Lessons in Hiring Developers From the Open Source World

When you’re hiring those key early team members, it’s critical to communicate the level of commitment required to be a part of your team. The best companies are able to find people who:

• Care deeply about the problem the company’s solving
• Are willing to work for less than market
• Are willing to prove themselves before being hired

The best open source companies find these people by looking in the developer community on their project. At Telestax (disclosure, I’m an advisor), one of the most active open source projects in the world, they don’t even consider anyone for hiring until they’ve built something and contributed to the project. If you apply for a job at Telestax, you’ll first get the answer “Find something you’re interested in and build it.” Only after regular contributions do they consider hiring the developer.

By making this simple ask, Telestax answers all three of the questions above before they spend any more time on the candidate. The developer has to care about the project or they wouldn’t even bother. They prove they’re willing to work for less than market (free in the case of their initial contribution). They put themselves out there and prove they can do the work by contributing real work to a real, live project.

You may not run an open source project, but you can use the same principles in your hiring process:

• Assess whether the person you’re interviewing is looking for a job or looking to work on your idea. Very different, and you only want the second
• Make it clear that you can’t pay what IBM and other big companies pay very early in the process. Startups and early stage companies require a different kind of team member. If they’re looking for that, you don’t want them
• Look for people who are willing to work on or around your idea on their own time without any promise of a job

There’s no formula for finding the right people, but these three traits matter more than most anything else.