[nickbarnwell]

This is, in my opinion, one of the largest issues startups face today. OSS and a culture of blogging have significantly reduced the barriers to entry for many technical issues including, but not limited to, scaling, data processing, and even general development.

What's still just as difficult is building the right team - my personal pain point is university recruiting, but it's bad across the board. If you're a startup that's expanding beyond the second or third round of technical hires the ability to draw on your network becomes increasingly limited as you've likely tapped out all your personal connections at this point, and your team's calendar still resembles one of the world's worst games of Tetris [1].

Traditional recruiting agencies are poor at matching technical hires with opportunities that are interesting to them because most recruiters are non-technical. GitHub profiles are worthless if the hiring manager (Read: /founders?/) have no time to read them, and dealing with phone screens and in-person interviews and arranging travel for candidates is a huge distraction from what they should be focusing on, building their business [2]. There's a huge potential for upset in the space, and I look forward to seeing a managed hiring provider that manages the scheduling, very initial matching of candidates, and once a hire is made follows-through with assistance on all of the ensuing paperwork and documentation.

[1] http://media.edge-online.com/files/imagecache/article/tetris...

[2] Hiring is one component of building a company, one of the most important even, but it is a distraction. In an idyllic world perfect employees seek you out and apply ;)

[vosper]

I completely agree that technical recruiting is open to disruption, and I hope that it soon will be, however: given the fees that barely technical recruiters extract now, what hope is there for a truly talented, highly technical recruiter who needs to get paid at least what (s)he could make in a technical role (120k minimum)

[l3amm]

Sadly, I think this is right. I know several recruiters at a big-name recruiting agency in Silicon Valley, they try to act like an internal recruiter (thorough vetting of candidates, understanding company culture, etc) and they make much less money than if they had just adopted the pay and spray mentality of their peers.

The bright hope for me is darwinian: if enough startups refuse to use these pay and sprayers then they will die off, leaving only the higher quality recruiters. Will that happen? Not any time soon.