Hiring 101
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Hiring 101 by Praful Mathur - How to find good talent before they know it.
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Hiring 101
- 1. Hiring Super Talent Praful Mathur, CEO derivatived
- 4. Amp Idea
- 5. Amp Idea
- 6. Amp Idea
- 8. Hired the best before they knew it
- 9. Business Problem (I'm facing this right now!)
- 10. Problem Over-capacity on service contracts
- 11. Target Increase profit by 20% next quarter
- 12. How?
- 13. Identify your open position
- 14. Identify your time window
- 15. Understand skillset & culture fit
- 20. Be direct
- 21. Follow up
- 22. Summary
- 23. Future: Building a pipeline
- 24. Hiring is #1
- 25. Make your presence known
- 26. Make your VIPs known
- 27. Make your work known
- 28. Make your experts known
- 29. Build Cred
- 30. Build Cred
- 31. Hire the best before they know it
Editor's Notes
- How many of you have hired the perfect team?
- The biggest problem we face is that there are global powerhouses that absorb our talent!
- At Amp Idea, we faced a very grueling problem. We had a very short timeline to solve a huge problem. If we could build the system, we made money otherwise we got sued! The solution was complex, riddled in regulation and took the other companies 3 years + $5 million. We had a few months and $50K of seed capital.
- We built backseat advertising units and credit card processing machines. The business was in collecting fees on the credit card plus selling advertising on the units.
- My co-founder and I worked on building the future of digital out of home advertising. I'll discuss what ended up happening later.
- Based on our execution and our vision, we were admitted to one of the most prestigious entrepreneurship programs in the world: TechStars
- All of this is only possible with a stellar team. The first person that was brought on was obviously my co-founder, Sumant, who is now VP of Product at Compass Labs Secondly we brought on one of the most technically talented people I've met who is now R&D at Google Finally, we brought on an insane design genius who led design at SVPPLY which is one of the main reasons it got bought by ebay
- None of these guys knew their potential when we started. Additionally, Amp Idea gave them a platform to extend and expand their understanding plus build a portfolio and confidence that sky-rocketed them into their existing positions. We sold the company within 9 months and worked on a few other projects before disbanding and graduating college. We had an interesting situation where we hired some awesome people who were well known and as they talked about it more people wanted to join what we were working on. We got the best to join because we presented our problem in an interesting way, understood their passions, fed into their desire to build something cool, gave them autonomy and we were in the same space they existed. Additionally, the result would be their work in every cab it's braggable!
- Let's walk through a business case study to illustrate how to hire the best (and actually how I'm working on expanding a team for an organization I'm personally connected with).
- The company is reaching its limit on internal capacity to service their clients. The classic chicken & egg -- add more people to increase revenue + capacity, but there's not even enough time or capacity to make money. How to grow???
- Knowing we can add another person can actually add 20% to the next quarter's bottom line including the person's salary. However, we have to hit strict deadlines. First thing, you need to identify a recruiter either externally or internally to start the process. In this case, I'm personally connected so am helping build the team.
- How am I going about the process?
- The position we're filling is for a data scientist/statistician.
- This works against you in every way. It's the shadow that persists and constrains all of your activities & efforts. One of the most important pieces that people overlook and become discouraged as all the other problems start to pile up and recruiting becomes a "nice to have" instead of "must have" for growth. For my case, I have a month.
- We need someone that can understand and reason about abstract data sets firstly and equally important someone who can use the domain knowledge to fill in the gaps. Mostly around marketing mix and audience reaction. They need to be able to work in a highly intense, fast turn-around environment. Additionally, everything revolves around data so all the decisions are data-driven. Finally, they should be able to take feedback non-personally along with an occasional insult.
- To find the most influential people in my potential candidates' life. This includes everyone from family and friends (mostly, signifcant others) but also people in their additional networks such as professors, counselors, collegiate/career advisors, lawyers, accountants, and others (get creative). For my particular search, I'm reaching out to the top information systems, math, engineering, and computer science professors. I want to reach out and get a good understanding of their interests, the students that conduct research with them, the classes they teach, and build a personal rapport. These guys will start feeding the pipeline in the future (more on that later).
- Additionally, I need to be in front of the talent as much as possible. I need to talking to them about what I'm working on, who I am, what I've done, and any questions to start building personal rapport. In my case, I'm going to be going to clubs to start presenting the problems we're working on. Additionally, I'm working on getting people to start developing genuine interest. This further feeds into the future pipeline and provides a greater number of candidates.
- The above two steps can take a significant amount of time, but as we mentioned before we have a fixed time, in my case, it's a month. In one month, I need to find someone and get them started. This requires someone who has an ability to learn quickly so must be very interested in learning, be someone that can understand abstract concepts so must be interested in math + engineering. Finally, they must be passionate about using data to understand the world. The world must be represented to them in numbers and symbols.
- Now that I have some candidates and some interest from people with incredible talent, it's my turn to show them what I got. People have to be careful at this point to avoid overexposure or as some might call it: 'flashing'. You want to give just enough to inform yet to create a tease. If you show everything, you'll overwhelm your candidate and don't be surprised if they run the other direction. Though I don't advocate misdirection or withholding information...
- You need to be direct and focused just not overwhelming. A big mistake I learned here was I tried to get a friend of mine on board freshman year when I was a finalist at YCombinator and instead I danced around the issue of having him join me. Instead I got another friend on board who showed no enthusiasm but was incredibly bright but was a huge downer through the whole process. You need to tell the other person you're interested and want to get them on your team. Allow them to reject you but at least give them the option.
- Finally, continually follow up with your candidate up until they walk through the front door on day one. I've had friends who thought they were hiring someone to learn a few days before their first day that their existing company gave them a better counter-offer. Additionally, you might have other influences that you never found out until the follow up. For example, one of my friends learned that the wife was a huge influence so sent them a big gift basket with a ton of items for the wife. She loved it so much, she turned from an adversary to a cheer leader overnight.
- At the end of the day, you're building a personal relationship with your employee. You need to find someone that can solve the problem AND keep you sane. The type of person you want is going to be better than you so you need to treat them with respect, but you can find some of the most incredibly talented people with the right effort.
- I wanted to do a basic Hiring 101 to get everyone on the same page, but the major part of this talk is the future and building a pipeline. In the beginning, we wanted to set the foundation of how do you get the right people involved and where do you start thinking about your pipeline feeders. The biggest point is to create a system that feeds the right people into your pipeline. There are a ton of approaches but a major point I like to build on are a collection of systems that focus on niches. For example, find a group of people that consistently hit your culture + skill fits and then try to identify niche groups that maximize the chances of getting those characteristics and build a pipeline for each niche. You're solving a marketing problem and I've found your success in marketing is directly proportional to the number of people who answer yes in your group to: "Can I brag about this?"
- Make sure your whole company understands hiring is a top priority. This boils down to your employees being the largest lead generator for your company. Every meetup, presentation, meeting, event that your employees attend is an opportunity for your company to find new talent. Even if you're not looking make sure you always offer the impression you're hiring. Even if you get someone talented to apply and you have no $$, capacity, or space at least you can engage them until you are ready. In some cases, I'd make room because great talent is just that good!
- Develop an online presence where your talent needs to be. This gets to be where you start creating different pipelines for niches as different audiences care about different things and hangout in different places. This way you can isolate various pieces and test for how it attracts a given niche rather than a general audience.
- VIP -- Very Important Problems Open up your problems for the world to see. Netflix is famous for the prizes it offers for solving very complicated problems. A couple of years ago, they launched the Netflix Prize that as to improve their recommendation engine by 10% and they had thousands of teams compete and build amazing algorithms. More importantly they saw and engaged millions of people with their problems and even if you didn't win or compete, you applied to solve those problems with their employees. Additionally, those that did well in the competitions were directly communicating with Netflix "Look, I'm solving your problems and I like you!". Even if they didn't hire those guys, they had a set of people they can engage with another set of interesting problems. Now they've launched a new competition to improve infrastructure but it's a net win for the community increasing their reach and interest level.
- On the flip side, make the solutions you solve available in full or partially. Talented people like to see how others are doing it even just to learn. There's a ton of companies that open source code for the sole reason of engaging an audience. Additionally, when you see people engaging with your work via comments, source commits, etc. you have a whole another set of people you're engaging and they're indicating interest.
- Be out there answering general questions in a community. Many companies, for example, SecondMarket are out in Quora answering questions about their industry, field, interest, etc. and getting people to find out their expertise. If you're working on something you know more about something than others so let your knowledge out and free.
- Again, speaking in terms of various pipelines, you want to find communities that revolve around what you do and build up credibility there. Take a look at the list and see what companies you can identify.
- Now look at how 25% of the top stories on that day are about a startup called Parse which got more mentions than Apple, Facebook, and Google! Once people are talking about you, you'll see increased interest and participation from your top communities.
- The best know it once they've accomplished something interesting. be that place. As you start building out your pipeline further, you'll find more people who are more capable than your best wanting to work for you. Additionally, you'll want to start focusing earlier in the process of finding people. For example: college interns, high school interns, etc. At the end, give your candidates a reason to brag.
- These are some of the places I go to find the best. For example, on Meetup I can identify the key areas of interest and show up in person to meet others that share my interests. It's only a matter of time before we start working together.
- If you have any questions, please reach out to me as I have some interesting products that may help you find your talent. Thanks!