Hiring guide
Hiring guide
When to hire
You want keep the team small until you reach product market fit and have proven you can get your first sales. One product team is sufficient, just the founders or the founders and a few engineers and a designer or product manager if necessary. Small teams are able to pivot and try lots of things faster.
The most impactful products were all created by small teams. According to Marc Andresseen Javascript was created by 1 person, the web browser 2 people. The core Google search engine 2 people Larry and Serge, OpenAI's only has a handful of core architects. Only hire once you've validated that there's demand and you need to scale up to meet it. Most of the hard work of figuring out product market fit is small teams.
Who to hire
We focused on hiring people who are 2-10 years into their career and are individual contributors not managers. Hiring people with no experience is hard because you'd have to train them. And when you hire more senior people they'd tend to want to manage a team instead of building.
Most of the work at a startup is building, there isn't so much people management needed, great people manage themselves. In fact Facebook is asking managers and directors to go back to coding. Also younger people tend to have a stronger work ethic because this is all new to them.
Managers and executives have more experience, but because they've done it before it isn't as exciting the 2nd time. It works great to get a very experienced person as a mentor for a couple of hours a month, and have them coach a younger team members that you hire full time. You'd get both experience and work ethic and it'll be cost effective.
Fancy university degrees don't matter. Working at big name company is usually a negative indicator. Instead test people by giving them a project that reflects their actual job during the interview. We found that our best hires came from tier 2 universities and worked at startups not big name companies. In fact a lot of folks on our India team were out performing others who had USA Ivy League degrees.
Also if you're the head of growth at a large late stage company and you probably joined after the company figured out product market fit and the growth model, so your not really doing much, your just optimizing. The company will grow regardless of what you do.
Job ads examples:
product manager ad, designer job ad
How we found candidates
For engineers did a search on Linkedin and looked for 7-12 years experience, title: engineer, and skills: PHP or Javascript, we looked for engineers in Asia and our salary range was $3500-$5000 USD / month. We assessed candidates via a written questionnaire and a coding test as well as looking at their github projects. For our engineering team we found that more senior hires worked better together because everyone had good code quality. Most of our engineering team is in the philippines, malaysia, and china. example1, example2, example3
For product managers we looked for people who can code and also have 1-2 experience as a product manager. Technique skills is a requirement because we felt that if you can't code then you wouldn't be any good at deciding what to build either. We assessed folks via a questionnaire and a product management research project.
Outreach message
Hey CANDIDATE,
Your name came up recently when I was talking to a colleague about our need for a product and engineering leader.
I'm Rob, CEO at ContactOut, a 500 Startups and Blackbird startup. We help businesses connect with the customers and staff they need.
We have the world's largest contact information search engine - we're looking for help designing and building an equally awesome user experience.
We're a small team and growing super fast - think Dropbox / Slack first 12 employees. Currently at $6M ARR ($4M profit) with a clear path to $400m revenue by 2024. We're being advised by Zoominfo's founding team, who have given us the exact playbook on how they went from 20 people to a $15 billion dollar IPO.
I'd love to chat about product and get your thoughts on what we're building.
Are you open to having a chat?
Here are some more examples from other companies
1st round interview
15min call to sell the candidate on the opportunity. We're telling them about ContactOut and answering all their questions and handling objections. We are not interviewing them at all. Our recruiter runs this call. At the end of the call we ask the candidate to fill out a questionnaire to advance to the next round.
Questionnaire
We ask a bunch of questions and use this as first screen:
What's the most impressive thing you've accomplished in your life/career?
How many books did you read last year, and what did you learn from them?
What are your values?
For product roles: Tell us about a project you worked on. What did you do and what outcomes did you achieve?
For sales: How would you sell ContactOut to the head of recruiting at Mckinsey, what outreach email would you write?
What we're looking for:
Clear writing. Clear writing equals clear thinking
Learns fast, reads at least 5-10 books per year.
Has achieved impressive results in past roles
Example responses from people we hired: example1, example3, example4, example5, example6
Interview with hiring manager
We'll ask the candidate to go into specifics about what they did to accomplish some of the achievements mentioned
We might ask them about how their previous boss would rate them if we called them for a reference and what their strengths and weaknesses are
Mainly we'd focus on selling the candidate. Are there any other roles you are considering? Is ContactOut your top preference, if not why not? and address any objections
Interview challenge
This would depend on the role. For engineers it would be a coding test and our team will review. Sales would be a mock sales call. Product managers and designers would be a take home project over 1-2 days.
Example:
Provide a critique of Contactout's website and application:
a) Sign up, use Contactout and write up your thoughts on what you would change or improve about the onboarding flow?
b) Please find attached an alpha version of Contactout's new chrome extension. Install it, test it and try to break it. Write up your findings and bugs in a format that can be shared with developers to fix.
c) You've joined Contactout as Design Lead responsible for improving our product and conversion. What would you plan to do in the first month? What questions would you have for me, our customers and other stakeholders?
Example responses from people we hired: example1, example2, example3
Training people
I ask Shahed Khan the founder of Loom (a billion dollar business) in a private conversation his take on delegation. His take was that when he wants to hire someone for a new function, for example CFO. He would first go learn the function himself, so he'd know what good performance looks like. Then he'd go hire someone and work closely with that person for 3-6months where they'd make all decisions together, and he'd be across all the details. Finally when he confident the new hire is performing well, he'd be more hands off and focus on other areas of the business. Delegate but verify.
When to hire
You want keep the team small until you reach product market fit and have proven you can get your first sales. One product team is sufficient, just the founders or the founders and a few engineers and a designer or product manager if necessary. Small teams are able to pivot and try lots of things faster.
The most impactful products were all created by small teams. According to Marc Andresseen Javascript was created by 1 person, the web browser 2 people. The core Google search engine 2 people Larry and Serge, OpenAI's only has a handful of core architects. Only hire once you've validated that there's demand and you need to scale up to meet it. Most of the hard work of figuring out product market fit is small teams.
Who to hire
We focused on hiring people who are 2-10 years into their career and are individual contributors not managers. Hiring people with no experience is hard because you'd have to train them. And when you hire more senior people they'd tend to want to manage a team instead of building.
Most of the work at a startup is building, there isn't so much people management needed, great people manage themselves. In fact Facebook is asking managers and directors to go back to coding. Also younger people tend to have a stronger work ethic because this is all new to them.
Managers and executives have more experience, but because they've done it before it isn't as exciting the 2nd time. It works great to get a very experienced person as a mentor for a couple of hours a month, and have them coach a younger team members that you hire full time. You'd get both experience and work ethic and it'll be cost effective.
Fancy university degrees don't matter. Working at big name company is usually a negative indicator. Instead test people by giving them a project that reflects their actual job during the interview. We found that our best hires came from tier 2 universities and worked at startups not big name companies. In fact a lot of folks on our India team were out performing others who had USA Ivy League degrees.
Also if you're the head of growth at a large late stage company and you probably joined after the company figured out product market fit and the growth model, so your not really doing much, your just optimizing. The company will grow regardless of what you do.
Job ads examples:
product manager ad, designer job ad
How we found candidates
For engineers did a search on Linkedin and looked for 7-12 years experience, title: engineer, and skills: PHP or Javascript, we looked for engineers in Asia and our salary range was $3500-$5000 USD / month. We assessed candidates via a written questionnaire and a coding test as well as looking at their github projects. For our engineering team we found that more senior hires worked better together because everyone had good code quality. Most of our engineering team is in the philippines, malaysia, and china. example1, example2, example3
For product managers we looked for people who can code and also have 1-2 experience as a product manager. Technique skills is a requirement because we felt that if you can't code then you wouldn't be any good at deciding what to build either. We assessed folks via a questionnaire and a product management research project.
Outreach message
Hey CANDIDATE,
Your name came up recently when I was talking to a colleague about our need for a product and engineering leader.
I'm Rob, CEO at ContactOut, a 500 Startups and Blackbird startup. We help businesses connect with the customers and staff they need.
We have the world's largest contact information search engine - we're looking for help designing and building an equally awesome user experience.
We're a small team and growing super fast - think Dropbox / Slack first 12 employees. Currently at $6M ARR ($4M profit) with a clear path to $400m revenue by 2024. We're being advised by Zoominfo's founding team, who have given us the exact playbook on how they went from 20 people to a $15 billion dollar IPO.
I'd love to chat about product and get your thoughts on what we're building.
Are you open to having a chat?
Here are some more examples from other companies
1st round interview
15min call to sell the candidate on the opportunity. We're telling them about ContactOut and answering all their questions and handling objections. We are not interviewing them at all. Our recruiter runs this call. At the end of the call we ask the candidate to fill out a questionnaire to advance to the next round.
Questionnaire
We ask a bunch of questions and use this as first screen:
What's the most impressive thing you've accomplished in your life/career?
How many books did you read last year, and what did you learn from them?
What are your values?
For product roles: Tell us about a project you worked on. What did you do and what outcomes did you achieve?
For sales: How would you sell ContactOut to the head of recruiting at Mckinsey, what outreach email would you write?
What we're looking for:
Clear writing. Clear writing equals clear thinking
Learns fast, reads at least 5-10 books per year.
Has achieved impressive results in past roles
Example responses from people we hired: example1, example3, example4, example5, example6
Interview with hiring manager
We'll ask the candidate to go into specifics about what they did to accomplish some of the achievements mentioned
We might ask them about how their previous boss would rate them if we called them for a reference and what their strengths and weaknesses are
Mainly we'd focus on selling the candidate. Are there any other roles you are considering? Is ContactOut your top preference, if not why not? and address any objections
Interview challenge
This would depend on the role. For engineers it would be a coding test and our team will review. Sales would be a mock sales call. Product managers and designers would be a take home project over 1-2 days.
Example:
Provide a critique of Contactout's website and application:
a) Sign up, use Contactout and write up your thoughts on what you would change or improve about the onboarding flow?
b) Please find attached an alpha version of Contactout's new chrome extension. Install it, test it and try to break it. Write up your findings and bugs in a format that can be shared with developers to fix.
c) You've joined Contactout as Design Lead responsible for improving our product and conversion. What would you plan to do in the first month? What questions would you have for me, our customers and other stakeholders?
Example responses from people we hired: example1, example2, example3
Training people
I ask Shahed Khan the founder of Loom (a billion dollar business) in a private conversation his take on delegation. His take was that when he wants to hire someone for a new function, for example CFO. He would first go learn the function himself, so he'd know what good performance looks like. Then he'd go hire someone and work closely with that person for 3-6months where they'd make all decisions together, and he'd be across all the details. Finally when he confident the new hire is performing well, he'd be more hands off and focus on other areas of the business. Delegate but verify.