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Ask HN: How do you find smart people without a network?

by nerder92 on 3/25/24, 12:27 PM with 28 comments

• by leetrout on 3/25/24, 1:39 PM

  I was head of engineering at a YC funded startup for a few months.

  You should be laser focused om what this person needs to do for you not what shape they might come in or where to find them. For example, you may say "we need someone to do everything tech" which I would frame as laser focused on a generalist and then write down the attributes of someone that would fit that and start sharing it.

  We used angel list jobs at the time and I posted here on the monthly "who's hiring" thread.

  It is going to take a lot of time to interview. Be prepared to spend money on a recruiter ($30k and up per hire) or 50% of your week (or more) talking to folks.

  As you grow your team follow the "hire when it hurts" advice and make sure you know what you are bringing another body in for because it is gonna add to communication overhead. I also recommend explaining to your team why you are hiring and what you need as you grow and dont just show up with surprise hires.

  Once you get your posting out there you will get good candidates.

  If you are ready to pay for great talent then I can also recommend reaching out to Recurse Center for candidates. https://recurse.com

  My gmail is my username (noted in my profile) if you wanna chat.

• by andy99 on 3/25/24, 1:36 PM

  Offer market pay. "Smart" people are smart enough to know their value, and unless you're looking for a cofounder you need to pay properly.

  If that's met, just do some advertising - I've found LinkedIn is useless, indeed.com gave better candidates, I'd try other "real" job sites like that.

  Depending on your needs, consider part time as well which may be more attractive to some people.

  One thing I did that worked was call my former university professors, they may know good fresh grades, postdocs etc.

• by FigurativeVoid on 3/25/24, 1:35 PM

  I’m not sure I’d look for someone talented. I’d look for someone who’s done it before.

  Early stage software development is tricky, but not unique.

  I think someone who’s done the role before would be more valuable than someone smart.

  They are also easier to find and screen.

• by Russelfuture on 3/25/24, 3:03 PM

  Sort of an off-the-wall idea: Do some kind of event, maybe a promotional thing connected with the business model of your intended product. Or maybe a hackathon or competition of some sort with a cash prize. It can let you find people who are keen, willing to get out there, and you can interact with them to try to ensure a good fit. Most startups fizzle out. In any early-stage thing, you need some initial folks with open-ended skills - willingness to work hard to learn new tech, and ability to see thru the clutter to get to a working result. Virtually any code you need can be found now on github, right? So for your first guys(or gals), you want folks with a prospectors mindset. And that means you will have focus now on prospecting also. Since everything is changing fast now, the town or city you are in can help - people in same profession tend to cluster. Figure out where the clusters are (Universities, big shared workspaces, etc.) and put the word out and describe what you are looking for. And remember that randomness is a good friend. If one looks at success stories, random contacts - at conferences, coffee-shops, etc., often figure in the process. Best of luck!

• by jokethrowaway on 3/25/24, 3:09 PM

  It depends if you are building something technologically hard or the usual CRUD API + frontend, which is 99% of startups.

  1. Hard tech: - Go to tech events in major cities (or local if you can't afford that), look out for good speakers who talk about something tricky / obscure

  2. Not super hard tech: - Go to startupper events and look for the 2-3 developers among the sea of business people

  In general when hiring software engineers:

  Try to avoid professional employees like the plague, especially the coasters who did FANG work or anyone involved in some form of activism. You need people who gets stuff done, not talk politics (whether in the company or in the real world).

  If you are going for employees, look for the ones who worked in early startups: no matter how small the startup, they must have solved the problems you'll face and hopefully they haven't been brainwashed with useless corporate crap.

  When I hired for my startup employee n1 was incredibly talented - and he definitely changed the course of the startup, so pick carefully. He came from my network but it fit the startupper profile who already launched a few online businesses before.

• by sagaro on 3/25/24, 1:52 PM

  Might not really help if you are short on time and need someone quick. When I started my first startup (working on POC before even registering the startup), I was hanging on ultra niche internet pockets. Forums/reddit/niche twitter and having conversations there about where the industry was heading, what was happening, trends etc. And that is where I found my cofounder. We did some private dms, got on a call and then decided we wanted to build this thing. Started the company, scaled it, ran it for 4+ years, got acquired and exited.

  Another thing you can do is go to the hackernews algolia and search of posts in your industry/domain. Find some of the smart answers with people who understand the domain deeply etc. Go to their profile see if they have some link to their twitter or something and connect with them. Again not super helpful if you are short on time. But leaving it here, for those who might like me want to find someone not in their network for some future collaboration.

• by oersted on 3/25/24, 2:10 PM

  LinkedIn mostly, you can use the free version, but it's easier if you use Recruiter for much more precise filtering, and/or set up a job post.

  You could try looking for related projects in GitHub if that makes sense for your project. Or going to local meetups. But it can be hard to find people that are open to switching jobs unless you have a very attractive offer. It's more efficient to explicitly target people looking for a job: again mostly through LinkedIn.

  There's plenty of recruiting firms out there that can help if you have the budget, and some SaaS-like databases of pre-filtered candidates, often for remote work, depends on the region.

  At the end of the day, recruiting is not much different from sales. You need a proper pipeline of leads and interview many people so you have real options to choose from. It's a numbers game, there is no real substitute for a proper multi-stage interview process. You can get recommendations from your network, but it's not very scalable or objective.

• by gregjor on 3/25/24, 12:46 PM

  Whom do you refer to as "we" if you need to find employee number one?

  Plenty of smart people out there, and plenty of talented people. Sometimes those go together. You should put together a description of the product or service, specifically, and describe the person you think would contribute to your goals. Remember that frameworks and languages don't describe skills or talents -- they describe tools. Then you advertise and try to find someone you can work with and take a chance, like every other employer looking for people.

  Since you wrote "employee" and not "cofounder" I assume you have a paying job available.

  Lots of people looking for work right now who got through vetting at companies with some difficult hiring filters, perhaps start there. HN has a regular "who's hiring" thread.

• by gushogg-blake on 3/25/24, 1:05 PM

  I haven't used it from the hiring side, but I've seen a decent number of early stage companies using cord.co. There's also a startup called Otta - https://otta.com/. Not affiliated with either. Edit - AngelList also has job postings.

  From the being-hired side, I was hired by Chess.com when the CEO found my chess app on GitHub. I think that was one of his main hiring strategies - look for chess-related projects and get in touch with the authors.

• by calvinmorrison on 3/25/24, 1:32 PM

  Find the maintainer of the main open source tooling you use. Look at thier repositories and see if there's anyone in thier network. Saved us tons of money hiring a core contributor

• by nerder92 on 3/25/24, 4:06 PM

  OP here:

  Thank you so much for all the insights! I'll leave my contacts here in case you'd like to stay in touch. We are building a marketplace for sport communities. Our initial GTM is in BJJ/Martial Arts, if you'd like to know more ping me here: stefano[at]joinmaat.com

• by CoastalCoder on 3/25/24, 1:31 PM

  This isn't a complete answer, but HN's next "Who's Hiring?" post is in about a week. That might be a good starting point.

  Although if you're dealing with out-of-network candidates, you probably have the daunting issue of effective screening.

• by petercooper on 3/25/24, 1:49 PM

  Go to local events, hackathons, etc. Don't just stick to the first level of your network, ask for "friend of a friend" type recommendations. Find out if any of your contacts know any hyper-connector "knows everyone" types.

• by bryanlarsen on 3/25/24, 2:06 PM

  This is a lot easier in 2024 than it was in prior years due to all the layoffs. Make sure your job application is appealing, and post it in the usual places. You will get quality applicants mixed among the flood of lower quality ones.

• by fenderq on 3/25/24, 1:41 PM

  Smart people will have social skills. You build your network.

• by fl0id on 3/25/24, 1:35 PM

  You should also define what you want. For someone to be a good fit, smart (for whatever that means) is not enough.

• by brudgers on 3/25/24, 1:30 PM

  Money is the usual way.

  But in your case, you can make someone an equal partner.

  Working with you versus working for you might be an important difference for people in your existing network.

  That's important because based on the lack of interest from people you know, the idea of working for you doesn't seem to hold much appeal.

  Is your job to make yourself rich?

  Or is it to make everyone rich?

  All the work is ahead. Pick someone you want to make rich. If your network still balks, you've learned something important about how you've treated people. If someone jumps, you've also learned something important...in addition to what you have already learned.

  And again, all the work is ahead. What you have done is sunk cost. You need another person to get the work ahead done. The best person has the same motivation as you.

  Besides if you go unicorn, you will probably get rich enough slicing the money pie one more time.

  Finally, your ability to identify smart is probably fallible. If you think most other people are stupid it surely is. Good luck.

• by jacknews on 3/25/24, 1:43 PM

  right here! lol