I made this document when Pinterest was going through a surge in hiring and we were under-resourced on recruiting so we wanted EMs to step in and play a larger role in the process. It was also used periodically to train EMs.

While I first wrote this at Pinterest, I also shared it with EMs at Lyft. It has really been a resource I have used throughout my career.

The goal is for EMs to understand the recruiting funnel and then prioritize which area needs the most support (it might be both areas).

How to decide what to prioritize:

- Top of funnel: Prioritize this if you have limited recruiting support, it is a niche role, or you're just not getting enough applications/referrals/sourced candidates to realistically yield a hire.

- Bottom of funnel: This almost always should be prioritized. The only situation it might be less important is if you're currently the most desirable company for engineers to work at and have an insanely high close rate (80%+). I've never seen that though.

Of course you do not want your team to have their entire capacity filled with sourcing. We recommended at Pinterest that EMs spend 20% of their time on recruiting if they have an open role.

In general, how much time spent should be proportional to how impactful it would be to close that role with a great hire vs all of your other day to day responsibilities.
For example, if you have a low PRI headcount to hire AND have a really important deliverable with a tight timeline, you should prioritize the deliverable. However, if the team is operating business as usual AND you have a key specialized hire that you think is going to unlock tremendous business impact, then consider spending 50% of your time on it.

While bootcamp certifications have expanded in our industry, they actually make up a pretty small portion of the total engineering labor market and tend to be skewed towards frontend engineering.

ML engineers usually come from grad programs.

This update was actually due to a tooling change. We had been using another tool to get emails, but it was shut down, so we switched to Connectifier. However it cost several thousand dollars per user so we didn't want to pay for every EM to have a Connectifier account.

We found that the more information we put in the subject line the more someone may decide to screen or ignore it. Engineers often get a lot of recruiting emails so some just tend to ignore most.

By having a subject line that feels personal yet not specific, you get them to open the email, read, and actually consider the opportunity.

I have not done this, however it could make sense if you're an early stage startup or hiring someone at the CEO - 2 level.
I've left it here to illustrate that you can go to extremes for escalation if it is a crucial hire.

It is possible that a candidate's pull & push factors could reveal a red flag. I've decided not to move forward a few times based on responses I've received.

Through this we noticed that our growth team was good at closing people who wanted more ownership and autonomy since we were a very bottoms up organization. We were also decent at closing candidates from large companies because Pinterest had a large user base, but was a much smaller company where individuals could have a bigger impact.

Going above and beyond would generally be for the top 30% of candidates. However, this decision comes back to how impactful closing the role would be.

Certainly there have been hires that weren't the right fit, but I don't think moving fast is the cause. Within this time we still have all the same steps: phone screen, full onsite loop, candidate debrief etc. In a typical hiring process you see anywhere from days to weeks between each step. Our goal is to just significantly cut down the number of days between each of those steps so you can fit the whole process in <10 days.

John Egan

I created this when Pinterest was going through a hiring surge and have continued to use it throughout my career. 

This doc gives an overview of how to cold source candidates.

To give you a sense of how much work it takes to get 1 hire, you need to either have 500 external candidates apply on their own through the jobs site, source and reach out to 100 candidates, or get 20 referrals (where referral means that someone has already talked their friend into interviewing at Pinterest). These numbers are just averages and for senior roles or more competitive disciplines (ex: machine learning) these numbers can easily double.

As a manager, where you can have the most impact is at the 

top of the funnel (driving leads) or at the bottom of the funnel (closing candidates)

If you are looking for engineers for a particular specialty (ex: machine learning), go to the LinkedIn profile of engineers you know who work on machine learning. Click “See All Connections” in the right sidebar. Depending on their privacy settings, you might not be able to view all of their connections. This strategy works great since people who do X tend to have a lot of connections with other people who do X. A more advanced tactic can be to start adding industry leaders in X as a connection on LinkedIn. Just say you admire their work or something in the connection invite, then if you’re lucky, their connections won’t be private and they will be an excellent source for finding people working in X.

Search all your second degree connections that have “engineer”, “sde”, or “swe” in their current title. Or all 2nd degree connections that match a certain keyword (ex: machine learning). You presumably are connected to good engineers and they should all know other good engineers.

Do a general search for what you are looking for. For example, if you’re looking for a backend infra engineer you might try keywords “backend”, “infra”, “infrastructure”.

Do a keyword search but limit it to companies with good engineering reputations or schools with good engineering reputations

Search for contact info or resumes from school websites.

 Many grad students have webpages that are maintained long after they finish school. You can also look at paper publications in industry journals to potentially find candidates.

Example search: machine learning “gmail.com” site:stanford.edu

Create a google doc, get all the engineers to go through their LinkedIn connections, and add people to the doc that they think would be a good fit for any of the open roles

Sourced candidates from a source-a-thon are great since the candidates will already have a connection at Pinterest, and a good percentage will not be getting many recruiter pings because they may not have fully filled out LinkedIn profiles.

In the cold email, warming them up with a "So and so spoke highly of you" has worked well in at least eliciting a response.

Ask 20 people you know (both internally or externally) for 5 recommendations of people they think would be a great fit for your role. Don’t worry if the candidate is looking for a new role, or if the person thinks the candidate is unlikely to leave their current role. Just focus on getting 5 people that the person thinks are some of the top people they would recommend. Then reach out those leads saying that so-and-so highly recommended you. Make sure you get permission from the person who gave you the lead, to mention their name. If the person isn’t comfortable with their name being mentioned, then just tell the candidate in the outreach that they were highly recommended without mentioning who gave you their name.

Attend meetups and conferences where the type of people you’re trying to recruit attend. The great part of meetups and conferences are that you’re able to talk to the candidate face to face, so they can’t just ignore your email, but have to give you a response. Your goal should be to get at least 5-10 leads per day for any meetup or conference.

While recruiting, you should target sending about 10-20 outreaches a day. You want to send outreach over email since LinkedIn Message response rates are 1/10th of the response rates on email. On average it will take 100 outreaches to get 1 hire. Response rates to an engineer or EM reaching out are much higher than when a recruiter reaches out.

 The preferred process is now to ask someone on the recruiting team, if they can use Connectifier to find the emails for the candidates you sourced and ask them to also cross reference with Greenhouse to ensure we don’t reach out to anyone who has recently interviewed. Recruiting team can even setup an email alias to do the outreach as you if you want.

The response rate over email is 10x the response rate to LinkedIn messages. To get emails use 

, but only shows people’s work emails, not their personal emails (and some people are sensitive about getting recruiter pings on their work email).

Another alternative is to guess the address by trying different common patterns and test if the email exists using 

. For “Firstname Lastname” you will want to try combinations like Firstname@, FirstnameL@, FirstnameLastname@, LastnameFirstname@, FLastname@, etc. For the domain, try both @gmail.com and @<company>.com (e.g. if they work at Twitter try both @gmail.com and @twitter.com). Also try seeing if you can find the username they user on social media (ex: username from their LinkedIn profile URL, Facebook profile URL, etc) and try testing <username>@ as well.

Note: Facebook uses “@fb.com” and Slack uses @slack-corp.com

Another option is to do a Google search for “Firstname Lastname” gmail and see if you can find their email in any of the search results.

Here is another great guide for how to find people’s email addresses: 

https://www.propellercrm.com/blog/find-email-address

To ensure a good candidate experience we do not want to reach out to candidates who have already interviewed with Pinterest in the past 12 months. Before reaching out, look them up in Greenhouse using Greenhouse’s search feature. If you find the candidate profile, it is ok to contact them again if they never got to the phone screen stage. However, if they were phone screened or did an onsite interview anytime in the past 12 months, please do not contact them again.

Good subject line that will get people to open

Say you are the engineering manager. People are much less likely to respond if they think you are a recruiter

Say something about them so they know the email is personalized

Timing when you send the email can have a noticeable impact on response rates. Best time to send emails are late afternoon (ex: 4-6pm), when people are wrapping up their work day. Also middle of the week (Tuesday, Wednesday) works well; avoid Monday mornings and Friday all together. You can use Google’s schedule email feature to schedule emails from your Gmail account to go out at a certain time.

I'm the Engineering Manager for the Emails & Notifications team here at Pinterest. Pinterest has been growing fast, we now have 175M monthly active users, and have more users in the US than Twitter.

I’m reaching out because I was extremely impressed with your background, especially your work on <something from their LinkedIn profile>. I thought you would be a perfect fit for helping us on scaling our emails and notifications platform as our userbase continues to grow. We are a very small team and initial projects in this area have added millions of active users, so it's a very high impact area with a lot of opportunity to grow.

Are you free this week to chat 10-15 minutes so we can connect and I can share more?

A good response rate to the initial outreach is 10-20%. However, sending a follow up email 1 week after the initial email can often double or triple the response rate. The follow up can be short and sweet, here is an example:

Just following up on my previous note. I realize with the crazy # of emails we get these days, that sometimes it takes a few tries to reach someone. If you're open to connecting, I would love to hop on a quick call this week. Even if now is not the right time, careers are long and I'd love to connect.

You may even consider sending a 3rd follow up to those that don’t respond, but I would suggest pacing that out 1 month after the 2nd follow up. You can use tools like 

 to automate your workflow for sending out emails, follow ups, open tracking, etc.

Another tactic for key candidates is escalating outreaches. If they don’t respond to your first ping, have the VP of Engineering reach out. If they don’t respond to the VP, have the CEO reach out. If they don’t respond to the CEO, 

. Keep escalating until it is detrimental to their career to not respond to the outreach

The other big lever for a hiring manager is closing. Typical industry close rates are 50% so getting that to 60, 70% can have a material impact on the amount of resourcing going into recruiting and speed of hiring. A few key points tactics to help with closing are:

Understand the candidates push & pull factors

Push factors are factors causing them to leave their current role (ex: lack of career growth, not liking their manager etc)

Pull factors are factors attracting them to Lyft (ex: smaller company, brand, etc)

It is good during the hiring manager interview to ask them why they are thinking about leaving their current role and what made them interested in talking to Lyft. Write down what they say and then use that information to tailor your conversations in closing around highlighting why Lyft is the best fit based on their individual 

When a candidate is at the offer stage you may be in competition with other companies and hiring managers to close the candidate. One tactic to help is really building a personal relationship with the candidate by 

going above and beyond what other hiring managers may do.

 Ways to do that are taking the candidate to dinner instead of just doing a closing call. Or having senior leaders in the company ping the candidate to say that they heard the candidate got an offer and are excited for them to potentially join.

The final tactic to improve close rate is really speeding up your hiring process. At a typical tech company, going from initial candidate contact to offer can take 30-45 days. During that time, candidates often decide if they are going to interview. They may as well interview at several places to see what is out there or where they can get the best compensation. If you can speed up your recruiting process to go from 

, this can have a material impact on close rate since you’ll likely be competing with fewer (or maybe even zero) companies to close the candidate.

 - Given someone’s LinkedIn profile, it will tell you their personal email address

Recruiting for EMs 101 from John Egan

Recruiting For Eng Managers 101

Recruiting Funnel

Sourcing

Strategy #1: Root Sourcing

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