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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

If you’ve ever been involved in hiring software engineers, you know how frustrating the process can be. One of the toughest parts is getting candidates’ attention. In an effort to understand what makes engineers respond to some recruiting messages and not others, I teamed up with the fine folks at Hired. Hired is a 2-year-old […]