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Startup Hiring Course Overview

A new cohort-based course focused on building great teams

About the Course

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Startup Hiring
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is a new cohort-based course to help people become amazing at hiring. Live instruction by one of the most respected recruiting leaders in tech. Featuring strategies, frameworks, and tools to help you hire stronger people faster.
The course will run over three weeks. Sessions will be Tuesday and Thursday evenings for 2 hours over Zoom. Students will learn how to improve their approach to hiring alongside other founders, CEOs, recruiters, and technology operators.

Objectives

How to think about hiring quality and making more accurate hiring decisions
How to increase quality and volume of recruiting funnel
How to build better evaluation mechanisms
How to close candidates much more effectively

About the Instructor

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2021 Kenny Mendes Square.png
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Kenny Mendes
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currently leads People, Finance, and Operations at Coda. He was an early member of the team and has helped grow Coda from 6 people to over 100. Prior to Coda, he led recruiting at Box, where he joined as the first person in recruiting and grew the company from 40 to 1,200. Kenny started his career in recruiting at Riviera Partners, an executive search firm focused on building the technology teams of many top startups. He is an active angel investor and advisor.
✉️ Contact Info:
kenny@startup-hiring.com
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Cohort 1 - Course Outline

Session
Topic
Goals
1
1
Intro / Outline
Syllabus outline
Instructor background
Background on some of the philosophical inspirations of the course
Expectations of students
Class participation
Community-learning
Homework to refine your own process
2
1
Hiring Quality
What does it mean to make a great hire?
Why are incentives around hiring quality broken?
Why no role deserves a shortcut here.
3
1
People Analytics Learnings
Counterintuitive findings about what factors are and are not predictive of success
4
1
The Basics - Systems, Tools, Process
Tooling 101 - what kind of tooling/systems do you need at minimum?
What are the elements of most recruiting flows?
What is a classic example of a Coda candidate flow?
5
2
Recruiting Data
Data + Analytics
Quantitative + Qualitative data
What data should you be looking at?
What are standard rates throughout the funnel?
Tools to help with data analysis
Eliminating slow/manual data analysis
Searchlight, Datapeople, Textio, Coda, Gem, etc.
6
2
Pipeline Generation
What are the different ways to attract pipeline into your funnel?
What are healthy ratios, ex. referrals, agency, etc.?
How can you drive more visibility into the world about attracting candidates?
What are ways to attract candidates from underrepresented backgrounds?
7
3
Sourcing
For those new to recruiting, what is sourcing?
LinkedIn vs e-mail (Gem, RecruitBot, TopFunnel, etc.)
Common sourcing mistakes
Live demo by ridiculously strong sourcer - browser tips, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
Modern sourcing tools
Why sourcing is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge
8
3
Pitching
Recruiting is selling. So, sell!
What are all candidates looking for?
Moving your opportunity from mildly-interesting to their top-ranked job
How I sell Coda to candidates
Recruiting pitch audit framework
9
4
Evaluations
Smart people looking at bad data make bad decisions.
Screening profiles/resumes
How to collect as much of the right data and properly discount ineffective signals
Kenny’s favorite interview questions
The best way to use references
How to get the most out of candidate take-home assignments
Why we make every candidate give a presentation
10
5
Closing
Offer Model + Options vs Equity
How to properly communicate the value of your offer
Special equity mechanisms all companies should use
Closing best practices
Team/Company activities
Recruiting narrative
Founder narrative
Guest Speaker: Shishir Mehrotra (YouTube, Coda) teaches Small Pond, Big Pond - how to get people to understand the real dynamics between big companies and startups.
11
6
Final Lesson
Spillover time for any unfinished content
Time to review any previous lessons
Open Q&A on topics not discussed
Sharing of ideas/best practices not covered
Favorite places to learn
Reflections on class
There are no rows in this table
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About the Course
Objectives
About the Instructor
Cohort 1 - Course Outline
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