I’ve advised recruiting operations at close to 300 startups, ranging from a five-person team at Scalyr to a several-hundred-person team at Gusto. Most startups share a common theme: Technical recruiting is often a top business priority — and every startup wants to improve its recruiting operations.
In an increasingly competitive environment for technical talent, and with the average time to hire for software engineers now over 35 days at best, startups need to consider faster, more efficient strategies to recruit the best talent. Whether you’re building an in-house recruiting team from scratch or looking to maximize the efficiency of your existing recruiting team, read on for five strategies that will take your recruiting operations to the next level.
Hire a tech recruiter who understands your technology. You would be surprised to learn how many startups hire tech recruiters that only have a cursory understanding of technology. A technical recruiter should be able to explain at a high level what a distributed system is, or the difference between a native mobile app and a web mobile app.
Having a good general grasp of technology is a core differentiator between an average tech recruiter and a great tech recruiter. Tech recruiters with a solid grasp of technology are more effective in understanding the complexity and relevance of the problem sets that technical candidates have encountered and solved. More importantly, they are in a much better position to determine whether or not those experiences and skills translate well and fill the technical gaps the new position is intended to address.
Edward Avila, head of global talent acquisition at Synaptics , stresses this point. “Effective recruiters are the ones who are able to go beyond the buzzwords of job description,” he says. “By having working knowledge of the company’s creation process, they are well-informed about the opportunities that they are sourcing for. They possess the advanced skills that allow them to appropriately engage and screen candidates. This is value that they add to hiring managers. Anything less is just being too administrative.”
Here are some questions to ask a tech recruiter to get a sense of how technical they are:
Ensure that recruiters attend product meetings that involve roles for which they are hiring. The effectiveness of recruiting operations begin to unravel when recruiters don’t have a seat at the table where product discussions are happening. Recruiters who are part of these discussions will be much better prepared to manage the inevitable pivots, get ahead of shifting priorities and have a deeper understanding of the technical challenges the team is facing.
Maryanne Brown, head of recruiting at Gusto, reinforces this idea. “At Gusto, one of our values is that we are all owners in the business. With that value in mind, our recruiters are expected to be thought partners to the functions they specialize in,” Brown says. “They attend all team meetings, and sit by their counterparts regularly to understand the daily needs of the team they work with. Organically they’ve grown into a more hybrid Recruiter and HRBP role where they help to predict the future needs of the team. This enables the recruiter to be in the driver’s seat and think further out in regards to the impact they can make. Being proactive versus reactive helps us not only to hire great recruiting talent, but also retain them for the long term.”
Armed with an understanding of the product roadmap and technical challenges, a great technical recruiter will provide objective insights around a candidate’s strengths, weaknesses and any potential red or green flags. Require your recruiters to call out where the gaps are for each candidate they submit, and make sure those areas are addressed during the interview process. If this is not being done, you are missing a key value-add of having a strong technical recruiter, and you should consider an alternative (such as hiring a sourcer).
Recruiters are often split between two different types: hunters and gatherers. Gatherers need to be pointed toward targets, such as target companies, job titles or product spaces. They will post a job description to a bunch of job boards in the hopes that their golden candidate will apply. Gatherers generally begin to flail after the low-hanging fruit is exhausted and more emphasis on passive candidate sourcing becomes paramount to successfully filling the position. What you’ll typically get from a gatherer are the best currently available (i.e. active) candidates on the market, not the best possible candidate.
Dialpad ’s head of talent, Moses Sison, explains, “Having a strong hunting mentality in Dialpad’s talent acquisition organization has really been invaluable. We were able to hire A players, which created a network effect of attracting more A players to join. Without ‘hunters’ going after only the best candidate, I don’t think our engineering team would have been as strong as they are right now.”
Hunters take pride in seeking and landing the best possible candidate, not just the best currently available. These are people who are skilled in unearthing top talent far beyond saturated tools like LinkedIn. Hunters understand the product/problem spaces so well they can easily determine when someone overstates their skills and experience. They know the industry and product space so well they can effectively counter competitive offers the candidate may receive. They are problem solvers who get down into the weeds with candidates during their pre-screens, and are masterful in their ability to pitch the opportunity as a solution to the candidate’s pain points. The hunters are the recruiters you want on your team.
Create a technical hiring roadmap, complete with deliverables, milestones and deadlines. Couple this roadmap very closely to your product and business roadmap. Now you’ll have something tangible that is driven by the company’s product and business needs that can be executed against. This will help you systematically move away from the “I needed this person yesterday” style of recruiting (also known as reactive recruiting) and into a “We knew this role was coming and already have five viable candidates” style of hiring (also known as “just in time” recruiting).
Creating a hiring roadmap that ties directly to the product roadmap enables recruiters to reverse-engineer hiring needs and establish a clear set of company-wide priorities. From there, you can inject metrics around phone interviews to onsite ratios, cost per hire, time to hire and more. With clear visibility into the pipeline and process you can start to identify places where there is room for improvement. H. James Harrington, author and expert on business process improvement, said it best: “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”
Mathew Caldwell, former VP of People at Instacart, remarks that, “Recruiting should be approached with the same rigor as product development. For every role you recruit for there are multiple people responsible for all the deliverables along the lifecycle of the recruiting process. The companies that are the best at recruiting approach recruiting like they approach developing a product — they identify what the ideal outcome is and when that outcome should be completed… If you have a solid product roadmap that identifies what you are developing and when, you should be able to determine the gaps in the team that will keep the company from hitting their targets. That will then inform them on how, who and when to begin recruiting.”
Lindsay Grenawalt, head of People Operations at Cockroach Labs , points out that because recruiting is a process, we often forget that it is fundamentally a human experience. “At any stage of the process, you can lose a candidate because you reject them or they reject you,” she warns. “It is important that once you engage with a candidate, you listen to what motivates them. If it’s not your company, that’s okay. If it is your company, make sure you take notes at each stage of the process to understand how your candidate’s motivations may be changing.”
You’ll want to hire a technical recruiter with excellent communication skills when it comes to speaking, listening and exhibiting passion for your product space. Recruiting is not just about pitching a product and a role. It is a two-way conversation around how a new position can solve both a candidate’s and a startup’s pain points. Identifying and addressing candidate pain points, discussing the technical challenges and understanding how the candidate’s experience can help solve these challenges in a 30-60 minute pre-screen interview is hard to do. It requires very strong communication skills and the experience of knowing when and how to ask great questions.
Lastly, insist that your recruiter communicate opinions and points of view even if they are unpopular or contrary to your own. Avoid hiring someone who will recruit the way they are told, even if it is not the best approach. Imagine a scenario where you told your recruiter that they need to find, hire and onboard a mobile developer with deep knowledge in both iOS and Android platforms within two weeks. A weak recruiter will jump in and start sourcing new candidates without much thought about the constraints. A great recruiter will listen to the problem, understand the constraints and communicate solutions. These include hiring a contractor, promoting from within, focusing on the primary platform first and employing an agency.
Ultimately, ask yourself, what kind of recruiter do you want on your team? Look for those who understand your technology and mission, seek new platforms to recruit, understand the product roadmap and communicate effectively. Those are the technical recruiters who will get you to the best engineering talent faster and more efficiently.

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Elon Musk is asking for people to recommend “specific amendments” Trump and the White House should make to the executive order issues on Friday regarding immigration and barring entry for people seeking refugee status. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is a member of Trump’s economic advisory council, and he said via Twitter that he will be looking to build consensus within that group about what changes to make to the order, so that he can present them to Donald Trump as recommendations for change.
Musk made comments on Saturday regarding the ban, noting that it is “not the best way to address the country’s challenges,” a statement which was later echoed by Tesla’s own official comment on the matter. Musk also noted that many impacted by the ban “don’t deserve to be rejected,” replied to a Canadian-Iranian dual citizen that it “is not” fair that said individual might not be allowed to enter the U. S. under these new rules, despite previously encountering no difficulties with border transit.
Understandably, a large number of responses thus far to Musk’s request have simply suggested that Trump repeal the order in its entirety.
Musk is set to meet with Trump during an economic advisory council meeting this coming Friday, which will also be attended by Uber CEO and fellow council member Travis Kalanick, who has also stated publicly that he will present concerns regarding the order to Trump. Musk is also a member of Trump’s manufacturing advisory council.

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Uber has apologized today for promoting surge pricing to and from JFK during yesterday’s protest and taxi strike.
After the enactment of an executive order barring refugees and visa holders from seven countries from entering the U. S., protests gathered at JFK International and the NY Taxi Workers Alliance called for a stop on pickups from the airport. Uber said that riders could go to and from JFK without surge pricing, prompting major public backlash that the company was taking advantage of the situation. The whole fiasco led to a trending #deleteuber tag, calling on users to delete the app and switch to alternatives like Lyft.
‘We’re sorry for any confusion about our earlier tweet — it was not meant to break up any strike,” a spokesperson for Uber said. “We wanted people to know they could use Uber to get to and from JFK at normal prices, especially last night.”
Uber was one of the first to come out publicly with a direct and measurable way to address the ban, but the #deleteuber movement is a reminder of how quickly good will can be undone with a communications misfire — especially for the aggressively-expanding Uber. Instead of being perceived as something that would assist riders in the midst of the protest, it was quickly labeled as an attempt to bust the strike. While it’s not clear how large the movement has become, it’s attracted a lot of attention on Twitter and other platforms.
It’s another public stumble for Uber, which has continually faced optics issues as its grown into a nearly $100 billion company. CEO Travis Kalanick was appointed to President Donald Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum in December last year (along with Elon Musk), and as pressure mounts on tech companies to take a stance on Trump’s new policies Kalanick and Uber have been in the public’s crosshairs.
Thousands descended upon JFK last night in protest of the ban, which at one point led to New York governor Andrew Cuomo reversing a decision and allowing the JFK AirTran to continue to operate. The NY Taxi Workers Alliance called for drivers to not pick up passengers from JFK from 6pm to 7pm on Saturday night, which also called on Uber drivers to do the same. The tweet from Uber went out at 7:36pm, meaning it had been initiated after the time cited.
Uber was quick to respond to the executive order, with Kalanick saying he would address it in President Trump’s first business advisory group meeting. Kalanick also said in a memo to company that it would be identifying drivers affected by the ban and compensate them pro bono during the next three months to cope with the potential fallout from the ban. Uber’s ongoing competitor Lyft also came out strongly against the ban, and said it would donate $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over the next four years.
Throughout Saturday, executives and prominent members in the tech industry sounded off on the immigration ban — either publicly or through internal communications that became public. It’s been a tricky situation as the largest tech companies in the world find themselves having to find ways to navigate the new administration despite a critical eye on each company’s specific stance on various issues, and Uber in particular has already faced plenty of optics issues even prior to the new administration.

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Ride hailing provider Lyft has taken a strong stance against Trump’s new immigration actions and ban on Muslim refugees (which Rudy Giuliani admitted is exactly what it was intended to be on Fox News on Sunday morning). In an email sent to users, Lyft noted that it is “firmly against these actions, and will not be silent to issues that threat the value of the community.”
This is one of the strongest statements against Trump’s unconstitutional executive orders from a tech company to date, and Lyft is also putting action behind its words: The ride hailing company also announced it will be donating $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over the next four years. The ACLU filed suit against Trump’s administration for the refugee ban, and succeeded in getting a temporary stay of the order from a federal judge on Saturday.
Many other Silicon Valley companies have expressed varying levels of opposition to the actions by Trump and his White House, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, but Lyft has done so with a public document (the messages from many others were shared via leaked internal employee emails) and with a clear articulation of why Trump’s actions are wrong on a moral level, not just as a potential hindrance to acquiring top level global talent, or as a threat to current employees who enjoy U. S. visa status.
Uber’s Travis Kalanick released an email to employees noting that the Lyft competitor would be working with drivers potentially affected to provide them legal assistance. He also said he’d raise the issue of the ban’s impact on “innocent people” during a meeting with Trump’s business advisory council on Friday, of which Kalanick is a member. Kalanick also acknowledged that many employees might disagree with his decision to join Trump’s administration in an advisory capacity, and said they enjoy the right to do so. Uber employees have taken to Twitter to do just that , and the company faces calls to boycott its service, and saw physical protests at its San Francisco HQ as a result of Kalanick’s involvement with Trump’s White House.
Here’s the entire letter sent by Lyft:

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One of the most popular shows on television 30 years ago was “The A-Team” — the story of five rogue military commandos who teamed together to form an elite fighting unit. Now, a generation later, DARPA and the U. S. military are in search of a new “A-Team” — only this team won’t be comprised of just humans, it will include a few machines, as well.
A-team refers to “agile team,” which DARPA refers to as hybrid teams of humans teamed with intelligent machines. What DARPA recognizes is that intelligent machines are not just “agents” carrying out the simple commands of humans, but rather are part of an “intelligent fabric” that dynamically evolves over time.
The obvious use case for these A-teams, of course, is in the military sphere. Imagine a U. S. military operation. There will be a fighting team comprised of battlefield commanders and soldiers, of course. But there will also be autonomous fighting units, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). The UAVs might be providing aerial cover for an assault on a terrorist outpost, while the UGVs might be working to defuse bombs along the way.
What the military is looking for is some mathematical method for designing these agile teams of humans and machines. There are some things that humans are good at — such as autonomy and creating trust with other fighting team members — and there are some things that machines are good at (analysis of large sets of data). But here’s the twist — there are some attributes that will dynamically evolve over time, thanks to the coordination and communication of the team, or the ability to distribute intelligence. What’s needed is some way of optimizing this man-machine interaction to provide the desired results.
There are many more use cases for these hybrid teams of humans and intelligent machines. These A-teams can be used to create improved logistical networks (e.g. imagine Amazon delivery drones learning on-the-fly and helping to improve the operations of Amazon warehouses), design complex software, discover new drugs or design new space probes.
As machines show the potential to “learn” over time, it will change the way people interact with them. Take the example of controlling and managing an air battle. Instead of UAVs (drones) being piloted from a distance, they will be truly autonomous fighting units, capable of making their own decisions without human operators. But they will have to coordinate these decisions with other members of the air strike force. Thus, a team of pilots sent into battle might learn how to coordinate their actions with swarms of UAVs. Those UAVs might be used to gather intelligence about the relative strength of an opponent, or they might be used as trusted members of the same combat team.
In many ways, the creation and development of these agile teams will come down to a matter of trust. Just as members of a tight-knit military team learn to trust each other on the battlefield and know that no members will be left behind in a confrontation with the enemy, they must also learn to trust the intelligent machines that will be flying or marching next to them into the next battle.

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L. A. is getting a star turn, with the most iconic of its local startups — Snap — on the cusp of going public. Locals expect much more than an endless string of headlines about its IPO performance, too. “The initial performance of the stock will be almost irrelevant,” says Paul Bricault, cofounder of the L. A.-based accelerator and seed-stage venture fund Amplify . “The IPO will shine a bigger spotlight on L. A. tech, and it will likely spin out more Snap execs as founders of new startups over time — as well as likely inject more capital into angel funding of startups in L. A.”
Bricault has reason for optimism. Five-year-old Amplify just closed its third fund with $10 million, and it could use new, promising startups to fund, as well as more capital sloshing around L. A. for follow-on funding. Investing $12.6 million across its first two funds, Amplify has already invested in 50 startups. Fourteen have raised a Series A round, five have raised a Series B round, and ten have subsequently been shut down.
Amplify has nurtured almost all of them at its campus in Venice, Ca., where companies of various, early stages stay for five months on average and are given opportunities to meet with investors for whom they would seem to be a fit. (Rather than stage demo days, Amplify invites investors to its offices four times a year for pre-arranged one-on-one meetings with its portfolio companies.)
On average, the firm, led by Bricault (who is also a venture partner with Greycroft Partners ), takes a 10 percent stake in each company in exchange for mentorship, introductions, and initial checks of between $100,000 and $250,000.
Bricault says a proliferation of seed-stage funds is already helping Amplify’s companies attract funding in their “post accelerator round,” but that L. A. is still falling short when it comes to Series A, B, and later rounds. March Capital Partners has sprung up to address the gap in part (the firm closed its debut fund with $240 million last year). Mucker Capital, which also runs a lab called MuckerLabs accelerator, closed a $45 million last year, which also helps. But there’s “still a paucity of Series A and B capital resident in L. A.” says Bricsault.
He says it’s been “balanced by a larger influx of external venture dollars coming into the L. A. market,” including not only from the Bay Area but increasingly from China. Of course, he suggests, it’d be nice if more of that capital were local. Now, with Snap’s IPO, maybe it will be soon.
Amplify’s biggest exits to date include the mapping visualization startup MapSense, sold last year to Apple for $30 million. (Amplify invested in its post-seed round.)
Three of Amplify’s portfolio companies have also closed Series B rounds in the last year, including the on-demand storage services startup Clutter. It raised a $20 million round, led by Sequoia Capital. Another company, the wine club Winc, raised $17.5 million in funding co-led by the Beijing-based firm Shining Capital and earlier backer Bessemer Venture Partners. The Bouqs, an cut-to-order flower delivery company, meanwhile raised $12 million in Series B funding from earlier backers, including Azure Capital Partners.
Two of Amplify’s newest investments include Ledge , a community lending platform, and SafeRide Health , an online platform that increase access to healthcare by delivering medically trained transportation.

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In the wake of President Trump’s ludicrous lies about illegal votes in November’s election — immediately after the lies about the size of the audience for his inauguration — it’s tempting to just point and laugh at his apparent insecurity and fears of illegitimacy. He does, though, inadvertently raise a point worth considering: how can we strengthen the integrity of our voting systems?
After all, the sitting president is eager to call those systems into question after he wins ; this makes it seem likely that he — and the party he represents — will sooner or later begin to reject the result of elections they lose. Can technology help us to ensure that elections, and their results, continue to be free and fair? (Modulo suppression of voters who simply aren’t allowed to register/vote, of course; there’s not much technology can do about that.)
The answer is, briefly, “yes.” In fact quite a lot of research has gone into end-to-end auditable voting systems , i.e. ones that can, through the magic of cryptography and/or one-way functions, be audited without endangering the sanctity of the ballot box. I encourage you to read through some of the linked options.
A feature common to most auditable voting systems is the “receipt.” The idea is: after voting, voters receive a paper receipt with some kind of serial number. All serial numbers and votes are then posted online, so that voters who keep their receipts can ensure that their vote was tallied correctly. Other kinds of fraud — stuffing ballot boxes, etc. — will, at least in theory, be statistically detectable because they will skew the ratio of voters-who-keep-receipts to votes.
Alas, most such systems require complex or confusing behavior on the part of the voter, in order to ensure that no one can possibly prove to a third party who they voted for. (That would encourage coercion, bribery, etc.) So I’d like to draw your attention to an extremely simple solution — so simple that it is barely more than an appendix to a 2007 paper by cryptography legend Ron Rivest with Warren Smith.
This system is brilliantly elegant. It proposes that every voter gets the option to claim someone else’s vote receipt, selected randomly, for later verification. Voters confirm their receipts before they leave; receipts include both a serial number and the details of the vote; and, subsequently, anyone who took a receipt can verify that it was correctly counted against the public vote registry, which tabulates serial numbers and votes. This ensures votes are counted, and can help guard statistically against vote-stuffing.
It’s not a panacea, obviously. In particular, it can’t solve the problem of eligible voters who are forbidden from voting in the first place for false, trumped-up reasons. But it is extremely simple and easy to implement — and anything which makes the voting process more transparent and verifiable, and safeguards democracy, seems very welcome in these turbulent times. Voting is the lifeblood of democracy; let’s make sure it’s never tainted.

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