Recruiting Strategy

Purpose

To provide support for our process and norms around recruiting at Countable.

Scope

Covers why we recruit the way we do, our larger strategy, and the research supporting our hiring.

Background

A study of 200 Silicon Valley startups investigated the effect of 3 hiring policies:

The “star” blueprint which sought the best technical candidates;
The “commitment” blueprint which hired based on values;
And the “professional” blueprint which commoditized skills.

The commitment blueprint was starkly the best, with zero failures in the 2000 market bubble and triple the chance of making an IPO the next best model.

Two other models, the “autocratic” and “bureaucratic” performed even worse than the aforementioned three.

Recruitment Strategy

Finding the best people is one of the top challenges in our industry, so we need every advantage we can find in this way. Our strategy:

Having our process act as a “funnel” for the right applicants.
Being clear about our high expectations, compensation range, technology used, culture, and that we’re remote in the posting. This will help prevent anyone who doesn’t like the above from applying.
Having a specific instruction in the application for cover letter formatting to filter mass applications out.
Having a friendly letter to acknowledge the people who made it part way into the process. It’s great to feel empathy for candidates, and we want to help them with their future applications. This is important because 99% or more candidates won’t be accepted, and it reduces pressure on staff to make exceptions to our process.
Avoiding any non-meritocratic bias. Gender, ethnic, and other irrelevant bias are not only unethical, they lower the hiring bar by considering information that’s not related to performance.
Always be hiring. Rather than reacting to specific capacity needs, we want to get the right people on the bus. If outstanding people are identified by our team, they’re added to a list that we stay in touch with and “court” over time, just as with any good client or partner relationship.
We work hard to be a place that ambitious people want to work. Ideally we want a virtuous cycle where if we have a culture fit, we probably want to hire that person, and they’ll be more likely to want to work here too. For this, we have to communicate our mission, vision and values within our philosophy documentation.
In a perfect “oracle” screening process, our first stage would advance the exact people that will mostly quickly achieve our mission while adhering to our values, and we’d just hire those immediately.
We should always have active job postings for positions as long as we’d consider the best possible applicant if they did happen to apply.
We should improve our company profile on recruiting platforms (etc) so the right people will apply.

Research

Useful stats for our recruiting strategy:

Research on the #1 thing developers look for in a job:

The compensation and benefits offered - 18.3%
The languages, frameworks, and other technologies I’d be working with 17.3%
Opportunities for professional development - 16.0%
The office environment or company culture - 13.6%
The opportunity to work from home/remotely - 10.3%

## References

[1] Harvard business review on how to hire