Aleksandr Yampolskiy provides six steps for recruiting great engineers: 1) Look in places engineers frequent like meetups rather than just job boards, 2) Know what attracts developers like working with other great engineers and learning new technologies, 3) Move slowly in hiring and quickly in firing to find the right cultural fit, 4) Make recruitment a company-wide priority through referrals and selling the opportunity, 5) Be willing to try unconventional tactics to source candidates, and 6) Accept that failure is part of the process and learn from mistakes. The key is finding passionate engineers solving problems in new ways.

1. Recruiting Great Engineers in Six Easy Steps
Aleksandr Yampolskiy

2. Who Am I?
• Aleksandr Yampolskiy
• CTO of Cinchcast, BlogTalkRadio, and Cinch.FM companies
that provide solutions to create, share, measure, and
monetize audio content.
• Grew the team from six to 15 in six months
• Previously global head of security and compliance for Gilt
Groupe companies
• The team served over 1300 people, got
recognized in the news media.
• Various leadership roles in Goldman Sachs, Oracle, Microsoft
building scalable, enterprise software for IDM, SSO, Security
• Ph.D. in Distributed Computing
Email: alexyampolskiy@blogtalkradio.com
Twitter: @ayampolskiy
Blog: http://www.ctothoughts.com

3. C o m p a n y O v e r v ie w
( w w w . c in c h c a s t . c o m )
• Cinchcast provides cloud-  Founded in 2006
based software and services  ~30 Employees
for creating, distributing,  15 of them in Tech
measuring and monetizing  HQ in New York, NY
voice-based content  Millions of pageviews a
• BlogTalkRadio is a day
consumer-based media  Powering over 1,500
property hours of content creation
every day
Confidential © 2011 Cinchcast - All Rights Reserved

4. BlogTalkRadio : Largest Audio Social Network
(for consumers)

5. T h e C in c h c a s t P la t f o r m
(f o r e n t e r p r is e s )
Confidential © 2011 Cinchcast - All Rights Reserved 5

6. My Recruiting Tail of Woe
• Or the first snow of the season, winter 2008, NYC

7. RULE #1: Look in the right places
• Where will you find more engineers?
MongoDB conference Alpha Epsilon Phi Sorority Party
This meetup

8. Where to look
• Best engineers aren’t showcasing their resumes.
• They attend meetups, build open-source projects on
github, advertise on Linkedin, answer questions on
stackoverflow.
• Tip: Sponsor or host dev talks. Or you could just attend
them.
• Tip: Scout Linkedin, github, stackoverflow.
• Look for technologies you are hiring for but also for
knowledge of exotic technologies (OCAML, LISP, etc.)
Only passionate engineers know these.

9. Rule #2 : Know what attracts
developers (and what doesn’t)

10. Typical Office

11. Hint: It’s not the money.
• A players like to work with A players.
• They want to learn new technologies and get better at
them.
• They like to seat in Aeron chairs, and have fun during
lunch break.
• Developers should be self-empowered to make the right
decisions. Some process but not too much.

12. Talk is cheap.
• 20% equity of $0 is still $0.
• Tell a personal story. What did you risk by joining this
startup? What makes you competent?

13. RULE #3: Slow to hire, fast to fire.
• When hiring, look for passion! Experimentation with new
technologies and a track record of failure.
• My pitch: learn a lot over a few years while building a
multi-hundred-million company, and then go create your
own startup.
• Always meet in person. Have lots of coffees. Use social
media to your advantage (tech blog, friends’
connections, twitter)

14. Slow to hire, fast to fire
• Get developers to write code during interview. Ask lots
of questions – “You add an index to a database table, how do you
implement it? What’ s a b-tree? Why do we need to use a b-tree?”
• If you have a 100 person company, someone is No.
100… A bad situation will fester. It is your job as CEO to
make sure those situations don't happen. " - Kevin Ryan,
CEO Gilt Groupe.
• “Right person, right job, right time”

15. RULE #4: Recruitment is Everyone’s
Job
• Sourcing (referrals are the best source of candidates. Offer a
$5K referral)
• Selling (sell the company to a prospective candidate at every
stage)
• Selecting (hire the best - if in doubt, then it’s a no.)

16. How to Succeed
• Developers should be self-empowered to make
the right decisions. Some process but not too
much.
•Start using the website (aka “eating your own
dog food”)
•Refer your friends to Engineering jobs.
•Think about how to improve the company even if
it’s not your direct job responsibility.
•Know what the business strategy is.
• Most importantly, have fun!

17. RULE #5: Try something. The price of
inaction is high.
• Make decisions quickly [to hire or not to hire]
• General Patton: “A good plan violently
executed now is better than a perfect plan
executed next week.”

18. Try Something
• Linkedin is an invaluable resource if you reach out to
candidates yourself. Look for unusal skills in addition to
the ones I need (Lisp, socket.io, MIPS assembly, etc.)
• Mixed luck with Craigslist or Stackoverflow.
• Hire a part-time recruiter ($20 an hour) vs. 15-20%
placement fee.

19. RULE #6: Fail fast forward
• “Failure is very acceptable. When it happens, make
sure you identify it quickly, and hopefully it's in a
forward motion. And then start going again.”
• Hiring great people isn’t easy. My response rate is 2-3
out of 20; recruiters report 1 out for 100.
• I don’t delegate hiring; it’s the most important job a
CTO can do.
Carol Bartz, former Yahoo CEO

20. Common Mistakes
• I should use ___ technology in the beginning because
it’s better, more scalable, and will make it easier to hire.
It doesn’t matter!
• Premature optimization of the team and infrastructure
• “I MUST have a technical cofounder”
– How about a tech advisor instead + outsourcing?
• Your worst hires will look great on paper.

21. Outsourcing
• Can be effective if done
properly. Stay tuned.

22. Any Questions?....
Email: alexyampolskiy@blogtalkradio.com
Twitter: @ayampolskiy