Hiring as an Early Stage Startup

Are you the alumni of any other companies or engineering schools? I've had to hire for similar sized startups and find the most success with reaching out to past colleagues or friends in the same space, and either pulling them in directly or having them extend a quick pitch to the people within their networks.

Until you get to ~15-25 engineers, this has been my highest yield way to hire.

I've recently been in a similar situation and it's very tough. Agree 100% on the LinkedIn (I didn't try AngelList) the quality was terrible, which I think is because of how easy they make it to apply, so you just end up getting randoms that don't actually have any interest in working for you.

I ended up finding peopl through a personal connection. After going through lots of personal connections that were not interested. I think that (unfortunately) one of the key things you are expected to bring as a founder is the connections to hire people.

Have you tried posting the actual salary in the ad.

Per of what I saw, the going rate for experience engineer (3 years and above) in the bay area is 500K, can you compete with that?

- 11 months of runway feels tight given market conditions have tightened; are you close to closing seed?

- Does your 25% MoM growth translate to revenue? If so, be clear about that

- Can your existing engineers refer friends they know?

What you're experiencing is pretty typical of a pre-seed startup that's unknown right now

Is the “3d asset creation” for NFTs? Because that’s an automatic “no” from me.

Otherwise, making the position remote (if it isn’t already) is my main suggestion. Or consider being more flexible with your requirements (e.g., be willing to accept someone without experience with your specific stack).

The three results/problems you listed, I think, are all related;

- Cold outreach has low uptake anyway, especially if not targeted properly. People tend to largely just ignore or decline these kinds of messages.

- People not looking for work confirms you're probably targeting the wrong people, especially on LinkedIn.

- Job ads by design, will get a lot of responses. Filtering them out quickly and effectively is an art.

I've had all these same problems myself when hiring, crafting the ad and targeting the right people is BY FAR the hardest part to get right.

Find a good tech recruiter that's experienced in your area, maybe even a couple of them, and let them do the work. It's very hard to compete with the years or even decades of connections, skill, and networking that a good recruiter will have.

I've had the best experiences with people who aren't just ex-HR drones looking for more money - ideally you want someone mildly technical themselves who's able to tell if a candidate is a BS artist and screen them out early. One of the main benefits of using a recruiter is not having to do 90% of the screening yourself, so make sure they're good at it.

Are you not remote friendly? That could be an issue.

is the position remote? have you tried who wants to be hired thread in hn?

Startups aren't as cool anymore, people understand how the business works and the risks involved and (especially senior) people don't want to work in them. I think soon early stage startups will have to allocate a much larger pool of stock for employees (think 25-30%), low single digits won't cut it anymore.