“We only want to hire the best engineers”

I hear this from almost every client I speak to. So does every other recruiter.

Seriously - just say those eight words to any room full of recruiting people, and everyone will give a wry chuckle and roll their eyes. We've all heard it a million times.

“We only want to hire the best engineers.”

No. No, you do not.

The best engineers make more than your entire payroll. They have opinions on tech debt and timelines. They have remote jobs, if they want them. They don’t go “oh, well, this is your third company, so I guess I’ll defer to you on all product decisions”. They care about comp, a trait you consider disqualifying. They can care about work-life balance, because they’re not desperate enough to feel the need not to. And however successful your company has been so far, they have other options they like better.

You’re not stupid. If I asked you, point blank, “do you actually think the best engineers in the world would give your company a second thought,” I bet you could say “well, no, obviously not”.

But you don’t act like it.

You lock in the same set of criteria as every other startup. Experience at early stage. Highly independent. In-office in the Bay Area. Not too “salary motivated”. Don’t even apply if you want a 40h/week job - we work hard and play hard.

Four months later, you haven’t found a good founding engineer. Do you know how long four months is in the life of a young startup? That’s an eternity, and you’ve spent it in stasis.

Hiring is a negotiation, and you’re acting like you’re holding all the cards when you aren't. You’re looking for a highly competitive candidate pool, and you’re not being competitive: you’re just checking the same baselines as everybody else. You're acting like a replacement-level employer and expecting more than replacement-level candidates.

Would you rather spend four months in stasis waiting for a senior candidate who hits the ground running on day one, or hire a skilled midlevel hacker who will be at full capacity in two weeks immediately?

Would you rather spend four months in stasis waiting for a 50h/week candidate, or have a 40h/week candidate now?

Would you rather be a green bar in this chart, or a red one?

You don’t ask yourself these questions. You say “I want a candidate with these traits,” and sit on your hands until one materializes, until you run out of money, or - more likely - until someone manages to worm through your unrealistic expectations and convince you to compromise for them.

If you had accepted compromise, you could have opened the floodgates on day one and had your pick of ten great-but-not-perfect candidates. Instead, you waited months and settled for one.

When you accept that you need a great engineer, and not the best engineer, you can deal with the trade-offs consciously. What traits are actually important? How much are you willing to give up to get them? What’s the dollar value of a hire this month versus next month? “What actually matters today?” is the most important question a startup can ask, and you haven't applied it to one of the most important aspects of running a company!

"Well, we're a little different from other companies, because we have really high standards."

Does it sound like you're different?

"We just raised a very exciting Series A!"

So did literally a thousand other companies. There was $26B in early stage venture investment last quarter, and you can do the math as to how much of that your $10M raise occupies. The hires you need aren't looking at your company as the slam-dunk success that a founder necessarily needs to believe that it is. Maybe they will once they talk to you, but that's later - at the top of your funnel, you're just another face in the crowd, and you need to act like it.

I’m not telling you to hire people who aren’t good. I’m not even telling you that the traits you want aren’t good things to look for. I’m not telling you to actually compromise on quality. I’m telling you that trying to hire the best engineers is the enemy of actually hiring great ones. You’re going to have to give up something (possibly time, possibly comp, possibly workplace policy) to make the hire you want.

The longer you aren’t thinking about what to give up, the more you’re implicitly choosing to give up time, the thing startups treasure more than anything else. And you’re giving up time to - what, play it safe?

The default outcome for a startup is always failure. You took a risk by even starting one. You ship things that might be broken all the time, because you know that speed is more important than perfection. You take moonshots, because you know that big wins matter more than small losses. And then you give up months of time because you refuse to apply the same philosophy to hiring!

I run a recruiting company. It’s no skin off my back if you want to be irrational about hiring. Please, by all means, continue. You’re leaving a thousand great engineers to sit in my database instead of your ATS, and I would much rather you pay me 40 grand to find them than find them yourself.

Or you can act like the scrappy realist you probably like to think you are, stop insisting on perfection, and move fast.