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, […]

Review of Statwing

Note: This post was adapted from a review I wrote on Quora. This is a review of Statwing. Statwing is magic. You give it CSVs, and it imbues you with a godlike power to analyze data without really knowing statistics. My main job involves hiring engineers for startups, but if you’re reading my blog, you […]

What I learned from reading 8,000 recruiting messages

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 […]

Hire from your user base

Recruiting great engineers is hard. You might guess that the hardest part is finding great people, but with the advent of LinkedIn, GitHub, and a number of search aggregators, it’s actually not too bad. The really hard part is finding great people who are likely to be interested in what you’re doing. To that end, […]

Review of Lever

Note: This post was adapted from a review I wrote on Quora. This is a review of Lever, my favorite applicant tracking system (ATS). ATSs suck There are a lot of bad ATSs out there. I’ve tried out most of them at this point, and I’m consistently shocked at how they manage to stay in […]