Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts

Chapter 49. Recruiting Developers? Create an Awesome Candidate Experience

Dharmesh Shah

If you’re trying to attract awesome developers, you need to create an awesome candidate experience (CX). Something that makes them go, "Wow!” It’s like UX—but for the people interviewing to join your team.

It seems that every startup I know out there is trying to grow its development team. But given that there are always a hundred things going on, few startups spend the time thinking about their interviewing process (because we’re all busy building products and delighting users).

Yesterday, I sat in a HubSpot “Tech Talk.” The topic was “Technical Interviews.” The idea was to share ideas and best practices across the product team so that we can better find and recruit great developers for the team. HubSpot has had a bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to technical recruiting. We’re fortunate to have Paul English, founder/CTO, as a friend (he’s hands down the best recruiter I’ve ever met). Paul was kind enough to be “CTO for a day” at HubSpot. And because Google Ventures is an investor, we’ve been able to have a Googler from the recruiting team spend a few hours with us, reviewing our practices and giving us tips for how we can improve them.

Ideas for Creating an Awesome Candidate Experience (CX)

Here are some ideas for what I think would make a great candidate experience. Many of these ideas are implemented at HubSpot—and I’m hoping the others will get adopted ...