How to hire a founding engineer?
Once a startup has gained some traction and founders lack the bandwidth or skill set to ship a product quickly, a founding engineer can join to help. Such an engineer has a unique combination of skills to operate in ambiguity, take risks, and get stuff done under tight timelines. Although, recruiting a founding engineer is challenging since 87% of engineers are already employed (pre-COVID-19 stat), and those who are a good fit prefer to become entrepreneurs themselves.
We hired a founding engineer within two months of starting our company — without external funding, a launched product, or an established brand. I wanted to share our process across the three phases of hiring — Sourcing, Interviewing, and Closing. Existing entrepreneurs, less than two years into their journey, will find these learnings valuable when trying to hire their first engineer.
Founding engineer for my startup was hired in India to work remotely.
Sourcing candidates
The goal for this phase is to search for potential candidates and connect with them.
1. Define the required skill sets
Create a set of necessary skills by thinking about your technical stack, collaboration needs, and culture of the company. Concreteness in this exercise will lead to efficiency in searching for candidates.
Key skill sets in our case were:
Passion for an engineering-driven culture, since our strength was solving deep technical problems
Professional experience with Golang
Strong written communication, which is essential for remote work
Ability to work independently
Handle risks
Get stuff done quickly
Tips
When making a technology choice, consider its impact on attracting talent. In our case, Golang proved to be an exciting choice for candidates.
Early-stage startups can’t afford the ramp-up cost for learning to work remotely; make sure the candidate has experience working in a remote setup.
2. Post a job
Job postings with a detailed description of the technical challenges and opportunities to learn will lead to a higher quality of applicants. Filter out cookie-cut applications instead, prioritize researched and specific ones. Angelist and LinkedIn were our primary job boards.
Example post we found effective:
Tip
Recommended matches feature for your LinkedIn Job post is a valuable tool to review potential candidates for free.
3. Cold outreach to candidates
Cold outreach worked for us after we narrowed down our search criteria and found a platform to apply those filters.
Our search criteria were:
Experience in Golang
Located in India
Open-source contributions
Participation in Google Summer of code
Github was the most effective free platform in searching for candidates with the above criteria. Search capability in Github helped us find a targeted set of candidates. For example, this search query finds Golang developers based in India with more than 50 followers, along with their contact emails.
Angelist provides basic filters for free with advanced filters for a $199/mo subscription. In contrast, LinkedIn only opens up filters, and unlimited searches with a Sales Navigator account for $79.99/mo.
Tips
Github is one of the best places to locate founding engineers and learn about their prior projects
Experiment with your search criteria until you find a relevant pool of candidates. We received high engagement from candidates who participated in Google Summer of code; this became one of our key search criteria
4. Craft a personalized reach-out message
Sending identical reach-out messages doesn’t work. Plan to spend about 15-30 minutes on personalizing each reach-out message by understanding a candidate’s past projects, public talks, and prior work experience. Sending out personalized messages will sharpen your ability to sell, a critical skill in your startup journey. We received the highest response rate with the following message structure:
Introduce yourself and company
Ask insightful questions about their experience or projects
Explain why their skill set would be valuable for the startup
Request for a short meeting
Vary the technique for sending these messages based on the platform — Email, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Emails should be descriptive but concise; Direct Messages via Twitter should be conversational; LinkedIn connection request messages should be short and attractive.
Email:
Twitter:
LinkedIn:
Tips
For emails, use Hunter.io for validating address and Boomerang to track responses
For LinkedIn, send a connection request instead of InMail
Interview process
After receiving a list of potential candidates from the sourcing phase, we conducted a four-step interview process for each candidate.
1. Screening call
A successful outcome of this call is to gauge the candidate’s appetite to work at a startup, passion for the problem space, and hands-on technical expertise. Specific problems being solved by us were most interesting to candidates.
Reference slide for engineering challenges in our pitch:
Tip
Present a deck during this call to increase engagement with the candidate. We used this slide deck.
2. Take-home exercise
Include a take-home exercise in your process for evaluating a candidate’s technical skillset. A high-signal exercise should take 1-2 days to complete, be specific to your domain, and ambiguous enough to provide space for creativity. Our exercise enabled us to gather the following signals: problem-solving skills, quality of code, and the ability to implement a working solution in a short time.
Tip
Choose a technical problem from your startup as an exercise; this can gauge a candidate’s passion for the domain.
3. Technical interview
Evaluating a candidate’s capability to design and manage complex technical systems is the motivation of this round — this a fairly standard interview with a ton of material online. Instead of generic questions, we spent time brainstorming about converting the take-home exercise into a production-ready service, along with monitoring, testability, and optimizations to the core search algorithm.
Tip
Facebook’s technical design interview is a useful reference for this round.
4. Culture fit interview
Early stages of a startup are a roller coaster ride — mostly filled with downs. You want a founding engineer who would draw positivity from experience and develop the company culture along with the founders. We spent time screening for the following skills: make progress in ambiguity, appetite to take risks, decision-making process, and the ability to receive constructive feedback.
Example questions in this round:
What was the decision making criteria for taking up a <previous company or role>?
Explain a specific scenario that involved conflict or disagreement with a teammate. How did you resolve it?
Describe one of your successful team projects? Why was it successful?
Describe one of your failed projects? What were the learnings, and what could have been different to change its outcome?
Describe a project or initiative that you jumpstarted from scratch?
Tip
Contextualize your questions with a candidate’s experience to gather higher-quality signals.
Close a candidate
At this point, you have found a candidate who is an excellent fit for the role, but plan to spend a significant amount of time to close the candidate. Focus your sales pitch on:
Why are they a great fit for this role?
What are the opportunities for their growth?
What is the projected equity value based on different exit scenarios for your startup?
Tip
The percentage of equity should be comparable to the yearly salary divided by the valuation of the company.
To summarize, we hired a rockstar founding engineer by performing a highly targeted search on Github, sending personalized reach outs, building a challenging take-home exercise, and providing fair equity.
Thanks to Pragya Pherwani and Pooja Jain for reviewing the draft.
Cover photo by Free To Use Sounds on Unsplash