Finding Talent for Free (or at least cheap)
A guide for pre-funded startups
If you need to get your first tech hire on board, but don’t have the funding to pay an agency fee, it can be a bit of a catch-22. You can’t get the cash until you have the person on the org chart and an MVP completed, but you can’t hire the person because you don’t have the cash. Here are some potential solutions to that quandary. Please note, A LOT of VCs will not give you any cash until you have a full time CTO on deck. See the final point for an approach that might solve this problem, while also ensuring your systems don’t come crashing down.
First Things, First:
● Write a good Job Description. See how to do that here.
● When you are reaching out to a potential candidate via email, follow these steps to get the person to actually read it, and maybe even respond. Good tech people are hit up constantly, and it’s mostly become white noise to them. Differentiate by:
o Using a specific subject — don’t just say something like “Reaching Out”. Say something like “CTO role with revenue generating SaaS” or “Joe Shmoe Sent Me” if it’s through a referral.
o In the email, make it obvious you actually took the time to learn something about this person. Cookie cutter templates usually get trashed. Be specific about the opportunity.
o Make sure you let them know how to contact you easily.
Ways to Recruit on Budget:
● Get a single seat of LinkedIn Recruiter — it’s the only way you can get the keyword searching you’ll need to hone in on the right prospects. It usually costs between $100–110/month.
● Join SoCalTech.com — anyone in LA tech should get Ben’s free, daily email regardless. But if you join, which is very inexpensive — $29 a month. In addition to gaining access to his database of startups, execs, funding, you also get to post jobs for free. They are front and center on his daily email which a lot of people see, and I think it might even feed into Indeed.com as well (most used job posting aggregator out there).
● HotstartupJobs — not sure how long it will last, but as of 9/17, you can use promo code “vip2017” to post a free job.
● The amazing Marissa Peretz of Silicon Beach Talent will give talent-related advice to portfolio companies at Make in LA, Amplify, Techstars Los Angeles, Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, Luma Launch and LightSpeed Innovations. You can read more about the program here.
● Cofounders Lab — they do a lot of events. SoCalTech’s newsletter usually lists them -
● BuiltInLA — you can post a job for a month for only about $70 or so.
● WeAreLATech — if you are really a LA startup person, you can ask Espree to join the WeAreLATech Facebook group. Once approved, you can post Jobs to the group (which is about 3k strong).
● Meetups — time-consuming, yes, but great way to meet potential hires face to face. Charm them ☺.
● Hackathons — for obvious reasons.
● Idealist — if you’re a mission-driven social-enterprise, you may be able to get away with inexpensive postings on this site.
● Linkedin Groups — I would not recommend posting jobs on Linkedin — it’s expensive and I have had very meager results. However, if you join Groups targeted on what you are trying to hire, they have a “Jobs Discussion” section that will get the word out to the specific target you are trying to reach. No charge to post here.
● University Job Boards — you may be able to score a MS, CS graduate who had some work under his/her belt before they went for their post-grad. LA has 4 killer CS/Engineering programs — UCLA, USC, Harvey Mudd and CalTech, and UC Irvine is close enough for LA opps).
Promise Me You’ll Do This:
One workaround is to hire a great Engineer out of college to be your “CTO”, but pretty please, hire a strong Advisory CTO (synonymously called Fractional CTO or CTO-For-Hire) to ensure that your CTO is architecting solutions that will scale. Having been in tech myself for years, I guarantee you that the way you learn how to do things in tech is by messing up, and then cleaning up the mess. People with less years of experience simply haven’t had enough time to mess up/clean up yet. A Fractional or Advisory CTO will not only ensure the ship will stay afloat, but he/she will add credibility to your org chart when you go on the road for cash, as well as getting your MVP ready, and setting up a strategy/path to hiring your own team. Many also have a technical team so they can farm out development (some local, some nearshore, some offshore). Speak to a few and pick the one that makes sense for you. Here are some of my faves all based in the LA area.
● Tony Karrer/Tech Empower — CTO-For-Hire, and has local Engineers on staff — mostly Java or PHP, and expertise in data-driven or algorithmically based solutions. Tony heads up the LA CTO Forum, so there’s also that…
● Erik Kellener— CTO for hire. He doesn’t really have a specialty. He’s been in many industries. Was with RIOT for a few years recently, a lot of B2C and eCommerce, but other stuff as well. He’s good at leading large teams of technologists.
● Barbara Bickham/BarbaraBickham.com — CTO for hire.
● Jake Ryan/Venice Consulting Group — CTO for hire and he has on shore and near-shore resources mostly for mobile and web.
Good luck in your search!
