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Startup Hiring Course Overview
Startup Hiring Course Overview

A new cohort-based course focused on building great teams

A new cohort-based course focused on building great teams

About the Course

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Startup Hiring⁠

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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Kenny Mendes⁠

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

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

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.

People Analytics Learnings

Counterintuitive findings about what factors are and are not predictive of success

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?

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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