I recently had the utterly terrifying experience of giving a guest lecture to an MIT computer science class on technical communication/public speaking. To my relief, things went quite well, and it was awesome to peel back the curtain a bit and give students a perspective on what actually happens inside companies when they’re hiring. Before […]
Building a product in the technical recruiting space? Read this first.
Lately, a good number of people have asked me for feedback on their tech recruiting startup ideas, and I’ve noticed that I tend to ask the same questions and give the same advice over and over. Below, I’ve reproduced some of these things. At the end of the day, a lot of my advice is […]
If you’re an engineer who wants to start a recruiting business, read this first.
Note: This post was adapted from a few posts I wrote on Quora (What should you know before starting your own third party engineering recruiting company? and Is it easy to become a technical recruiter from a software engineer background?). A version of it also recently appeared in Forbes. Like many commission-based jobs, technical recruiting […]
Resumes suck. Here’s the data.
About a year ago, after looking at the resumes of engineers we had interviewed at TrialPay in 2012, I learned that the strongest signal for whether someone would get an offer was the number of typos and grammatical errors on their resume. On the other hand, where people went to school, their GPA, and highest […]
Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist
People often ask me if I’m a talent agent for engineers, in the same way that actors have talent agents in Hollywood. In a lot of ways, the way I work is closer to a talent agent than a traditional recruiter — rather than sourcing for specific positions, I try to find smart people first, […]