From Series A To Salesforce, 50 Perspectives On Hiring Tech Talent

If you know a recruiter, do me a favor and give them a hug. It’s been a rough couple of years for everyone in the world; I’m not going to be that guy who bogs you down with another intro to an article that summarizes the pandemic. I think we are all a little tired of having to read about what we’ve lived through. As essential workers braved the challenges and dangers of continuing to work in-person during a pandemic, those lucky enough to work remotely have adapted and grown accustomed to commuting to their kitchen table. While there’s certainly some folks who can’t wait to return to their teams and coworkers in an office, for a large majority of tech workers who can do their jobs from anywhere in the world, it’s become a requirement that their employer be flexible with how they work. Many people started working remotely for the first time and some say they’re never going back into an office. What does this mean for recruiters and those looking to hire and grow their workforce of tech talent?

I feel like one of those stereotypical people in movies that go, “think of the children!”, but instead of children it’s, “think of the recruiters!”; recruiters are people too! As a journalist, (journalists are famously not people) I’ve taken it upon myself the last two weeks to fill my Google Calendar to the brim and speak with as many people involved in the hiring process as I could. From companies as small as 5 employees to huge organizations with multiple teams of 1,000+ engineers, what I’ve learned across the board is that it’s been harder now more than ever to convince someone to take your money and work for you.

It makes sense that people are enjoying the perks of working remotely, but it’s deeper than that. While it’s being coined as “The Great Resignation” I think it’s more a “The Great Wakeup” in that, people are waking up and realizing that they don’t want to do work that they don’t enjoy or doesn’t provide them more value than just a paycheck. For tech workers specifically, many engineers and product managers have always had recruiters in their inboxes showing them jobs and trying to poach them; that’s not what has changed. What shifted are the reasons why people on a larger scale are choosing where they want to spend their 40 hours a week. Money and benefits are motivators for many, but an increase of demand for flexible work situations and feelings of direct impact and enjoyability of work is what’s making it even tougher to convince someone to join your company.

In the not so distant past, the way the job interview song and dance went was that the talent first had to sell themselves to the company as to why they would make a good hire. In return, the company, once convinced, has to turn around and sell why working for them would be a good choice for the candidate. That’s still how we do things, but that second part where companies have to showcase why a candidate should work for them is becoming so much harder to do when tech workers have a fruit basket of offers to choose from, with money being important but meaningful day-to-day work being more-so. Top talent, especially hard to find specialized technical talent, has always had multiple places to choose from to work at, so why is everyone saying that recruiting has gotten so much harder? Well, the answer is, the challenges are different for everyone. So, I did my best to speak with, well, everyone.

I asked 56 recruiters, VPs of talent, chiefs of staff, founders, venture capitalists, and private equity partners about their biggest challenges and experience with the difficulties of hiring tech talent in the current market. I’m a different kind of writer in that I don’t know how commas work or enjoy the actual writing part of writing. So, what I’ve done here is I’ve summarized all 56 perspectives into little bite-sized snippets that highlight the unique insight and most interesting answer. I really strived to create a wide lense into the world of tech recruiting, and not just for the companies my mom has heard of. Okay, I’ll stop rambling and just get into the quotes now.

Kerris Hougardy, Head of People at Ada:

The current hiring market is very competitive and hiring for engineers is very hard. With new languages and code complexes being created, it is very difficult to hire top engineers.

We realized that retaining employees is just as important as recruiting new candidates. What also really helped build out our recruiting process was when we hired a Senior Manager of Tech Talent who came from Meta 5 years ago and who helped us develop our own hiring processes based on their experience working at a bigger company.

Courtney Caldwell, Co-Founder of ShearShare

65% of hair stylists lost their jobs during the pandemic. ShearShare’s revenue went to $0. It was scary for sure. But we have been in the industry for 30 years, we’ve seen how the industry bounces back. All we did was turn our sights outward and said how can we help this community? We helped people get approved for PPP loans. We helped 150 stylists/business owners SBO who were previously denied for these loans get approved. We’ve always been remote, the way that we’ve been able to hire tech talent is we hire one good engineer and they attract another good engineer. We did have an open role for our CTO, and tech talent can call their own price, so it was so difficult to find someone for that role. After moving to Buffalo, we were introduced to our now CTO. There’s just something about Buffalo, it’s a hidden gem of tech-talent.

Scott Weidley, President & CEO of ClinCapture

At ClinCapture, we have always valued our culture. While we understand there is a competitive hiring market right now, we believe employees still want to work for companies that share their core values, and at ClinCapture our mantra is “we build software that saves lives.” Our software enables clinical researchers to make clinical trials more accessible, and our goal is to help them bring new treatments to the public faster. Our biggest challenge in recruiting right now is making sure our culture stays intact and we successfully convey our passion for this mission. Even while our team may be working remotely, we remember that we are all in this together.

Leigh Butler, Founder & CEO at Akina

Akina’s mission speaks for itself and we’ve had employees seek us out. That’s how we have helped our team grow initially. We haven’t advertised any roles. We want people who are willing to disrupt the mom space, we want people who are wanting to empower black women and moms. If you are producing better outcomes for moms, you’re impacting the children’s lives. We want ideas. All of the ideas from all sorts of roles matter. It is my goal to foster that sort of environment with our new hires.

Briana Larkin, Head of Strategy & People at BEES

Being able to navigate the culture fit for a company is a hard challenge. People are very different, and it’s really the candidate’s choice right now. We are most in need of data scientists, software engineers, and product designers. BEES (part of AB inBev) is a wonderful mix of being a startup and having the support of the mammoth side of our company. We are able to really invest in the candidates who we think will be with us long term and who want to work in such a unique environment.

Aimee George Leary, Global Talent Officer at Booz Allen Hamilton

The main challenges in recruiting tech talent are the competition for this talent and the supply. A key way to address this is to retain current employees through skill building and continual access to new career opportunities. Booz Allen is doing this with a marketplace model that creates fulfilling, flexible career paths that can adapt over time, giving both employees and their managers resources to identify and train for new roles within the organization so that talent can continue to grow within the firm, and the company is able to optimize its talent base.

Joey Blogna, Director of Talent Acquisition at Axuall

Top of mind for every company right now is the talent war that has emerged over the past two years and continues to become more competitive with each passing day. While finding the right talent is key for growth, maintaining your current headcount has become just as equally important as competitors seek to poach employees with offers that couldn’t have been imagined before the pandemic. The companies that will emerge most successful during this time are the ones willing to recognize that employees have taken time during the pandemic to think about what’s most important to them in their work and life. Talent attraction teams can only do so much during time when the traditional handbook has been thrown out the window. It has become crucial for executives to avoid any top-down decisions about what the future of work looks like and instead adopt an approach that works best for the company and its most important stakeholders: the workforce. Those who refuse may find themselves struggling to attract and retain talent.

Lisa Van Gelder, VP of Engineering at Avvir

Machine learning roles are the hardest roles to fill since our needs are quite specific. We need people who can work from the initial problem statement to the actual deployment. A lot of candidates we were talking to didn’t have the python coding experience. The good news is that people who come for problem solving stay because of our mission. The retention rate at Avvir is 90%+.

Grace Sperry Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Fictiv

Brand recognition is really tough as a recruiter for a smaller company. When you’re recruiting for large brands, it’s much easier. Overall, it’s a candidate driven market and we are in competition with all sorts of companies. Remote work has mainly helped us recruit, a lot of candidates are leaving for remote roles. We really appreciate people’s contributions and we stick to our values. I went to Fictiv because I was treated respectfully.

Keren Rubin, Vice President of People Operations at Augry

To attract the best talent, Employers must differentiate themselves by their company’s values and culture – they must double down on the employee experience because employees nowadays have a lot of options and thus all the leverage.

They personally take a “people first” approach and they believe that the best way to gauge how successful a company is in creating a people first culture is by measuring what their new hire referral rates is. At Augry, almost half of their hires comes from referrals.

Jordan Applegate, Director of Recruiting at Sweetwater Sound

We do a lot of our sourcing for senior talent through local and regional searches. Senior software engineers are the most difficult talent to find. There is no such thing as local competitors anymore. We used to rarely see people in Fort Wayne working for FAANGs, and with the shift to remote work the opportunities to work for different companies have expanded greatly, making it harder to find talent of our own. One thing that makes us stand out is our interview process. Since we want the candidate to understand the community and culture at Sweetwater, we insert the hiring manager and a few points of contact so the candidate can get a real feel of what the team will be like.

Uri Gruenbaum, CEO & Co-Founder of TipRanks

It’s been an incredible year for Israeli startups; in 2021, they raised a record $25.6 billion, and 23 Israeli companies listed IPOs on the U.S. stock market. With so much capital and disruption, TipRanks’ approach has been to understand what candidates want – it’s not just about outsized salaries. Many Israelis are savvy investors, and candidates jump at the opportunity to work in a company that has a product that they can relate to, which many already use. They love that TipRanks creates simplified research tools that give everyday investors the same research power as the most prominent asset managers.

Jordan Edelson, CEO at TradeZing

We currently have 10 FT employees at TradeZing, and are looking to hire immediately! To do so, we have been outsourcing agencies for marketing, development, and customer services. We’re selling our vision and passion behind our product- we’re trying to give a home to people who are interested in learning about finance and content creators. We are willing to invest in good employees if they’re willing to invest in us.

Oren Saar, Co-Founder & CEO at WoodSpoon

We are in a great place for developments, being a food delivery platform- we are always looking to come up with new ideas and adapt. Our biggest struggle right now is finding the right talent for the job. In general, startups are a hard market to be in, and being that there are other food delivery services out there, we want to make sure WoodSpoon is a top contender.

Joanna Woo, Head of People at CruxOCM

COVID/Remote work hasn’t changed our hiring process much. What we believe really helps set us apart is our strong belief in transparency. We are extremely clear on how much candidates can expect to make in salary and we use data to determine what the best salary bands are. We are able to “sell” potential candidates on our mission and the grandness of what we are building. There is a strong mental health aspect of caring about what one does at work so at CruxOCM we want to hire people who genuinely care about the infrastructure that we are building.

Karla Porter, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner at CloudBees

We’re looking to grow by more than 35% this year and are aggressively hiring tech talent globally, so we know how challenging the hiring market is. We are doing three main things to break through: We believe that great talent attracts great talent. In the past year we’ve focused on bringing in industry leaders and great talent at every level, and have incentivized employees to recruit from their own networks. We are streamlining our recruiting process because you have to move very quickly and seamlessly through the interview, offer, and onboarding process or you will lose the candidate to another company. In addition to competitive salaries and benefits, we are looking at new ways of operating that entice new talent. While we’ve always been a remote-first global company, we’re now looking at other options for how to adjust our operations that can attract and retain talent with greater work-life balance.

Jeff Diana, Chief People Officer at Calendly

Your website is the first place where people go to learn about you. Try to give people a realistic lens into what it’s like to work at a company. For us, we’ve done a lot of unscripted videos of workers talking about their experience. People are choosing jobs for a sense of connection and impact. You cannot buy loyalty and you wouldn’t want to because then people are joining for the wrong reasons. If you think compensation is your difference maker, then your company is doomed.

Bruce Taragin, Managing Director at Blumberg Capital

The mantra of “slow to hire and quick to fire” is being turned on its head in light of the dearth of engineering talent. Even more important is the focus on employee churn – what is the point in hiring if you can’t retain? Human capital remains the life line of any startup. Companies should find engineering talent that is passionate about the problem that they are solving. Internal referrals are typically the strongest and longest lasting. Maintaining strong culture and esprit des corps, especially in this distributed virtual world that we live in has never been harder. But the positive is now startups can really think and hire outside the box. There is no geographic constraint on hiring the best technical talent. Startups should leverage that opportunity as the future of work continues to be redefined.

Shawn Tubman, Head of Talent Acquisition at Liberty Mutual Insurance

There was initial uncertainty brought to the insurance industry during the pandemic. We saw an initial slow down, but as we got to the end of 2021, the economy started back up and so have jobs. Since then, we’ve seen an acceleration of companies needing to find talent. Demand is really high for talent and the supply of talent is low. People are rethinking their careers and sitting on the sidelines. There are lots of dynamics of how to best fit their professional lives into their personal lives.

Eyhab Aejaz, Co-founder of Breach Insured

Hiring good talent is hard because for many of the top positions there is not an adequate supply of talent in the market (Engineers for example). Also, hiring for a small company/startup is especially hard because not many people are able to stomach the risk that comes with working a job like that. We have been able to differentiate ourselves by bringing on people who are really passionate about what we are building. Currently, we have 10 people who come from 6 different countries and the reason we have been doing well is because we have been able to hire employees that genuinely like what we are working on. We also want to hire people who make the Kool Aid, not drink it.

Hannah Yardley, Chief People and Culture Officer at Achievers

The demand for talent drastically exceeds the available talent pool. This has resulted in companies increasing salaries for the highest performing available workers, though this isn’t without consequence. As a result of these higher salaries – there is a large pay gap within companies, there is lack of money to fund future talent and projects and overall companies are having to rely on junior talent more since they are cheaper to hire. Another trend in this competitive hiring market has been the move towards making faster hiring decisions, despite this leaders should be very thoughtful and strategic about who they hire and why they are hiring that specific person. As a result, Achievers moved to a hybrid, flexible work environment and we invest heavily on developing career paths that help employees identify the skills to bridge the gaps that are being created as a result of higher turnover and faster paced career ladders.

Raphael Ouzan, Founder & CEO at A.team

The old methods of recruiting are slowly getting broken. The top talent (0.1% percent) have more leverage and want to work for themselves on interesting projects rather than be employee #121 at a large company. As a result we are trying to decentralize work at A.team.

Adrienne Cooper, Chief People Officer at Clarify Health Solutions

Being/working remote is the new thing. Not only from a perspective of hiring the best talent but it is naturally where the new trend of working is going. Companies that previously did it had an advantage at first, but now all companies are able to take advantage of the benefits of remote and/or hybrid work.

Tigran Sloyan, Co-Founder & CEO at CodeSignal

Engineers build the digital world and everyone needs them, but they are in such low supply (at least the good ones). The good thing is that the internet democratized getting a good engineering education, but at the same time the talent pool isn’t growing. Employers are scrambling to hire the best talent by giving away more perks, more money and more. They look to improve their hiring process from universities.

Phoebe Yao, Founder & CEO at Pareto

We help a lot of startups source engineering candidates. When we work with recruiters, they have dozens of criteria to filter for and most of those requirements are not filterable by machine. Good recruiting requires human expertise to know what candidates make sense for a role and having that filtering and intuition is a critical for success.

Amit Bhatia, Co-Founder of Datapeople

The hiring process has changed a lot in the past 6 months. Jobs have gone up 80% in tech, while the amount of immediate candidates has fallen by 25%. Referrals are 15x more likely to get a job. Sales is the hardest part for hiring in tech, you have to really make sure that they understand what they are signing up for. The candidate sells you, then you sell the candidate.

Dena Upton, Chief People Officer at Drift

The hiring landscape is really tough right now. Going remote has allowed hiring across the US and we think it’s really hypocritical if we don’t embrace it due to the nature of our business. The real challenge is creating a culture when we are all remote. We encourage people to come into our offices but it’s optional. 270 employees have onboarded remotely and our production has increased as a result.

Felix Weitzman, Chief HR Operations Officer at Cognizant

Recruiting challenges vary by geography, but generally we are seeing several common themes: different perspectives on remote versus in person work, the overheated talent marketplace, shorter tenures, and dropping graduation rates. Some people prefer working remotely and believe it enables them to be more productive, while others feel that it is isolating, and reduces team cohesion and a sense of belonging. Hiring managers are trying to balance candidate expectations and company policy which has resulted in longer cycle times to hire, and increased propensity for attrition in the first year. With declining graduation rates, grads and entry level talent are more difficult to find which drives costs up not just for campus recruiting programs, but also for hiring those with 3-5 years of experience.

Sudhir Reddy, SVP of Engineering at Esper

We are hybrid with 3 days in the office and 2 days at home. It was a very conscious-decision. We used to be more remote focused. While remote work is great for talent acquisition, we also saw the shadow side. Team cohesion and bonding is impacted by being fully-remote and the downsides are real: missed opportunities, no new ideas from casual collaboration, slower production and everything becomes more transactional. In-office is actually an advantage, being in Seattle and Bangalore and with the FAANG companies going remote, it gives us access to a bunch of folks who are actively looking to go into the office.

Matt Durr, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at Fetch Rewards

Brand recognition isn’t a thing at a startup. When you have an email that ends with “google.com”, people are going to be more responsive. The one thing you can control at a startup is candidate experience. We have a 24hr SLA. You get a response in 24 hours for referrals and applications. We have to anchor on responsiveness and follow up and next steps. We have to out hustle the other recruiters and companies.

Mark Morissette CEO & Co-Founder at Foxquilt

We make a strong investment in teaching our leaders to storytell. You really have to seduce younger engineers with storytelling, especially as a smaller company. We start the process super early, with college students. We court junior talent early and are passionate about showing them the problems they will be solving. Finding talent at the very very senior level has been easy. Juniors in tech are more compelled to join us because of our problem we are trying to solve. That director level is what’s truly hard to find talent for.

Stephanie Petry, Director, Talent Attraction at Jobber

One of the biggest challenges facing our recruiting efforts at Jobber is the magnitude of competition. It’s challenging to compete against the ‘known brands’ and engineering talent is overwhelmed by the volume of recruiters reaching out to them. To further compound this, competition for talent is very different than it used to be. Where proximity was a delimiter previously, now with remote work and hiring capabilities across a larger talent pool, almost every company—regardless of the city and even country—is competing in the same pool.

Laura Coccaro, Chief People Officer at iCIMS

The recent shifts in the work landscape and job seeker sentiment aren’t something we’ve faced at scale in the past, but there are a few key things that we can do: First, we need to be authentic in showcasing company culture. Today’s job seekers are looking to work at organizations that align with their values and where they can be their true selves. We also need to showcase a culture of growth and advancement; this not only helps attract new talent but also gives current employees the opportunity to grow, which helps increase their career satisfaction and aims to improve retention. Finally, talent leaders should leverage technology to help improve everyone’s experience. Tools like texting, chatbots or digital assistants can help answer candidate questions quickly and lead them to apply, no matter the time of day and without taking up recruiter time.

Kris Franco, Head of People at LeanTaaS

In the summer of 2021, LeanTaaS announced that it was transitioning to a “flexibility-first” model where the majority of our employees (except those whose functions are onsite) are empowered to decide where they would like to live and work in the United States, and if/when they want to come into an office. We continue to have offices in Santa Clara, California and Charlotte, North Carolina for employees who do prefer to work regularly or occasionally from an office. This marks a big difference from companies that are simply introducing variations on a hybrid approach, and runs opposite to some of the most established technology companies who have shifted back and forth between what was promised and what was actually delivered. This flexibility-first model set us apart with candidates, especially for highly competitive tech talent, and helped us achieve 46% team growth last year. This year, we continue to expand the number of states that we operate in to add more flexibility for our employees and have launched an “Employee Experience Committee” to ensure we’re scaling our culture across both office and remote work environments.

Deepica Mutyala, Founder of Live Tinted

I feel fortunate that people are leaving their big corporation jobs for companies like ours. I’ve been blown away by people working at massive beauty brands asking if they can take a meeting with me. The pandemic has created a shift that people want more from their jobs and they are creating a better world.

Dave Vu, VP of People at Local Logic

Quality engineering talent has been a struggle to find. Recruiters are also tough to recruit. A recruiter has to wear multiple hats and the conversations have gotten so complex. A recruiter has to be a salesperson, detective, and a marketer. You need people who are great communicators, it feels like customer success.

Brianne Kimmel, Founder of Worklife Ventures

I’m spending 50% of my time sourcing and closing candidates for portfolio companies, hiring has been that tough. I’m seeing more medium-size tech companies that can’t compete with MANG salaries offer four day work weeks. I was initially skeptical of new benefits, like a four day work week, because typically these workplaces are viewed as not having a hard-working culture. My opinion on that has changed. Startups need to get creative in ways to attract and retain talent. Zendesk, for example, is giving its employees the first Friday of every month off. I’ve talked to some Gen Z employees who have joined these 4 days week companies; they love it because it lets them focus on non-work side projects and ways to improve their professional development.

Cody Shankman, CMO at NowVertical

A lot of marketing people are looking for contract roles. Getting full-time commitment is tougher and we’ve leaned more into the contract model which is beneficial to both parties. We get the top tier content and less focus on overhead. I’ve noticed a lot more people reaching out with atypical backgrounds – candidates are not coming from the classic agency to in-house pipelines. More folks are taking turns and taking jumps. We are just looking for someone who can do the thing we are looking to accomplish. You don’t need that traditional background.

Maria Aveledo, Chief Business Officer at Octane

The most important thing to understand is what drives the candidate. We aren’t competing with FAANG companies. Working at a company like ours you can see directly what you’re working on and you have the opportunity to wear different hats. We’ve created a few cross functional teams, which is something that wouldn’t be possible at a FAANG. From the job application and interview process standpoint, we move very quickly. We more than doubled our engineering team last year by moving the process so quickly because they have so many options to choose from.

Shawn Doyle, Dev Manager & Director of Culture at STRATIS

We are looking for people who are language agnostic. Python is where most of our development happens. Looking for someone who can switch and learn different languages. In the future, more reliability engineers are going to be needed. Especially at startups, having an engineer who can write the code and then also deploy it. It’s much more do-able now than it was. At the same time, talent is in control of the market which makes finding that person even harder. You no longer have to move to California to get a California salary. Opening to remote work is great because you have more talent pool but, you have to compete with everyone. In Philadelphia, we have a hybrid setup. For smaller companies, that sense of team and storytelling is more challenging with remote. With Zoom, it’s hard to connect with more than five people at a time. Those other tangential connections on other teams are harder to make in a remote setting. Water-cooler connections are tough to come by on a screen.

Kristen Weber, Vice President, People & Culture at OnShift

Today’s job market is a candidate’s market – the sheer volume of open roles means the tech community is being inundated with job opportunities. Capturing the candidate’s attention amidst nation-wide competition is difficult. In fact, a recent OpenView survey found that the average candidate is interviewing with nearly eight different companies before settling with one. To navigate this, we created a new role, Associate Engineer, which provides our senior engineers the opportunity to develop and mentor incoming tech talent. Our HR team leveraged insights from our Engineer Managers to ensure the job descriptions conveyed the right messages around skill sets and reflected the team’s culture. In addition, we injected some humor into our outreach messaging, which really captured the attention of candidates. By leveraging the insights of our employees, we’ve received positive feedback, increased candidate flow and exceeded our hiring goal for the Associate Engineer role.

Steve Melia, Partner at OpenView VC

Engineering is a difficult profile to hire for and that doesn’t change with the stage of a company. It’s also been extremely competitive on the GTM and sales side for all scales of a company. Founder led sales aren’t scalable, and founders need to decide how to get a sales lead: “Do I want to go more seasoned or do I wanna get someone more trainable?” There is so much that goes into that first sales hire and it’s likely to be a turnover in 8-12 months. Finding the right salesperson for your business at a moment in time while also knowing you’re growing and changing is a huge challenge.

Nathalie Scardino, Executive Vice President of Global Recruiting at Salesforce

Over the last two years, we have been faced with a new reality: society has called for change in and out of the workplace, jobseekers continue to re-evaluate what is important to them, and companies have transformed their approach to the office in a digital-first world. As a talent acquisition team, we had to pivot. Suddenly in-person interviews, office tours, and all the traditional elements of our recruiting playbook were off the table. At the same time, our hiring goals haven’t changed — in fact, they’ve increased as Salesforce continues to grow rapidly. In order to continue to help scale the company, we’ve reimagined how and where we find top talent — from broadening our search beyond city centers to creating processes and programs that put equality at the center of hiring. What started as a challenge has become an incredible opportunity for us to welcome talent from new communities and build a global workforce that people want to be part of.

Shauna Chernicoff, Head of Employee Experience at Panopto

The shift to remote has allowed us to hire across the globe. It brings so much to the table. Remote hiring has allowed us to compress our hiring cycles. Because of virtual interviews, we are able to spread out the interviews and candidates don’t have to take PTO to interview. It’s been a really great change to our process.

Nitin Gupta, Head of Benchmarking at Pave

In light of The Great Resignation (aka, The Great Transition) we’re experiencing a new candidate expectation of compensation transparency and pay fairness that all constituents in the ecosystem have. That’s why we’re in a candidate’s market, where companies have to elevate their offerability through salaries that are above market. Pave’s Data Lab monitors salaries at over 2,000 companies in real-time, providing a deep dive into location-based compensation trends, and here’s what our data shows. First, the average software engineer’s salary in top tier metros has risen to $155,000, an increase of 4% over average salaries from midway through 2021. Second, for DevOps engineers, though average pay is lower, the average salary has risen faster—growing 16% over the same period, up to $142,000. Companies need to know these numbers even before posting their job descriptions. To pay above the market and attract top engineering talent, they have to level up their HR tech stack, leveraging advances in compensation benchmarking to support data-driven policies.

Ingrid Alongi, Partner at Stage Fund

Budget is the toughest challenge. Startups make it worse for themselves by offering them less structure. People are weary because of pay and they might be walking into first-time founders who might not know how to manage engineering teams. As an early stage company, you have a lot more to offer than just money. When you really talk to people and candidates, they really want to have an impact and how they can impact the product. Early founders make the mistake of treating tech like magic instead of realizing that a diverse team is going to translate that to success in launch. A mistake is that people have these tricky tech interviews that aren’t really similar to the work environment of that engineer. People don’t have to be able to tell someone why a manhole is round, that isn’t going to translate to your product launch. I like hiring from programs like Turing, I advise young startups to hire for people on the team fit side especially.

Joe Freitas, Senior Vice President of People at Reify Health

The pandemic proved most people can work remotely and people just want that. We have hubs with larger pockets where people can go into and collaborate if they want. The landscape of comp bands has changed as well and you have to be flexible in how you approach comp parameters in regards to hiring. We gain our traction around the type of work that the candidates are going to do. We have a very tangible product that’s impacting human kind, and that is a huge attractor to us.

Todd Sbarro, COO at Robots & Pencils

We don’t want people to come and go. We want to hire people who are looking to broaden their skill sets and have a growth mindset. We are growing together and looking for employees who want to evolve. We don’t know what the languages of tomorrow are and don’t want employees who think “Nope, I just work with Ruby” that is fine now, but we aren’t looking for that mindset.

The conversations have been edited and reduced for clarity. Special thanks to Kathleen Walsh, Anurag Gautam, and Miri Tannenbaum for making this article happen.