Back to school. Why college recruiting should be part of your scaling efforts
Back to school. Why college recruiting should be part of your scaling efforts
In the previous post I outlined some of the challenges an engineering organization will face as it scales. This post will address one of the main elements of scaling an engineering team: recruiting.
There are three main recruiting channels: referrals, industry, which is what a recruiting team is mostly concerned with and college. The first two are almost always the default recruiting channels, with college being an exception especially in early stage startups. I argue that college should be part of your recruiting efforts and the earlier it is, the better. I’ll outline my reasons for this argument and some of the challenges in building an effective college recruiting program.
Let’s start with some of the main motivations to build a college recruiting program. The first, and probably most obvious one, is colleges offer an abundant pool of talent. Attending a single college career fair will easily expose you and your recruiting team to 100+ candidates. These won’t all be a good fit for your team, but the volume of high quality candidates that a career fair offers is second to none. This volume poses a challenge: how do you find candidates that suit your team and needs? I will address this question in a later section.
The second reason is enhancing your brand, which applies whether you are a consumer or enterprise software company. The candidates, and there are hundreds of them, that you talk with will leave your booth knowing more about your company and product.. Your college booth is a marketing and branding opportunity. Some of the candidates who stop by your booth could be future hires or future customers of your product.
The third reason is the diversity of college students. I have found that colleges have a much more diverse student population relative to the industry. CMU, UIUC, amongst others, are good examples of this, with both attaining ~50% of women amongst the CS student population, substantially higher than the industry average. College recruiting offers a fantastic opportunity to recruit from a more diverse population.
The fourth, and arguably most subtle point, is a college recruiting program will be a forcing function to implement a rigorous onboarding and mentoring program. If you decide that college is one of your recruiting channels, you will have to invest in a robust onboarding and mentoring program. College hires, regardless of their academic excellence, enthusiasm and hunger, are still “raw” talents. They haven’t really worked, beyond brief internships, in a professional software company. Honing and growing that talent will require explicit investments spanning onboarding, mentoring and more. One of the main reasons I am a big fan of college recruiting, is because these investments will accrue and benefit the entire team.
A team that is able to grow and develop engineers regardless of experience is one of the telling signs of a high performance engineering team.
One of the main challenges with a college recruiting program is focusing. You will need to focus at two levels: macro and micro. At a macro level you will have to identify the colleges that you want to recruit from. Some of the more common filtering criteria are proximity to your headquarters/offices, which admittedly nowadays isn’t that important. Perhaps the most important criteria is the strength of the undergraduate program relative to the skills you need. All of my college recruiting efforts have been at enterprise software startups. Working on low level enterprise software systems requires a good understanding of CS fundamentals like operating systems, distributed systems, networking and so on. In fairness any of the top 20 or so CS programs in the US will satisfy this requirement.
Another important criteria when evaluating which schools to target is cost. College recruiting is time consuming, both in terms of handling the logistics of career fairs and the interviewing volume coming out of them. You want to strike the right balance of targeting enough schools to cover your needs, but not too many to overwhelm you. You also do not want to end up attending a school and not hiring anyone from within. That could tarnish your employer brand. Lastly, I alluded to the diversity benefits of college recruiting. You should evaluate the overall student body demographics to validate that they offer diversity levels that are aligned with yours.
Once you have identified your target schools you will need to structure how to differentiate between candidates that might be a good fit for you versus ones who are not. This is difficult to do in a career fair setting. You will get about 2-3 minutes of face-to-face time with every candidate during which you will scan their resume, ask them a few questions and answer theirs. Those few minutes are the initial screening process, in which you are trying to ascertain whether you should follow up with this candidate or not. Therefore, you will want to make sure you are asking questions that help you with this filtering process.
The questions you ask must be aligned with traits and values you care for. They should also be universal, meaning you and every other member of your team attending a career fair must align on what these questions are and how to assess them. I usually spend a few hours with the campus recruiting team (recruiters and engineers), before every career fair aligning on what these questions are, how to assess them and how to read a resume. The intent is for the entire team to develop a consistent manner in evaluating candidates under 2 minutes. Trust me this is hard to get right. Practice.
You cannot scale an engineering team with college recruiting alone. In fact, the candidates you attract from your college recruiting efforts should be no more than 20% of the total hires you intend to make in a given year. College recruits need a lot of investments, if you over hire you will not be able to onboard let alone develop the hires you make. Not only that, but your existing team’s performance, and morale, will drop. A rule of thumb I use is “no more than 1 college hire per engineering team”, with a team being 4-6 software developers.
College recruiting is a lot of work. Not only is it costly to do, but the benefits aren’t realized in the short-term. The investments you reap in building a robust college recruiting effort will yield results in a few years down the road. If you are able to attract smart, driven, emphatic college candidates and develop them over time, you will reap substantial rewards. This is especially true in a startup environment, where stretching is required.
Fifth, you have to stretch. This in my opinion is the biggest lesson and motivation to join a startup. Startups will offer ample opportunities for anyone to jump in and solve problems that nobody else in the company has any prior experience with. I call that stretching.
Some of the most brilliant engineers that I have worked with were ones I hired straight out of college. That’s why I continue to invest in this program and will be headed to CMU, UIUC and the University of Washington in September and October.
Things I am reading/listening to
Haruki Murakami’s vinyl collection. Not only is Murakami an exceptional writer, but his taste in music, jazz particularly, is exceptional.
The End of Astronauts by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees. Robots and space exploration!
A good read looking at the connections between education, changes in job market dynamics and socio-economic issues.
