Recruiting tech talent is an old problem that keeps getting harder, including in Latin America. Learn the way to finding, attracting, and hiring tech talent
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TL;DR: Engineers are a scarce resource. For recruiting tech talent for your startup, even if you don't have a technical background, follow this 4-step guide:
1. Prepare: be in the right mindset, know your audience, get curious, define who you're looking for, nail the job description, and learn how to win against more well-known startups;
2. Source: use your personal network, make outreaches, and access job boards and boot camps;
3. Evaluate, from resume screening to the evaluation committee;
4. Close the deal the right way.
Finding and hiring engineers is an old problem that just keeps getting harder and harder. Every startup founder is recruiting tech talent in a world where the demand for engineers is higher than the supply, and there's no end in sight for the scarcity of talent in tech. Latin America's not an exception: the region will need 2.5M more ICT-related professionals by 2026 (IDC).
As you must have heard, "software is eating the world". Not only are technical startups growing and will then need tech talents, but traditional companies are also getting more aware of software. Propelled by the Covid-19 pandemic, competition from international companies hiring remotely and becoming "borderless" is also on the rise.
Even so, your startup still needs these engineers to succeed. To help you in finding, sourcing, attracting, and hiring tech talents, I put together a 4-step guide for recruiting tech talent that will help you even if you don't have a technical background.
The guide was created through the lessons I've learned through the last 20+ years I spent around engineers. I conducted hundreds of technical interviews at both startups and scale-ups during my time as a technical manager and a CTO. And at Latitud, I continue to help early-stage founders source and interview technical hires.
There are no silver bullets: hiring tech talent is hard and takes a lot of time. On average, Y Combinator says that companies only make offers to 2-8% of engineering applicants and only 50% of those offers are actually closed.
We're looking at pretty slim numbers here, so get into the right mindset before you start. Have realistic expectations about how much effort you'll have to put into the process and what conversion rates you'll be getting. (I'll share some ways to increase conversion later on in this guide.)
In terms of how much time to dedicate, I'd say that 50% is a good target to spend your time on hiring.
This varies by phase, of course. If you are in the very early stages and don't have a lot of capital, you won't have the resources to spend a lot of time on hiring. As you get traction and raise your initial round, you'll start having more aggressive hiring targets. They'll get even more demanding after your Series A or a Series B. So, you have to learn how to do this well to keep up.
In his book Drive, Daniel Pink shows that these three aspects are key motivators in creative jobs – and software engineering is definitely in that category.
Notice how money is not one of the motivators. Engineers are more often driven by purpose and challenge than by business metrics.
My friend Jair Verçosa, who was an Engineering Director at Carta and is now CTO of Flieber, summarizes this in a simple task: have a technical pitch.
When you're honing in on your pitch, optimize it by keeping these motivations in mind. Then, reflect on and communicate the following:
First, you will need to understand the terminology to properly communicate with tech folks. Engineers solve hard problems, while programmers write code. You will want an engineering profile for a modern dynamic startup, especially in the early days.
At Escale, we applied UX research techniques to study engineers and we mapped these two main engineering personas:
Below are some examples of how they would look on a LinkedIn profile, for instance. Can you tell which is which?
Engineers, like ice cream, come in many different flavors. This is a list of the main engineering profiles, from generalist to specialist types:
Whether you need a Hacker or an Architect/a Full-stack or a DevOps is going to depend on your objectives and stage. However, generalist profiles are typically better suited for early-stage startups. (More on that later in this guide!)
Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things advises that when hiring someone outside your area of expertise, you should act in the role. However, this is really hard to do for technical roles.
You could spend upwards of 6 months just to grasp basic software engineering concepts. Therefore, your best substitute is getting curious. Read, attend online events, and get familiar with the terminology and the types of technologies that are top of mind for engineers.
A good example of this comes from Mercado Libre. When I joined Escale, we went to Buenos Aires to meet the Kaszek team, who are also the founders of Mercado Libre. They mentioned their very specific decision to double down on technology a few years into the journey, as they saw that this was going to be the future.
Marcos Galperin, Mercado Libre's CEO, then literally took his desk and moved it to the technical area, spending a lot of time with product and technical folks, focusing on building out the technical team and infrastructure. By the time the competitors caught up, they were already light years ahead of everyone.
There are many resources out there for you to satisfy this curiosity. Companies like Google, Stripe, and Twilio have great technical blogs with a wealth of information on the topic.
Another great resource is the StackOverflow developer report. They release it every year and there's a lot of information about which technologies are coming on board, which are being phased out, and specific details on engineering profiles around the world.
It's really hard for you to find something if you don't know what it is. Here are some suggestions that I think you should consider when recruiting tech talent as an early-stage founder:
I get a lot of dry, very boring job descriptions that are mainly just a list of things you'd like the person to have. You should be trying to present yourself through your job description and aim to touch the candidate on an emotional level. Invite people to join the big mission!
Be aware of the fact that you won't attract everybody. But no worries there: you want to attract the right kind of people. These are people who'll pick up on the keywords that you mention about your culture and mission.
Benchmark against the best but also consider your DNA. If you're not really Google or a heavy engineering company, be upfront about it and sell other things. If people join you because of the technical challenge, they won't stick around if you don't actually provide it.
Remember mastery, autonomy, and purpose? Those are usually off the charts at early-stage startups! Make sure to sell these points as strongly as you can. Here are some examples of how the engineer's motivators usually apply in startups:
In order to provide tips for sourcing candidates for your A+ tech team, I decided to list them in order of their effectiveness for early-stage companies:
Spend most of your time on your personal network. If you remember, I said in the beginning that for a standard funnel, companies only make offers to 2-8% of engineering applicants, half of which are actually hired in the end. Well, when using personal networks, these numbers are much better.
For this tactic, pick your biggest network. For example, don't share most of your things on LinkedIn if your biggest network is on Twitter.
Then, work your network exhaustively. Build a list of people that may be able to help you and reach out to every single one. Make the ask and sell yourself, so that they'll put in a good word for you.
If that person knows you, they'll listen to you and hopefully make connections. If they're not the right fit, you can ask them for other recommendations on who to contact.
Also, make it easy for people to help you. You can search other people's networks on LinkedIn. But if you know another CTO and want their help, don't reach out to them and say, "Hey, I need some engineers! Can you help me?"
That's a very generic ask and makes it really hard on the person you're asking. My advice would be to go to that person's network, use the filters to select your top five candidates or so, and instead say, "I've seen these people from this company you worked at and they seem amazing. Here's my challenge: insert your challenge here. Could you please do the intros?"
That's a much better ask, that will make it super easy for the person to help you out.
This is a second option and more work-intensive. But if you don't have an established personal network, it's still great and works.
My recommendations here are to personalize your message and review your own profile.
Yes, your profile matters. It's the first thing the person you reach out to will check. Make sure to mention your most impressive previous company or experience.
If you want to expand your search when sourcing for recruiting tech talent, you can generate hundreds of applicants by doing some very simple things:
Here, you're reaching the "not so effective" techniques, as you're opening up the funnel a bit more.
Still, job boards can be quite useful to fill the pipeline quickly. Check some tools such as LinkedIn and StackOverflow, adapting your research to your location.
Companies such as Academlo, Resilia, Rise School, and Trybe help produce junior engineers. Maybe these are not the best hiring option, but all of these have larger communities. You might be able to find a senior engineer that has gone through a boot camp like this some time ago and is still reachable through the community.
So try to reach out to these companies! They are usually more than willing to help their students and alumni.
Keep this step simple and quick for early-stage companies. Notice how some of the steps that are last on this list will come first at larger companies.
You've gone through all these tough steps. Now, it's only a matter of closing. How do you finally hire that tech talent effectively?
I see many founders working on similar startups with similar funding. Some have no problems hiring engineers, while others do. Building your dream company requires having a dream team, and those A-players will need you to be at the top of your game to convince them.
Hiring the right people takes time and effort, but don't hesitate to also make it fun for you (and for them!). Also, remember that you don't have to have everything figured out: paint a picture and invite them to build it with you.
Now roll up your sleeves and get to work. That top of the tech hiring funnel won't fill itself!
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