Hiring your first engineer at a startup is incredibly hard. As a founder, you’re already stretched dangerously thin on time. There are bugs to fix, customers to close and any number of urgent existential fires that demand your full attention. I’ve experienced this pain myself as the founder of two startups. I’ve also seen it as a partner at Y Combinator and through the hundreds of companies using Triplebyte for technical hiring.

The bad news is even once you find the time, much of it will feel like wasted effort. Hiring isn’t the kind of work that provides you constant dopamine hits like programming. It involves a lot of dead ends and frustration. This post is advice for early-stage startup founders who are hiring their first engineer. At this stage, traditional recruiting methods (e.g. hiring a recruiter) won’t work as well for you as they do for larger companies with brand recognition. I’ll talk through your options and discuss their pros and cons.

Before you start
Start by being clear on what exactly you’re looking for. In practice, hiring decisions invariably involve tradeoffs. You could trade quality for speed by rejecting solid candidates to wait for the dream one. Or you could trade money for time by paying a dream candidate above what you’d consider market rate to join now. Founders should be aware of all these tradeoffs and make the one that’s best for their particular circumstances.

I’d recommend starting by listing all the specific criteria your dream hire would have. This will be a combination of technical (are they a good engineer?) and non technical (would I work productively with them?). Then mark each candidate you interview against all these criteria and rigorously debate if you think they have enough strengths in some area to make up for weaknesses in others.

Where to find your first engineer
There are a number of ways to approach hiring your first engineer. I’ve broken it down by source/channel, in order of estimated effectiveness.

Note: As the founder of a hiring platform, I’m not neutral in discussing their effectiveness. I have articulated both their advantages and disadvantages.

Personal Networks
This is your most important source by far. As your startup scales it’ll become less important as you’ll have more budget to spend on recruiting tools and building a recruiting team. At the start though, it’s where you should exclusively focus your energy and only consider other sources when you’ve exhausted all possibilities here.

Hiring someone you’ve already worked with is your best option because you already know if you’ll like working with them. How much you enjoy working with any single person matters less as you grow larger; but for your first hire, it could …