How do you find the first hires for your startup, especially remotely?

Online communities have been a great way for me to find great people. They know you already, and they might know what you are doing already via the community. Quick turn-arounds, no BS (since you need to face them again in some community meetup), and the quality of people we find is insane.

I think you should give AngelList a try. We've used it for recruiting both engineers and business development and we're very happy with the hires we made. The candidates were motivated and highly skilled and it's great that the platform forced them to submit a short letter of intent because it allowed us to easily filter out the ones that wouldn't work

There's various channels and patience definitely pays off to find the perfect person. Personalising every message to strong hire is super important. Say why they're a good fit, what you like about their portfolio. Search projects or companies with the same domain as you, you can then seek their current or past employees. Specific search Hunting: - Linkedin - Stackoverflow - Look for people that have worked on similar projects / problems. - Github (same as above) - Product hunt! Check out competitors talent. - Local universities can be good bets on first hires too. Job Posts: - Slack Communities - Workinstartups.com Co-founders: - Foundersnation - Co-founderslab Recruiters: Don't always have the best reputation BUT if they find the perfect person try and negotiate full release on contract to avoid having a middle man. It may not be successful for everyone you get in touch with, but most of those people will have a network themselves which you should use as a potential door. Always follow up too! You may not always catch them at the ideal time. Hope that helps and good luck! @slava_bobrov

Ah, my favorite type of question, thanks @slava_bobrov I think your industry specifically – Neurotech makes it even more interesting. I would recommend to start with strong co-founders or partners that would help you establish a brand. For example a CTO with previous successful exits would help you decompose a structure of your first hires. Or maybe in your case it would be a Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) that will help you attract PhDs in your field. Ultimately I would look for intersections of fields that are close to what you're trying to do and scout the talents from there. As @imkarthikk mentioned, online communities are a great resource. I am personally a big fan of hiring from Discord and Slack communities in past couple years. Once you get your Product Market Fit and raise next round (or invest your own money) your life will become easier as you'll start changing you organization and introduce a Head of HR that will be a core point for your hiring, once your team grows beyond 50 people. Last but not least, besides hard and soft skills in your first hires, I would look for a culture fit first, for people that buy-in on your great vision, and *want* to be that first employee, and share most of the risks founders have. And to find this kind of first hire takes time and lots of referrals. Good luck with your first hire!

Great question, I think the best way to reach talent is LinkedIn but also communities like Indie Hackers or Reddit. But it's not easy at all and now is even harder because you compete against companies around the world. We (froged.com) are looking for a Head of Content and it's taking us a lot of time to find international profiles to cover our open position. Threads and questions like yours help other users :)

This is not about remotely hiring, this is about ability to trust easily and need for comfort with the person in my humble opinion. Agree @benoit_chambon ?

I failed everything remote man.. zero deals.. I am a hard core techie and 14 years been running my show.. am back doing local connects and ground sales. Screw the plague going on for me.

We find developers on github and check their commitments. One non-tech guy found our founder on Wykop (Polish Reddit) and asked to join the team. Later on, this person advised one of his colleagues to us. So, it's basically networking and social media activity. It's important to check if peeps join you 'cause the like the product or they just need a working place.

We use a product called intervue.io It helps us screen candidates and it even has code editor with around 30 or so languages if you wanna hire a techie

We have 2 founders and 3 engineers on our team. Here is how we found the engineers -1 through toptal.com, 1 I had done some work with in the past and 1 reached out to me on Slack after we did our beta lunch. All 3 have been great hires and we have a long future together. Finding talent through a "staffing" company like Toptal was really nice, but now bringing the talent in full time is not cheap. Any ideas on how to minimize fee's for contract to hire? P.S. We are all remote.

There are many different ways and platforms to look for. We started to invite candidates to timz.flowers, the Async Video Meeting tool, we are creating ourselves. There we are explaining the project in a flower and are asking some background questions. The candidate answers whenever finds time and we just watch the different results. You can immediately see who knows how to deal with new tools (digital savviness), who understand the project and the system and who is contributing with valuable statements and links. Quite powerful method. We found our best developers that way and they are really remote - dwelling in different time-zones from Newzealand to Argentina, across China, Poland, Persia and many more countries. All of this makes no difference, when you see them being creative in a flower.

LinkedIn is great way to hire, also if you are looking for coders , github is another place

I'd recommend targeted outreach. For example, I knew that I wanted to build a chrome extension that could help people find Airbnbs with fast WiFi. I looked to see who had previously built extensions for Airbnb and then cold emailed a few people. I was able to find an awesome co-founder! We've never met in person, but we have video call check-ins every 1-2 weeks.

Great question - how do you know or asses exactly what skill sets you need to round out your founding/early team to increase your chances of success? It can be so challenge to view your own strengths and weaknesses without bias. And understand how VCs/investors view you.

I love this kinda question. but I've another , Why a Strong Onboarding Process is Essential?

At TechHut I am guiding 50+ students to become a Full Stack Developer. They will learn MERN Stack and will get experience working on a live product. I am prepared to have multiple internship structures for organisations so that they will get curated candidates for the open positions.

If you have connections on the university side, the way we have progressed is to open an account on udemy and ask them to complete certain training. We analyzed how much they wanted to work with us by looking at the duration of the training. We have hired 4 people so far and we are very satisfied.

It might be best to work for an established company in the field you are trying to make a startup in. So if you were interested in Neurotech you could work for Neuralink and after a couple of months or a year you could tell some of your friends in the company of your idea and why it is better than what is going on at the company you are working for. Then you might get a team of 2-4 and start on your own project.

1. Decide which remote situation you want to hire for 2. Figure out which time zones to hire in 3. Put top candidates to the test 4. Ability to prioritize 5. Trustworthy

In my experience helping 100+ companies with this, the first few hires *need* to come from your personal network. There is a lot of negative signaling if you're trying to hire your first engineer by going outbound (e.g. most good people will ask "why should I join your early stage venture if you can't convince any of your friends to work for you?") If you don't have a big personal network, focus on that first. Build relationships first and focus on hiring people second. Ask people to give feedback on your product–if they're excited about it, you might pivot the conversation more into the hiring angle. Once you've hired your first 3-5 people from your network, then a mixed strategy is key (covering all your bases). Different candidate sources have different tradeoffs–I wrote extensively about this here: https://maxkolysh.medium.com/the...