Run your Hiring Like a Sprint or Renounce the Title of Startup

Traditional recruitment is tedious and time consuming, so we decided to add a pinch of Agile to the hiring process to make it more effective and less frustrating for both sides. (Yay!)

At 6nomads, we are sure that remote teams are the future of work. In order to popularize this idea, we launched a series of interviews with CEO’s of startups whose teams are distributed around the world. We collected their tips for success and mistakes, so that those who dare to push the boundaries of hiring outside their city, country, and even the continent, could use the accumulated experience.

Startup CEO’s and CTO’s benefit from flexibility in processes, freedom from bureaucratic remnants, speed in decision-making, planning, and mobility. In the process of communicating with them, we found out that all the progressive components of being a startup mysteriously did not affect hiring. At all.

Startups have learned to develop technologies, attract billions in investments, change industries, but our recruitment is still a horse and buggy. We still use the same approach and techniques, the same waterfall hiring that everybody use from small business to enterprise. But why?

There are two extremes when it comes to classic methods of recruiting for startups:

1. You have a no-name startup that nobody wants to work for, having been lured away by huge corporations with their money and promises. So you have to compete with enterprises locally or try to go remote (which is rather helpful).

2. You have managed to build an HR brand for your startup and posting on job boards gives you a flurry of responses to the vacancy, requiring a lot of time to even screen yet leading nowhere due to irrelevant options.

It’s either you’ll spend a tremendous amount of time sourcing candidates and pitching your startup to them or drown into assessments and tons of irrelevant specialists who don’t fit your culture.

Can we improve tech recruiting?

And the answer is ‘We can try’. We can try to treat hiring as serious and responsible as we do development or fundraising. To take all the best practices and apply them to one of the weakest and most distressful parts of Startup life.

Chameleon gave a good example. They got the idea of recruiting sprints and wrote in detail about the experience of building a hiring process on the basis of a monthly scrum sprint. Here, we insist on a more efficient, more radical to be precise, approach — two-week sprints.

No miracles, just following the plan, quick decision-making, and evaluation of the result. This approach, of course, should not affect the quality of the hired specialist. Therefore, at first, as a result of a two-week sprint, you could end up with 0. Then, you need to review the vacancy, sources of attracting specialists, analyze the experience of this sprint, and launch the next one.

Fast iterative hiring is the most obvious, simple, logical solution that we offer from our experience of recruitment with the 6nomads team and helping other startups.

We decided to go further and make an experiment.

We are going to select 30 startups and help them to hire remote full-time engineers and designers within 2 weeks and not a day more. We need volunteers for more evidence than we have now.

Sprints are starting from 20th of June, we divide them by specializations: backend, frontend, design. Leave a request if you’d like to join the hiring sprint.

Based on the results of the experiment, we will collect feedback from companies, determine what difficulties arose, how effective these 2 weeks were, and what can be improved or accelerated in an already simple process.

We do not know what will come out of it, but we are almost sure that this experiment will finally break down usual recruitment, which from article to article is described as “broken”, but an alternative to which no one introduces into their processes.