What is the best way to recruit engineers in Silicon Valley? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Auren Hoffman, SafeGraph CEO, on Quora:
The most important thing you can do when recruiting engineers in Silicon Valley is to figure out a way to have as few people on your team as possible.
The fewer the people, the less you need to recruit. Recruiting is really hard and it takes a really long time. Recruiting one hire can take up to one hundred hours of your team’s collective time. That’s time that is not spent making the product better or getting customers.
Adding more people to your team inevitably means more communication problems and means people will be less productive.
Of course, most companies need more than zero people to achieve great things. So you will need to recruit. The important thing is to hire as few people as possible.
1. Hire absolutely amazing people
If you hire amazing people, you will need fewer people. One great person can do what three very-good people can do. Great people move fast and come up with innovations. And great people are always looking for leverage. In fact, all great employees know how to use leverage (if they do not, they are a very-good employee at best). Leverage is the hallmark of any A+ team member (at least in a tech company).
2. Use leverage
Once you have amazing people who know how to use leverage, make sure you actually use leverage. Focus on automation. Focus on bringing in high quality vendors, APIs, and more. Constantly look to have someone else (outsource) or something else (vendors) do the commodity tasks so your employees can focus on only the truly hard (and true value-add) things.
The most important business skill of the last one hundred years was the ability to recruit and manage people. The most important skill of the next one hundred years is the ability to select and manage vendors.
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