it is not recruiters, most folks in corporates look at startups as competition, insubordinate, have a bias for action and understand business drivers much better
Yeah, I get recruiting emails from startups all the time but I don't even want to talk to them because somehow it feels rude to bring up the elephant in the room - I'd have to win the lottery at your startup to make up for the loss in joining it. I'm not sure if this is saying big techs have too much money or VC investors are not willing to compete for talent.
I think it's because most startup founders are not very interested in getting hired. Hard to poach people who doesn't want to let down their team, and maybe the team is what you want anyway. Also easier to have a lock-in for a couple of years if it's tied to purchase of a company rather than just hiring somebody.
In straight consultant companies this happens a lot. Only way to grow is to hire more consultants, and it's easier to get more people by aquiring whole companies and lock in the consultants for a couple of years. Good deal for everybody if you don't work yourself to death before cashing out.
Talent acquisitions make me sad. I think about all the job creation machines that might have been.
There's a standard model in the valley on both the supply and demand side. It goes like this:
On the demand side:
Recruiting costs money. Hiring talent is risky when you don't know the caliber. Picking up one engineer at a time is costly and inefficient because you're competing with many other great companies. Acquiring a group of proven engineers not only solves all these problems but it gives you a way to lock them into working for you for years with an earn-out. And every engineer knows that dev's who "sold a startup" get laid more.
On the supply side:
A great business model is to come up with a startup that is super-interesting to talented engineers. Raise money and recruit them in droves with the prospect of massive wealth and being the next Facebook. Hand out stock options like candy and never mention the difference between short and long-term capital gains. Then when you hit 10+ great employees, start shaking your booty around the valley and see if you can flip for $2M per engineer plus a nice cash-out for founders and investors. [Usually around $20M total].
I suspect this is a small demographic - chances are startups don't want to hire people that wouldn't make it through a Google/MSFT/Facebook tech-screen.
The people who would make it through are going to demand founder-level equity to compensate for the risk associated with the lack of money being offered.
Not too sure whether this is the right way to attract talents; most talents can have their pick of work and they don't need to beg a startup founder to hire them. Only those who are desperate enough need to resort to this kind of tricks.
My suspicion is that the startup talent market isn't very efficient
I think this is true of the hiring market in general. "You made $80k at your last job as a senior developer? Super. Alright, we have to ask: FizzBuzz. Can you do it?"
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