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Life Is A Hire Way: 5 Tips For Startup Hiring
Apologies for the egregious pun (I considered "Hire Way To The Danger Zone" and "Hire Way To Hell" but wisely decided against them), but following hot on the heels of people talking about Aussie startups and Marty's incessant meme flirtation, I'm going to try to start my own meme - 5 tips for hiring.
Atlassian is growing. We haven't stopped hiring for the past 5 years. On average, we've hired one developer every month for the past 3 years. We have extremely low attrition.
Right now, it feels a little like we're in hyperdrive. We've sailed past 80 people and this week we have 6 new employees starting.
And the clincher? We currently have 27 open positions.
Shameless plug: Want a job? Refer a friend? See what life at Atlassian is like and view our open positions. (I also pay $USD 1k to any mates who refer an employee to Atlassian, if you're reading this blog I suppose you're a mate of mine!)
The Meme - Startup Hiring Tips
I want to talk about hiring in a startup. Share, read, learn - you know the drill.
It's a tough market to hire in around the world. The economy is in good shape. Tech is getting hotter every day. Good developers are like gold dust. Great product managers seem harder to find than water on Mars. So how do you hire?
I know a lot of other startups out there have clever hiring ideas. The techniques they use to convince people you're the place they want to work, the things they look for in employees, the filter questions they ask, the places they look for people, the innovative programs they've put together to find talented people.
Basically, anything that helps them find, select, attract and keep the right people.
Mike's 5 Startup Hiring Tips
Let me start the ball rolling - here's my 5 tips. I hope they're useful. If you share yours, please comment below!
(By the way I realise that giving these away might allow some people to "game the system" when trying to get a job at Atlassian. Then again, if you're reading my blog or you found this by searching the internet before your interview, well done - there's a good chance you're our type of person anyway!)
1. Recruiting Is Marketing
More often than not the best employees are the ones that find you, not the ones you go out and look for. The problem a lot of startups have is, how do I get more people to find me? Simple - think of it as a marketing exercise.
How do you get people to buy your product? Explain it's benefits on your website and then make sure people can find out about it.
How do you get people hire good people? Explain what it's like to work for you (in real language, no HR platitudes thanks), what you look for in people and then make sure people find out about it.
We've done this in a few ways. We have always clearly explained on our website what we look for in every employee but we never really told people what it was like to work at Atlassian until recently. Quite a few people who came to work here said the actual job was better than they expected - which is a lovely thing to say but really meant that we didn't do a good job of marketing ourselves to potential employees.
Thus the genesis of the Life At Atlassian page. The aim is to simply show people what the office looks like, what their co-workers do, what blogs we write, what events they can expect during a year - to make them feel comfortable and keen to work here. If you're doing cool things to keep employees (like Marty) be sure that people can find them when they're investigating your company. In the 2 or 3 months it has been live, we've already hired someone who said it was a deciding factor in applying - score one!
(Oh, and please - no generic stock photography!)
Want more examples? The Omni Group's hiring page has always been one of my favourites for their honesty and the feel I get for the company from just reading it. Even small firms (like FreshView) can do a good job of selling themselves, it's a small investment to make.
2. Trust Your Team
You've hired smart people already right? You think your team is the best on the planet. So put them in front of candidates! Don't hide them in a back room. Too many people have their HR people do most of the interviewing.
I've had at least two or three new hires mention to me that one of the reasons they decided to come work for Atlassian was because they felt they wanted to work with the guys across the table in their interview. I want people go back to their existing job after an interview, look around at their co-workers and thing "You know what? Those guys at Atlassian were much more fun / smart / interesting than these guys. I could learn from them. I should go work there."
For example, in our developer interviewing process - you'll talk to at least 4 different engineers (phone interviews, tech interviews, pair coding tests), our HR director and probably one of two founders. I love our team, so I make damn sure to put them in front of anyone I want to add to it.
3. You Don't Win With Money
I'd like to politely disagree with all those entrepreneurs I meet who think that the simple way to hire a good team is to throw money at the problem.
In choosing a place to work people look at the company, the role, the people, the environment and the money. Pretty much in that order, but it's important to keep balance among all the variables.
As long as the money is competitive (and this is key), the other factors should decide the final outcome. Money doesn't win people over, money prevents you from losing them. It gets you in the game. People value their time and while you might be able to 'buy it' with an outrageous salary that's a temporary measure. They'll eventually realise that doing a boring job 10 hours a day for huge dollars isn't the way they want to spend their life. It's not a way to build a company, it's a short term band aid strategy.
You don't win people with a lot of money and I'd say you don't want to. People who chose a job purely on the larger salary are probably people you don't want on your team anyway. That said, the corollary here is that you can definitely lose people with money. If you're not paying what the market is or your firm just pays really low salaries, people will go elsewhere. It's all about balance.
4. Make Space For Smart People
Sometimes people come along who don't fit into any existing role. We encourage it on our website by saying that if you want to come and work for us, but we don't have a job ad that matches your skills - send your resume along anyway and we'll see what we can do. Some of our best hires have come this way.
At the same time, don't be afraid to redirect a candidate if you feel they're interviewing for the wrong job. I've created a number of roles on the spot when I met someone, because they were smart, I wanted them on the team and I felt they could fill a need we had.
For example, last year I was interviewing Michael for a role but he didn't seem to fit. I'm sure he would have done a fine job, but the person position match wasn't right to me. However I knew that hosted services was something we were considering doing and given his background he seemed to have all the qualifications we would looking for if there was a role. So what did we do? I brainstormed a role in the interview, asked for his input, he got instantly excited about the possibility and the rest is history (incidentally read How you know you hired the right guy... for the detail).
Stewart Mader (our wiki evangelist) was hired exactly the same way. After a meeting about his upcoming Wikis In Education book late last year, everyone around the table spontaneously decided that Stewart would make a brilliant evangelist for us - he knew about wikis, he was passionate to the extreme, smart, fun, got-things-done (he just wrote a book!) and would be a great addition to the company generally. The amusing thing? Before the meeting we had no plans to hire an evangelist, he just seemed to fit. We made space for a smart person.
5. Know When To Fold'em
The hire-or-don't-hire decision is critical. Why is this decision so important? The damage a wrong choice can do to morale, to your product, to your company should never be overstated. It's a little like poker, the most important and hardest skill to learn is when to fold a hand not when to bet. Not hiring a few good people is far better in the long term than hiring a few bad ones. Err on the side of caution.
Over time, we've developed some rules of thumb internally that help us evaluate this choice.
Try to develop rules that work for your organisation. Look at your best people, what do they have in common? Why are they the best? Is it because of the way they perform their job or is it something broader, the things they contribute to the company as a whole?
Here are 3 of our "gut check tests":
- Do you want him on your team? This is the number one question we ask our interviewers. Not do you think this person should work for the company, do you think they're good but do you want them on your team. Is working closely with them for the next year something you'd want to do?
- Does he pass the beer test? Basically, if I was in a bar with this person drinking beer (or juice, or tea or anything) are they interesting? Would I learn something from them? Would I want to stay? If so - they're probably someone I want to be around.
- Are they fired up, passionate, enthusiastic? Simply put, positive people make for positive teams in tough times. Passionate people rub off on the whole team. Try to find as many of them as possible, put 'em in a room and let 'em make magic.
Quickie Bonus Tip: No Keyword Hiring
This mostly applies to developers. Don't hire based on keywords in a resume. Some of the best people we've hired wouldn't pass a keyword test. Too many companies look for "JMS", "EJB 3" and "J2EE" and assume someone is a good developer. We don't look for people who know technologies, we try to look for people who are good at learning new technologies.
Tag!
So there you have it. I hope that was useful - love to hear you feedback, or your own tips.
Thusly, I'm going to tag a few CEOs I think know a little something about hiring to see if I can't learn something from them - Marty, Don, Graham, Nik and Mark - consider yourselves tagged! How do you build your teams?
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rebelutionary: Life Is A Hire Way: 5 Tips For Startup Hiring (tags: business2.0)
Having read a lot of resumes over the years, Jeffrey nails it in his post How to write a bad resume. Most mortals can fit their background on one page. After about ten years of experience, you might merit a...
Comments
Does Atlassian still qualify as a startup ? Surely not !
(I know, it must be hard to let go of the "feeling" - but you guys are part of the furniture now - so you have to stop riding that scooter to work and must ALWAYS be grumpy on a monday).
Took the bait: http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2007/03/01/how-we-hire-at-smugmug/
Passed it along, too. Hopefully the meme will spread...
I couldn't agree more, especially with your "No Keyword Hiring" tip! Most - if not all - recruitment agents make this mistake.
Another trap: Don't trap people into doing the same thing they've done all along. Just because they DID work in hosted services doesn't mean they want to work in hosted service now. Not referring to your case specifically just as an example. Speaking for myself, the longest furloughs I had (and none were all that long) were when I just didn't want any of the jobs offered because they were the same as the one I was leaving/left. The worst companies to work for are the caste-driven companies.
Don: thanks for following the meme! Great tips, I'd have to say that hiring from customers is another item I considered putting on my list. A huge number of our best staff have come because they've used our products, loved them and applied for a job.
Andy: good point and I completely agree. For the record in my example, Michael had done nothing at all to do with hosted services when we hired him. He had a lot of good analytical experience, passion for the products and excitement to take on a new challenge.
Another "litmus test" for hire/no-hire decision that I picked up from somewhere I don't remember: when trial period for the new team member is over, announce to the team that you are not going to hire this person. And watch the reaction. If noone objects emotionally, don't keep the candidate. If at least one team member goes furious about your decision, the test is passed.
Of course this test implies that the current team is passionate enough. This often is not the case. As with software design, you rarely do it right from the start. And there's no refactoring for people.
"when trial period for the new team member is over, announce to the team that you are not going to hire this person."
If someone did that to me, I'd be tempted to just keep walking out the door and find somewhere else to work. The moment your employer decides that clever mind-games are more important than straight dealing, it's time to go.
I read your blog from a long time, but today I had a feeling of being called to the board when talking about recruitment. Hiring good people is the most difficult and fascinating task in the company.
All you write is true - I use the same rules, but have never summarized them in such a friendly way.
What is important and confirmed by you - when I talk to the person, I try to fit position to this person, not the person to position. I can confirm that many of our best people pretended to roles which were not so good for them. They studied computer science, so they wanted to program. But I felt that they would be a good support or sales people, etc.
We look for young people. When someone starts his work as a student (usually half-time or summer practice), he gets to know the company, knows people and athmosphere and will come back after studies. So we recruit people on universities, give them interesting tasks, and they use their open minds to invite something interesting for the company.
And one of my interview tips - when I talk to the person, I ask him or her some questions from real today's life - e.q. about today's currency exchange rate, holidays, hobbies. People who are interested not only in work fit better in the company which pretends to be a company of people. Which wants people to fill good in a team.
And right - money is not the most important factor. Feeling to be a part of something, feeling of doing something big is more important.
PS. In contrary to other commentators I will not provide a link to my blog, because it is in Polish, and would be useless for most of readers ;-)
Make sure they can code:
1. Reverse an string, both iteratively and recursively
2. Convert 2 lists into a HashMap and vice versa.
3. Create a Doctor class that can be stored in a HashMap (make sure they understand they need to redefine equals and hashcode).
4. Make sure they know sockets.
5. Make sure they know design patterns.
[ Poto Rico: 1. Reverse an string, both iteratively and recursively ]
Unless you use java's StringBuilder I can almost guarantee that you're going to write a solution that doesn't work for Unicode. I'm not sure why people still use this problem.
Wonderful article! Mike really gets it: hiring process is a two-way highway. As much as you are trying to make sure you like whoever you are hiring, you are also trying to make THEM want to work for you and be excited about it.
It is sad to see how many employers miss this point. You have a shining example right here, in Poto Rico's response. I am sorry, my friend, but that freshman-level test is not going to get you anywhere.
You give that crap to a brilliant, creative, passionate candidate who is looking for inspiration, in a new job and he (even more so she) will be out of the door faster than you can say "sorry".
Mike, you rock and your bet was right, too. I am sure, after this blog, a lot more people will know Atlassian for a wonderful place to work at :)
cheers
This is a great post. I would love see a follow up post along the lines of how do you tell that the company is the company you want to work for - sure you can hear what they have to say about themselves (and everyone always explains how cool they are to work for) but how do you really tell what working with the team is like, if there are any egos in the team, what their projects are like, what's the state of their code base etc.
Regarding the money being competitive, it's definitely true that work satisfaction counts for a lot. But when you have a family depending on you - a difference of 30-50k between contracting and permanent is a real difference. I just don't get the philosophy behind paying permanent people less than contractors. Can someone give me a good explanation for it?
Neville,
Supposedly, the difference between the contractor wage and employee one is caused by a) benefits that employees get b) the higher risk of short-term employment/uncertainty that a contractor takes. c) the higher freedom of let-go of contractors that employer has.
I only wish that more of my fellow managers would adopt your 1st philosophy, the one that states "More often than not the best employees are the ones that find you, not the ones you go out and look for."
Unfortunately, the employment industry has fallen in love with what they've termed the "passive candidate." You hear this term from some top people in HR, bemoaning "all the good people are already taken." They say they have to lure and poach them away from competitors, implying that passive candidates have no initiative. You then have many managers who don't bother challenging that, including engineering managers who paradoxically come from a field that takes pride in showing more than one way to solve any problem.
Howard Adamsky covers this in his book on how to recruit and retain IT talent. He comments that he too has been an active candidate who has been very eager to learn about a company and start producing. However, because he's doing the hunting instead of being hunted, he's deemed less attractive. That's nonsense, especially when employers complain about workers being unmotivated.
So that's great, to see an employer who actually welcomes and embraces the active candidate.
Andy was definitely onto something when he pointed "Don't trap people into doing the same thing they've done all along."
The way hiring is done today in a lot of places with resumes and faulty behavioral interviews is they focus on "what you have done." The real mindset we need to adopt in today's accelerated changing world is "what you can do." To do that, employers have to really know what defines job competence.
Unfortunately, another thing that drives job offers today is the fear of making a hiring mistake. So your past is looked at incessantly, with proven track records, credentials, etc. That way, if you don't work out, the hiring committee can say "at least he looked and sounded good." That's a terrible way to hire, especially if you're a Theory Y kind of manager who believes people will put out their best when you give them a chance.
A recent study came out saying that at least 50% of Americans are unhappy with their jobs. That's got some companies concerned about who will jump ship. Many say they feel bored, that they are "underemployed." They're tired of doing the same old same old.
That's especially true in those fields that are constantly changing (and which isn't nowadays?) People are very concerned about their employability and marketability. If they're not having those needs met, they'll look for another employer who'll help them expand their skill set. Nicely, however, those employers who keep workers challenged are the ones who don't have to worry about retention.
Mike -
Great article! Your suggestions are good not just for startups, but for most hiring managers (those that want to be good.)
You didn't tag me with your meme, but I took the bait. Please see my five points on my blog:
http://notjobs.blogspot.com/2007/04/meme-five-tips-for-hiring.html
Glenn: Spot on in your first comment. The "Passive Candidate" term is the hot management buzz word these days. The term doesn't account for candidate motives. They could be a slug, or very happy in their job. They could be married to the boss's daughter and would be killed if they left. That doesn't make them good, just passive.
Troy
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I'm the co-founder and CEO of Atlassian.
I live in Sydney and San Francisco. I'm an Aussie. I travel (a lot). I learn. I read. I talk. I create. I bike. I drink. I'm all in.
This is my blog. Welcome!
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Atlassian is a customer-driven software company, combining brilliantly simple tools with legendary service.
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Oh, and we're always hiring. If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're our kind of person. See open positions.
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Advising startups is something I've started doing in the last year. It's a fascinating way to use one's brain and experience to solve other people's problems.
I'm loving it.
Besides the few I advise, I've invested in one, HomeThinking.
HomeThinking provides realtor reviews, ratings and metrics (qualitative and quantitive) for home sellers.
I also make a lot of small microfinance loans to entrepreneurs around the world through Kiva. Read more about my on going Kiva Challenge (update).
