In the early days of jem we were doing this wild thing where we would come up with a different project for every single person that interviewed with us. An approach like that mostly works for referal base and network hiring, which i still believe for your first ten hires, building ut your founding engineering team is generally the right place to focus. There are ways to scale that and really boil it down to just the core pieces, but i don'tknow that we necessarily would have landed there if we started from scratch.
Today’s episode is with Steven Bartel, co-founder and CEO of Gem.
Before building the talent acquisition platform, Steven was an early engineer at Dropbox, where he spent 5 years working on analytics, Dropbox Paper, and hiring as the company grew from 25 to 1500 people.
This experience from Dropbox, combined with his lessons from building out Gem’s own team and talking to his customer base of recruiters makes Steven the perfect person to talk to about early-stage recruiting.
In our conversation we focus on how to make those fourth, fifth, or tenth hires — those really early days when your startup has zero brand recognition or recruiting help. Here’s a preview of his tactical advice:
- A trick for sourcing second-degree network connections
- The power of sending a “break-up” message in your candidate outreach.
- How Gem brought candidates on to work with them in very structured trial periods before making a full-time offer.
- Advice for working on your recruiting pitch and nurturing passive talent
- The similarities between early-stage hiring and founder-led sales
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