Learn the tips and hacks for gaining a competitive edge in hiring. You will learn for example: > How to shape your candidate pitch > Secret (legal) hacks to finding candidates on Facebook > How to crack popular services to find your candidate’s contact info > List of useful interview questions > How to save tons of time with the right efficiency apps

1. HIRING TOOLBOX
FORSTARTUPS

2. INTRO
Startup founders have two main duties - to secure cash and top-tier
talent. The latter can often prove to be more challenging.
Based on a study by Sequoia Capital’s talent team, hiring 12 software
engineers requires approximately 990 hours of work. And the majority
of that work will fall to the startup founder.
To help you become more efficient, we prepared this super-practical
startup hiring toolbox.
We use all of these methods in our continuous search for top software
engineers from around the world. We strongly believe in the Open
Source idea and would like to share our know-how with you.

3. “A startup CEO should spend a minimum
of 20% of his time on hiring.”
BRET RECKARD,
SEQUOIA CAPITAL

4. YOURSTORY
Recruitment is sales, and as every good salesman or woman knows,
you need to tell an enticing story. How do you convince a top engineer
to walk away from a comfortable job at Google and join your team? You
have to sell your company’s vision.
• You need an investor pitch to get money, and you need a candidate
pitch to get people.
• Everyone in the company should agree on and tell candidates the
same story.
• Explain the story throughout the whole recruitment process to keep
candidates engaged.
• A good story must be relevant to the people that listen to it.
• Practice your story over and over.

5. DRAFTYOURSTORY
Why does it exist? What’s the potential?
What’s unique about the company? Why
does it make sense financially? Are you
attempting to disrupt the market?? What is
your vision?
Business Story Tech Story
What is your expertise? What kind of tech
challenge can you offer candidates? Do you
have unique tools, equipment, procedures
or systems? Interesting upcoming projects?
Culture Story
What is the atmosphere like at your
company? What types of personalities are
most valued? What makes your current
employees stay?
Tip: When drafting your culture story, avoid nice-sounding but useless words such as Excellence or Communication,
Respect. Ask your team to describe a person they would love to work with. The result is your company culture -- the
personalities and skills that are valued by your employees.

6. “Talented people are looking for technical challenges, and you
need to be able to explain them to candidates. They are not looking
for something easy. High performers like to be challenged.”
SHIVANI SHARMA
SLACK

7. DEFININGTHEROLE
Before contacting potential candidates, put together an outline
of the job at hand. Ask for input from the whole team about key
requirements and responsibilities for this position.
Functional responsibilities
Why does this position exist? Why is it interesting? What will the
person work on during their first 3, 6, 12 months at the company?
Desired experience
How senior? What kind of experience do you need? Where does your
ideal candidate work?
Tip: When hiring a CTO, for example, you want him to have experience with similar
types of product or technology. Same for marketing. A Marketing VP from an
established big-name brand might be useless when drafting a go-to market strategy
for a startup.
Non-functional requirements
You don’t want a super specialized expert, because startups require
flexibility and quick adaptation to new situations. Your early hires will
likely be future leaders. Focus on:
• Leadership and team-management skills
• Recruiting skills
• Selling skills
Yes, in a startup everyone is recruiting, and everyone must sell.
Value-add
What do you expect the person to bring to the company? What new
skills or experiences do you want?

8. POSITION BRIEF
Tips:
• Highlight what kind of person would fit in best with the team.
• Write in an active voice when describing the position and your
expectations.
• Be specific with your wording. Objective descriptors (i.e. “two
years of experience with React.js is a must”) get right to the
point.
• Stay gender neutral and make sure your job ad steers clear of
unconscious bias.

9. “When a candidate says no, I convince them it's a maybe. Once
they say maybe, then my job is to say, maybe is a yes. People
give up on recruiting way too early and way too quickly.”
VINOD KHOSLA,
KHOSLA VENTURES

10. Team sourcing
Your employees will usually have hundreds or thousands of
connections on their LinkedIn profiles. If you want to get them involved
in sourcing new talent, give them a few pointers.
1. Get people together for an hour
2. Order food, so you can link it with lunch and be efficient
3. Provide them with a LinkedIn query targeting the position you need
4. Start reviewing profiles together
5. When a promising candidate is discovered, reach out to him on the
spot.
Within one hour, you’ll will have a bunch of potential candidates who
have already been approached by people who know them the best at
the company. Super efficient.
SOURCING
Do you know where to find the right candidates?
Exploit your network and your colleagues’. Good people know good
people. Think about friends, friends of friends, classmates, ex-
colleagues.
Sequoia Capital’s talent team recommends a mind-mining method
called Memory Palace. Reflect on different stages in your life, from high
school and college to internships, first jobs, hackathons, trainings. At
each stage, ask yourself questions like:
• Who were the three smartest people in the class?
• Who was your best friend?
• Who was the expert / go-to-person?
• Who was your mentor?
• Who were the people that everyone respected?
You can read more about the tool here.

11. Search Query
When searching on LinkedIn or any different network, keep in mind, that a
job title can be styled in various different ways. Take “Programmer” as an
example. Some people call themselves “Developers,” while others prefer
“Software Engineers.”
There are usually three components in a job title:
Level
Senior, Lead, Chief, Managing
Technology
React OR React.js OR Frontend OR JavaScript OR Web OR FullStack
Profession
Programmer OR Engineer OR Developer
The query can look like this: (Senior OR Lead OR Chief OR Managing) AND
(React OR Reactjs OR Frontend OR Javascript OR Web OR FullStack)
If you are searching for a specific skill, rather than a job title, then you’ll
search by technology. Use this glossary for tech recruiters.

12. Facebook
Facebook has a powerful search tool called Graph Search that can help
you source people based on specific interests, locations or events they
attend.
On LinkedIn, you search people based on who they are (job title:
Mechanical Engineer), while on Facebook you search based on what
they do (i.e. people interested in an event about Mechanical
Engineering).
Search queries can be done directly in Facebook by using its phrasing
logic: “people who live in san francisco and like python.” However, to
conduct more sophisticated searches, we recommend a Chrome plugin
called “Intelligence Search.” Download it here. As an alternative, you
can use peoplefindThor.dk
You can search for events attended by people with a certain interest.

13. You can use this syntax:
site:stackoverflow.com/users -inurl:jobs|company|cities|meetup
location: *San Francisco ReactJS OR JavaScript
After “location:” you input the city (or state) you are interested in,
followed by the technologies. You can use the Boolean operators AND/
OR.
List of technology tags on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/
tags List of technology synonyms: https://stackoverflow.com/tags/
synonyms
Angellist
AngelList has a free search tool: https://angel.co/people/
Meetup.com
You can google attendee lists on Meetup.com: site:meetup.com
"member since" Angular "San Francisco"
This query finds members of San Francisco Angular meetups.
GitHub
Use the search box on GitHub to input search strings.
Search string Result
If you are a GitHub member, you can access people’s contact details.
However, some prefer to keep their email private. In this case, you can
try this hack:
• Copy the ID from someone’s profile URL: https://github.com/ID
• Insert the ID in this URL: https://api.github.com/users/ID/events
• Search for email address in the code
StackOverflow
When you are looking for people with specific tech skills,
StackOverflow is the place to go. To search its user database, you can
either pay for the recruiter licence or use Google search.
location:Berkeley
location:”San Francisco” language:Swift
location:Berkeley language:Swift
language:Kotlin
All users in Berkeley
All users in San Francisco with Swift
All users in Berkeley with Swift OR Kotlin

14. BRET RECKARD,
SEQUOIA CAPITAL
“Best teams hire up to 50 or 60%
of candidates from referral.”

15. BRANDYOU
No one can sell the company’s vision to candidates better than its CEO
or founders. Before you get an actual company brand, the brand is you.
Do a quick audit of your brand’s touch-points and find ways to improve
them.
Check your Social Selling Index (SSI), which measures how effective
you are at establishing your professional brand.
Complete your profile with candidate in mind
• Nice profile picture
• Candidate pitch
• Upload rich content
• Add endorsements
• Ask for recommendations
• Be a member of relevant groups
• Like and share interesting posts
• Write articles
• Show your work
Hack: Get unbiased feedback on your photo by using the app: https://
www.photofeeler.com/ Upload your profile picture and let others vote
on it.
Hack: Use existing content as much as possible. Upload a presentation
you’d like to share on your profile to https://www.slideshare.net/.
Hack: Find the most popular content related to a specific skill and
share it. https://www.linkedin.com/topic/python You can replace
Python with any common skill (JavaScript, React…).

16. Events and Networking
Attend or organize events. Nothing beats real human contact. Network
with people, contribute to the community, show your expertise.
Event suggestions
• Job fairs
• Attend conferences
• Speak at conferences
• Lecture at schools
• Organize tech meetups
• Sit on panels and juries
• Breakfast/lunch with candidates
• Organize workshops and trainings
• Hackathons
Tips: At STRV, events for the IT community are one of the main ways we
pool top talent. In the last 12 months we organized 45 events in 6 different
countries that were attended by 3,500 people.

17. “You need to treat recruiting like dating. Passion and integrity
are what candidates look for when choosing their next
employer. They need to be courted through the process.”
KELLY KINNARD,
BATTERY VENTURES

18. CONTACTING THECANDIDATE
A good candidates get dozens of “Let’s have a chat” emails from
recruiters and startup teams. You have to earn a candidate’s attention.
What value can you offer them? Do you send generic recruitment
spam, or do you approach a candidates with a personalized email
message?
Information
Prepare a useful and sexy information deck. Check out the
presentation we share with our candidates. By using URL shorteners,
we receive access to basic Analytics and can see if the candidate
clicked on the link.
Personalized
Check a candidate’s Twitter, Facebook and GitHub accounts or blog
and add some personalized information to your initial email. If you
learn, for example, that the person went to the same highschool as you,
mention that.
Shally Steckerl’s tips and tricks:
• Minimum 7 points of personalization (Name, Day, Source, Company,
Function, Title, Location)
• Have 8-12 word subject
• Use 3-sentence paragraphs separated by blank lines
• Have a clear call to action
• Do not use HTML formatting
• Do not send emails on Mondays, Saturdays or during lunchtime
Follow-up emails
If you don’t get reply to your first email, send another one. Your email
could have gone unnoticed, or the person simply forgot to answer. By
sending follow-up emails, you get on average 20-30% more responses.
Hack: Use If No Reply plugin for Gmail, which allows you to set
automated follow-up emails.
Hack: To increase your reply rate, combine several communication
channels. Send an email as well as a short notification over Facebook
Messenger. If you have a phone number, use WhatsApp; the volume of
replies is much higher and faster.

20. “Realistically, everyone must source. Everyone at
the company should be involved in recruiting."
DAN PORTILLO,
GREYLOCK PARTNERS

21. INTERVIEW
There isn’t single right pattern to follow. The number of rounds can be
changed depending on the circumstances. However, there is a
recommended structure:
• Screening - basic validation of the candidate: expectations, salary
range, on-site / remote, availability. Can be done by phone or Skype.
• Personality interview - introduce the position in detail, generate
interest, talk about candidate’s work history, motivation. Check
personality and soft skills.
• Technical interview - check candidate’s expertise. Let them prepare
something real. This is always better than just talking. Ideally have
them complete a technical assignment, like draft a product spec,
program a simple app or draft marketing text.
• Peer interview - Candidate’s potential colleagues should be involved
in the process. This is the time to check how the candidate fits in
with the company culture. Peer interview can be merged with
technical interview.
• Reference check
Interview questions
DON’Ts:
DO’s
Ask a candidate to share a situation from a past job where they had to
use a certain skill. For example: “Tell me about a situation when you
had to deal with a conflict among two co-workers.” or “Give me an
example of when you managed a large project involving people from
several departments.”
Closed
question
Multiple
questions
Hypothetical
questions
Weird
questions
Illegal
questions
Do you like leading people?
Tell me how you lead people.
What were your successes and
failures?
Imagine you have to solve a
dispute between two employees.
How would you proceed?
How many tennis balls are in
New York?
Questions about race, age,
gender, religion, disability, family
status or salary at a previous job.
Yes / No answers tell you absolutely
nothing about the candidate.
The candidate may get confused
when asked 3 questions in one and
will likely select the easiest one to
answer.
Everyone knows the right answers
to give.
These questions used to be fancy,
but no one was ever able to explain
their value.
You don’t want to face a lawsuit.

22. Common openers
“Give me an example of…” “Take me through…” “Tell me about a
situation when…” “Describe a time when…”
For complex issues, follow the STAR model and prepare probing
questions in advance.
• Situation: What was the goal you have to achieve or problem you
were tasked to fix?
• Task: What were your duties? What challenges did you face?
• Action: What did you do? What tools or resources did you use? Who
were you working with?
• Result: What were the end results? What did you learn from the
experience?
Teamwork
• How did you handle a situation where you had to deal with someone
who didn’t like you?
• Describe a situation where you had a conflict with a co-worker. How
did you deal with it. How was it resolved? How did it make you feel?
• Describe a time when you worked with a colleague who was not
pulling their share of the weight. How did you handle it?
Creativity
• Tell me about a time you thought “outside the box”?
• Describe a challenge you solved in a unique or unusual way. What
was the end result?
• Tell me about an innovative idea you introduced to your team? How
was it received?
Communication skills
• Walk me through a recent successful speech or presentation you
delivered.
• Tell me how you handled delivering tough feedback to a colleague.
• Tell me about a time you convince someone to do something they
did not want to do.

23. Project or Time management
• Describe a situation where you had to delegate work to others.
• How did you kept your work organized at your last job?
• Tell me about a time when you had to manage multiple competing
deadlines.
Client focus
• Tell me about when you had to deliver bad news to a client.
• Give an example of when you went well out of your way to make sure
a client received the best possible service.
• Tell me about a time when you resolved a problem for an unhappy
client.
Decision making
• Tell me about a time when you had to make an unpopular decision.
• Describe the most difficult work decision you’ve ever faced? How did
you arrive at your decision? What was the outcome?
• Describe a business decision you made that you later regretted.
What happened?
Working under pressure / Stress management
• Give me an example of a stressful situation and how you handled it.
• Do you work well under pressure? Tell me about a specific situation.
• How did you set goals and monitored your progress at your last job?
Adaptability
• How do you adapt to changes over which you have no control?
• Describe a situation where you had to adjust to a colleague’s
working style in order to meet your project deadlines.
• Tell me about a time when you were bored at work.
Initiative
• Describe a situation where you overlooked an obvious solution to a
problem.
• What was the most challenging work-related problem you faced at
your last job?
• Tell me about a process you came up with or improved at work.

24. “It absolutely changes the process if you show the candidate
that you are going to call every single former employer. It is
not always the case afterwards, but it makes people really
stop pretending and be honest with you.”
JEFF TANNENBAUM,
BLUERUN VENTURES

25. CANDIDATEEXPERIENCE
Speed
The candidate shouldn’t be left for more than 2-3 days without a
follow-up.
Information
Providing all relevant information is a decisive factor of a good
candidate experience. The candidate should now know:
• Everything about the position
• Each step of the interview process
• Who they will meet
• How long it will take
You can do a nice slide desk presentation that you share with each
candidate. See example.
Interviewers
Consider organizing a basic training session for those who have never
conducted an interview before.

27. “Create a 100-Day Plan for the newcomer to fast track
her adaption and let her win.”
GIA SCINTO,
Y COMBINATOR

28. TOOLS
Here is a toolbox from our recruitment team. All tools are free or come
with a small fee.
Calendly
Easily share your calendar with candidates, and let them book a time
slot based on your availability. This can eliminate a lot of email
exchanges.
Canned responses
Thanks to this Gmail feature, you can create email templates to save
you a ton of time. Switch it on in Settings/Lab.
Doodle
It is not synchronized with your calendar like Calendly but is helpful
when you need to find a time with multiple people.
Google Slides
Use Google Slides to make a cool presentation for candidates. No need
to send a large .pdf or .ppt file. See example of STRV’s company
introduction to candidates.
Grammarly
Write perfect texts without grammar errors. A must-have free tool.
If No Reply
This is an effective way to touch base with candidates who didn’t reply
to your first contact email. Thanks to If No Reply you can set automated
follow-up emails.
Intelligence Search
Chrome plugin to search on Facebook.

29. LinkedIn Advanced Sourcer
This Chrome plugin allows you to write notes about candidates when
you are on LinkedIn. Also, it shows what profiles you have already
visited in the past.
Mail Track
You can easily see whether candidates opened your emails, how many
times, on what devices and whether they opened attachments or
clicked on links.
OneTab
When searching for candidates, you usually opens many tabs with
profiles. OneTab converts all of your tabs into a list that is accessible at
all times and can be shared with co-workers.
Rapportive and Email Guesser
Combining these two tools helps you identify personal email
addresses of candidates who you found online.
Slideshare
If you have interesting content you’d like to share with candidates,
upload it to Slideshare, which allows you to easily share on your
LinkedIn profile or elsewhere online.
Tone Analyzer
This AI-based service uses linguistic analyses to detect joy, fear,
sadness, anger as well as analytical, confident and tentative tones in
text. This helps to fine-tune your emails to candidates or job ads.
360 Social
If you find an interesting candidate on Linkedin, 360 Social searches
and aggregates all their social profiles.

30. “The most important thing is building a world-class team.”
BEN HOROWITZ,
ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ

31. FAVOURITECONTENT
ANDGREATFOLKS
Five excellent books
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz)
• Start With Why (Simon Sinek)
• To Sell Is Human (Daniel Pink)
• Work Rules (Laszlo Bock)
• The Alliance (Reid Hoffman)
Super smart people who helped us and/or inspire us
• Kelly Kinnard
• Jeff Tannenbaum
• Shivani Sharma
• Bret Reckard
• Gia Scinto
• Dan Portillo
• Erik Kriessmann
• Irina Shamaeva
• Shally Steckerl

32. NICE TOMEETYOU
We are STRV, an award-winning studio developing mobile apps, web
and backend solutions for Silicon Valley startups.
Let’s connect:
STRV’s YouTube channel
Our Vimeo page
Our Facebook page
Our Behance page
Our Dribbble page
Our LinkedIn page
Our Glassdoor page
Follow us on Twitter

33. LINK UP
MATEJMATOLIN
Talent Partner, STRV
Matej and his team recruit technical talent from
around the world. He’s also a mentor, blogger and
keynote speaker.
Email: matej.matolin@STRV.com
Matej’s Linkedin profile
DAVIDSEMERAD
CEO, STRV
David is a global entrepreneur who founded and
leads several startups. His work has been featured in
the Huffington Post, Forbes, Wired and TechCrunch.
Email: david@STRV.com
David’s Linkedin profile