on your website or through job platforms. Your team members only want to refer good candidates, especially if they will work together later.
More than half of my hires came from employee referrals. The rate should be similar to other startups. And onboarding them is easier because they already know team members who have worked there.
2. Set a referral party session for your team members to focus on referring
When I was at Twitter, I went into a session where we would come and refer candidates in exchange for cool swag. It inspired me to start a session at my company where we invite employees and give them snacks. They then would sit down and put down the name and emails of their friends that they think would be a good fit for the company.
Whenever I do this, after a couple of hours, we would have more than 200 candidates ready to contact.
3. After each interview, ask the top three friends they know
At the end of every interview, regardless of how the interview goes, I would ask the candidate who are their top three friends working in the field. Just knowing their full names are enough. Even better if the candidate can help introduce you to their friends.
Do this for a couple more iterations, and you will have an exponential candidate database. And once in a while, a specific candidate pool will be saturated. It happens when the people recommended to you are already in your database. It is a good sign because you have exhausted that pool and won't leave anything on the table. Now time to move to another pool.
4. Whenever you meet people, ask the top three friends they know
Generalizing on the previous action, now not only after an interview but also anyone you meet.
If the person you meet is more senior, you can be more specific in your ask. And be more general in your intention. Not only for recruiting but also for learning and networking. For example, who are the best mobile engineers you have heard of? Or, who are the best product people that I can learn from?
5. Cold message strong candidates on LinkedIn or Twitter
When you don't have a team yet, cold messaging is the easiest method to get started. Before messaging people you don't know, start with people you already know. Tell them you are building something and want to hire the founding team members.
And what works best is if you do the cold messaging on your own. Founders or hiring managers have a higher reply rate than recruiters. If you have recruiters and would like to still get the benefits, ask them to operate your LinkedIn account on your behalf.
Here's a cold message template that I often use:
Hi {First Name},
I'm Irfan, co-founder & CTO of Lumina, a job & community tech startup backed by Y Combinator & Alpha JWC.
I found your profile impressive for a {Role Name} role at Lumina.
Let me know if you are open to chatting, reply with your WA number & we'll take it from here :)
If you want an even higher reply rate, you can show some proof that you have taken a look at their profile. And share how exactly their profile matches what you are looking for.
6. Arrange group dinners with candidates you admire and pay for it
Back when I was in college, a veteran CTO of the biggest national conglomerates invited me and some other engineering candidates to a dinner. It was an exciting experience to meet both the CTO and the other candidates.
Years later, I hosted multiple dinners with various candidates. Usually in a small group of 7-10 people. We can build more intimate connections. And we can assess more of someone's personality during an in-person session. As a bonus, the participants will remember the dinner long after the session ends, like I did.
Don't brand this as a recruiting dinner. Call this a regular dinner catchup or a mixer. Let them bring one or two of their own friends. Interesting connections might happen that otherwise would not.
7. Host or sponsor a community meetup
If you want to scale your dinner further, say to a group of 40-50 people, you can host or sponsor a community meetup. In Silicon Valley, it is common for companies, especially smaller startups, to host a meetup at their office. If you want to host one, you need to provide the venue, some light dinner, and two or three people to give talks. The hassle is that you need to find the participants on your own, which may not be easy.
When you sponsor a community meetup, you only need to provide the venue and some snacks, while the community organizer will handle the marketing and the meetup logistics. It is fairly easy to find meetups that you can sponsor. Websites such as Meetup.com, Eventbrite, and Luma have many communities with recurring meetups.
You can set up a small booth for people to stop by or go around and talk to everyone. It is easy to bump into people who are open for opportunities and you can assess them on the spot.
After the meetup, you can message the participants and ask if they would be interested in interviewing for your company.
8. Engage headhunting firms or freelance recruiters
When you have secured some initial funding, moving fast is very important, and you may want to capitalize on that momentum. Engaging headhunting firms or freelance recruiters make more sense than recruiting yourself. They will save you a lot of time.
Headhunting firms and freelance recruiters only charge you when you hire candidates coming from their pipeline. If you have the budget, this is an easy win. You will have vastly more candidates and interviews while only paying for the successful hires.
Most of them also have a sensible refund policy. If the candidate doesn't perform as expected or leaves the company within three months, they will refund your money or will help you look for a replacement for free.
Hiring the right people may make or break your startup. So, ensuring you have a healthy funnel to get your next hire is essential.
Threads
Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter, finally arrives yesterday. And I think it’s pretty decent. The UI is clean. The critical features are there. And you can import your Instagram followings into the new app.
In one day, it attracted a whopping 30 million users. Since I am also an active Instagram user, albeit only to stay in touch with my real-life friends, I find this a refreshing scenery. I communicate through visual means on Instagram. And it has been a long time since I communicate with my real-life friends in open spaces through texts.
I don’t think Twitter will get killed yet. It will still have decent usage with its current user base, as it has been in the past ten years.
I joined Twitter almost fifteen years ago, in 2008, one or two years after it launched. I witnessed many evolution of the platform. I even worked there for two summers and saw the company's inside workings. In every town hall meeting, we would iterate the company's mission, to make every voice heard. We would listen to stories where underserved users’ voices are being amplified for the better. We would listen to how the platform impact democracies around the world.
I believe Threads also has the same mission. And with the current progress, I’m rooting for it to succeed.
Let’s connect on Threads here: https://www.threads.net/@irfan3.me
Top Finds
Greg Brockman is a legend in the tech industry. Before being known as the Co-founder, CTO, and subsequently President of OpenAI, he was the first engineer and CTO of Stripe. In this short interview during his early years at Stripe, he talks about how he does recruiting. Many of my hiring philosophies are inspired by him.
Paul English is also a legend in the tech industry. In this article he wrote in 2002, he shared his criteria for hiring (bandwidth, attitude, experience, and lack of dysfunctional behavior). He then shared his principles to hire for his startup.
In a world where every piece of writing becomes AI-generated or corporate-speak, writing like a human is a special art. Be real. And write like a person. Your words will be unique because only you can be you.
Have a good week folks!
Nice insights 👍🏿