Since blogging about Transmitive’s search for a Lead Developer / CTO a few weeks back, we are finally winding down our search. We have three “final round” candidates and, sure enough, two of them arrived to us through proactive outreach, while one of them found us on Craigslist.

At risk of being a one-trick pony, I wanted to write up a post with some more lessons learned. Many of these will be obvious to folks who’ve been through a similar search before, but here goes.

Sourcing Candidates

In terms of sourcing candidates, my top four sites were:

• LinkedIn
• Development-related Meetup groups
• GitHub
• StackOverflow

For GitHub and StackOverflow, a great trick is to use a Google search like site:github.com intitle:profile “new york” or site:stackoverflow.com intitle:user brooklyn. This will immediately give you a significant number of relevant profiles.

Maximizing Your Response Rate

The response rate for proactive outreach across 150 candidates landed at 40%. This increased markedly (from ~30% to ~50%) when we focused on a few key things:

• First, email and LinkedIn were easily the most successful ways to get in contact with candidates. Although I didn’t use Twitter frequently, my limited experience suggested it’s also a “top tier” medium. Using contact/messaging links through Meetup, Quora, etc. is pretty much useless.
• Second, personalize your outreach by specifically citing why you’re interested in speaking with someone. This is important for several reasons. First, it makes clear that you’ve done your research, and there is something particular about a person that gets you fired up. Second, if it’s clear that you’ve invested time in a candidate, they will be much more inclined to to return the favor and at least send you a “no thanks” email.

What makes a great “cold” email?

In terms of the content of outreach, my quick tips are:

• Write about what your audience (developers) cares about, not what you care about. I had at least three people tell me that they care much more about building cool products with fun people than they do about pedestrian things like “salary” and “health insurance.” You will, of course, want to use every lever you can, but remember to focus on what really gets developers interested. 
• For example, we ran two versions of a Facebook ad targeted at developers in New York. One version said “Work at funded startup. Salary. Equity. Blah blah blah.” and had a CTR of 0% after ~1,000 impressions. The second version read “Tired of bureaucracy and dull products? Come build something great with awesome people.” The CTR was a respectable 0.3% on ~1,000 impressions. (Facebook, for the record, was not a great recruiting tool.)
• I also got one helpful suggestion from a respondent: “It would be cool to see you mention the technologies the position would most likely be expected to utilize. I’m sure other potential candidates would as well. Don’t get me wrong. Most people (headhunters) who send me recruiting emails just rattle off the acronyms without much context.”

What next?

My tips are getting more and more obvious as this post carries on, but always, always, always take a meeting. If someone is “not interested right now” but “would love to hear more about your product”, take them up on it. It’s a chance to meet someone interesting, get feedback on your product/technology, potentially generate referrals, and plant a seed that may grow into something beautiful down the road.

Other Resources

I had the chance to catch up with Jon Bischke of RG Labs, who shared some very similar stories from the front lines. After building a few teams of his own, he has put together a list of 21 Must-Read Articles on Building World-Class Teams. He also specifically pointed me to a spot-on and amusing post from Ethan Bloch titled How to Recruit A+ When You’re an Early Stage Startup. And, if you know of other interesting links, I’m always happy to see them at dk@transmitive.com. Best of luck to everyone else out there who is trying to build a great team.