I’ve hired hundreds of engineers and had many years of success hiring away from Citadel, Google, Facebook, Stripe, Jump, Jane Street, to name a few.
I feel the last 3 months have been the best hiring market for startups in the past ten years.
And the pay also remains amazing for employees. (Not to mention, it’s especially stupid to be picky on jobs when you’re fresh out of college. At this stage, investing in yourself, and acquiring work skills, has a faster ROI than any other way to gain income.) In my day, my classmates who were IMO medalists and had internships at KCG/Uber/Google would at best get US$150k out of college. Today, the same would land US$500k out of college, far better than pre-2020 after demeaning average wage growth across other industries and adjusting for inflation.
As for startup hiring advice, I don’t recommend combing layoff lists. Never had success with one. Large companies are extremely good at trimming operational excess. And they know their employees better than you. So you’ll experience a lot of adverse selection even if you got a reply.
Roughly in descending order, here’s 7 things that I find are most effective in improving your hiring chances:
1. Press coverage.
2. Fundraising momentum, e.g. big name VC.
3. High throughput.
4. “Glamor” posts about the job on your company social media.
5. A nice website or product.
6. Other teammates with good pedigree.
7. Open source.
8. On-campus talks.
You can’t immediately control (2). (5) is a chicken-and-egg problem, since you need good hires to build a good product. ( is difficult outside of the US.
For (1), it’s hard to get media interest in your product and expensive to pay a PR company to astroturf on your behalf. We’ve found a cheap strategy is to do press releases, e.g. joint press releases with your partners or vendors. You get picked up by a few large journals, your company’s CB rank goes up, you get spotted by others who trawl for new companies, including VCs and journalists; this creates a ladder of better press coverage over time. As a side benefit, it boosts your SEO.
Regarding (3), if you’re finding it hard to hire, it often means you need even more throughput. More sourcing; more job posts; more interviews; faster pipeline etc. A well-organized ATS helps (I like Greenhouse, but Lever is OK too). Even during seed stage, we had about >10^4 applicants per year, made offers to <0.3% of them, and had an offer acceptance rate over 85%. I had it harder at my first startup: our 2nd and 3rd hires took 50+ and 300+ interviews respectively. My cofounders and I took all of those calls in the span of 2 months.
If your offer acceptance rate is too low, it’s a signal that you should pay more. It’s even more expensive to have your hiring team’s time to be interviewing candidates for nothing gained.
Regarding (4), it’s easy to copy others who’re good at this. Market making firms are extremely good at doing this, even better than MANGA firms, because they are more dependent on talent than quantity. I say HRT is the golden standard for this. (Don’t be mistaken — on the surface, Stripe has a more successful social media strategy and more subscribers, but they’re mostly targeting their customers, whereas HRT’s audience is almost 100% their candidate pool.)
(6) is trivially obvious, but I’m surprised so many companies don’t care. There’s a positive feedback loop when you hire people from top firms and universities: it attracts others. It’s worth halving your target headcount just to afford these.
Regarding (7), I always make it an effort to email authors and maintainers for work that I appreciate, and offer to buy them coffee if they ever drop by my city. You’ll be surprised how many US$750k+ comp engineers will reciprocate interest in your work. Besides this, several of my teammates and I have contributed to the high visibility projects — Linux kernel, LLVM, Cmake, Rust, Intel DAOS, Ceph, Cumulus etc. — which I find helps with recruiting.
(6) and (7) work in tandem. Good candidates do homework on their interviewer. It’s important that you have a few interviewers who are there to impress the candidates early on in the interview pipeline. You get a good read when a candidate is star-struck by their interviewer and speaks with a deferential tone. If you don’t feel that way, it means you need to improve your interviewers’ own public image.