A CEO’s Total Shift in Perspective on Recruiting

Note: In case you don't know Adam, he's the CEO and Co-founder of Abroad101, one of Boston's fastest-growing startups and a MassChallenge success story.

At first, I recruited by spending an hour of my time pitching Abroad101 to a candidate. Then, we’d go straight to an interview. Towards the end of the interview, we’d get to our technical questions, where almost every candidate failed.

Then, I decided to flip the process around: start with a technical phone or video screen, and then go backwards, ending with pitching candidates on Abroad101. But that didn’t work, because the only people who were willing to do a technical screen without any initial conversation weren’t the right fit.

So how did I go from having three good candidates over the course of three months to having dozens of qualified candidates at once in two weeks?

I realized that recruitment is about understanding each individual. Does the person care most about the company’s financial prospects, the team, our challenges, or furthering their career goals, etc?

What I do now has enabled us to solve both problems I encountered before. Now we attract top candidates and then interest them in proving themselves to us so that we can then evaluate them.

Here’s my trick: Invite every qualified candidate to beer or a phone call; take just a few minutes to share our elevator pitch and exponentially growing metrics; spend up to few hours learning about the person on the other side of the table; pitch the opportunity to the candidate in the context of how it fits into his or her goals; do a classic interview, meet and great with the team, go out for drinks, etc.; make decision.

It’s working great, but we still need one more Ruby on Rails Engineer to join our team. Anyone interested or know someone ($1,500 referral fee)? Visit for more details: bit.ly/abroad101ruby