Before we dive in, I wanted to thank Anthony Louis, a Recruitment Manager at Beacon, for contributing to this week’s newsletter. Beacon provides talent solutions for the modern era. You can find Anthony on LinkedIn and Twitter.
I want to also thank Hilliary Turnipseed of Hill Street Strategies for contributing. Find Hilliary on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Alright, let’s get to it.
The TL;DR
Create a MOC
Craft a compelling job description
Diversify your sourcing
Empower your people
Create a talent pool
Leverage sourcing tools and resources
Your team is your startup. No team? No startup. So how do you get the right people on your team to go from an idea to a look-mom-we-made-it company?
As Alex MacCaw, Founder of Clearbit says:
Sourcing good candidates is the hardest part of the recruiting process to make time for, and the easiest part of the process to procrastinate on. It requires a good network, a lot of grunt work sifting through that network, and a lot of rejection. Quite frankly, if you allow it, the process can be really dull.
However, there is no alternative. Clearbit's success hinges on our ability to source great candidates. A good rule of thumb is that every offer requires 10–15 candidates, which requires contacting 100 quality candidates.
It’s clear you need to source a lot of candidates to find the right ones for your company and that this part of the process is important. However, it’s just the starting point.
Finding the right candidates and getting them to join your team are two different things. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves 😉 We’ll go through how to close candidates in a future edition, for now, let’s map out the playbook for sourcing.
Start with the MOC
Before you start sourcing candidates, you have to be very clear about what you’re looking for and the direction you’re heading.
Obvious, perhaps, but advice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, might help cement it in your mind:
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don't much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.
Once you have that understanding of where you want to get to and the type of team you want to build, you can use the MOC (Mission, outcomes, competencies) framework mentioned by Jon Dahl in last week’s edition of Startup Hiring to draft the job description.
Craft a Compelling Job Description
You can’t talk about sourcing candidates without mentioning job descriptions.
Anthony Louis offered up this advice on how to stand out when crafting yours:
Skip the industry fluff and colorful adjectives that describe "engineering gurus" or "marketing ninjas" – this is a huge turn-off. Your job description should tell your founder's story, value prop, and include very specific bullets of the role's outcomes. The most positive feedback I've gotten from candidates is when the candidate said they can truly envision what their day-to-day would look like based on the job description.
We’ll dive deeper into job descriptions in an upcoming newsletter, but it’s important to remember how candidates find these career opportunities in the first place.
Yes, these will often be posted on job boards or other career sites, but as Fred Wilson of USV mentions, jobs pages are important too:
Your company should have a jobs page. Even if you are a five person startup, you should have one. It should articulate what it is like to work at your company and list any open jobs. It should be linked to at the bottom of your webpage, right next to the link to your about page. This is important. Don't put it off. Here is Etsy's "careers page". It's a good example of what you want to do on your jobs page.
Now that you have created the MOC and job description, you can move on to the how and where of sourcing candidates.
Diversify Your Sourcing
As I previously mentioned, diverse teams outperform homogenous teams.
Building these diverse high-performing teams starts at the top of the funnel and at the early stages of your company.
For years the idea of a pipeline problem has been the excuse for the lack of diversity in tech, but this myth has repeatedly been debunked.
Of course, this isn’t altogether intentional. As Hilliary Turnipseed wrote about, we got to this point because we tend to:
Hire who we know
Hire who reminds us of us
Hire people in our “trusted” network
To be clear, you should leverage your network to source candidates, which we’ll get into shortly, but it’s problematic when this is the only way you source candidates, especially early on.
Looking beyond your network, these are some excellent places to source a diverse group of candidates:
Empower Your People
As soon as an employee joins your startup, they can help you source great candidates for future hires.
Fred Wilson mentions an entrepreneur he knows who likes to ask this question early-on with employees:
Who is the most talented person you have ever worked with and whom you would love to work with again?
I love this as part of the sourcing process, especially as companies scale, because it has a compounding effect of adding candidates to a startup’s talent pool.
Furthermore, as Anthony Louis mentioned to me, you can also attract talent to your company and build awareness through social media with founders and employees talking about the company.
A few founders who’ve done a great job leveraging social media for this:
Alex and Austin from Morning Brew
Taylor Nieman from Toucan
Twitter, in particular, is an incredibly powerful platform for building your team:
Lastly, when it comes to empowering your people to help you source candidates, employee referrals are going to be critical.
You can set up an employee referral program and, as your company grows, use source-a-thons to leverage the networks of people on your team to build your talent pool, which we’ll cover next.
Create a Talent Pool
If you're diligent in your hiring process, leveraging an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Lever or Greenhouse, and keeping tabs on why candidates might not have been a good fit at that time, you’ll start to build a pool of talent to source from later as your hiring needs evolve.
To further grow this talent pool, you can leverage those employee referrals we discussed earlier as well as any outbound sourcing efforts with potential candidates who could be a fit for future roles.
These candidates could be people who work for your competitors, at companies that were recently acquired, or that you find through tools like LinkedIn Recruiter.
The important piece to remember is this:
Top talent isn’t on the market long, and the majority of people you could hire, aren’t actively looking for a job.
Leverage Sourcing Tools and Resources
A plethora of hiring tools exist today, I’ve included a few of them below, but in addition to these, you can also work with recruiters to handle your hiring needs. We’ll dive deeper into working with recruiters in an upcoming edition of the newsletter, so watch out for that soon.
LinkedIn Recruiter - An all-encompassing hiring platform for talent professionals
Greenhouse - An applicant tracking system and recruiting software
Gem - A platform for modern recruiting
SeekOut - AI-powered platform for recruiting
Github - Where the world builds software
Sourcing.io - A platform for sourcing talent software engineers
Jobvite - An applicant trackings system and recruiting software
AngelList Recruit - A suite of products that helps you find, connect, and hire startup-ready talent
Hired.com - A curated pool of responsive top tech talent actively seeking their next role
Triplebyte - A platform for sourcing and hiring great engineers
Hiretual - AI-powered global talent platform
Underdog.io - Handpicked startup talent delivered every week
Rainmakers - A platform for recruiting top-performing salespeople
Fetcher.ai - A full-service recruiting automation platform
Bolster - An on-demand executive talent marketplace
Lever - An end-to-end talent acquisition platform
TopFunnel - A platform for sourcing talent (Thanks, Deon Nicholas for the suggestion)
Interviewing.io - A platform for hiring engineers
Teamable - An intelligent employee referral platform
Covey - The world’s first collaborative sourcing CRM
Reply.io - A sales engagement platform that helps you automate & scale multichannel outreach
Sources
The process for sourcing talent - Hunter and Satya of Homebrew
The Manager’s Handbook - Alex MacCaw of Clearbit
Startup Recruiting Part 3: Sourcing - Upsider
How to Start a Startup - Paul Graham
Recruiting Active vs. Passive Candidates - Beamery
Thanks for reading this week’s edition of Startup Hiring!
Best,
Justin
Director of Marketing and Community at Vitalize Venture Capital
Host of Just Go Grind and Talking Venture