JT17 | Andrew Kim On Getting A Foot In The Door Of Early Stage Startups

Discussion Topics: Andrew Kim On Getting A Foot In The Door of Early Stage Startups

• How to identify a good startup to work for?
• Tips to get recruiter’s attention and stand out
• What happens inside after you submit your resume
• Key takeaways you can practice now!

Transcripts: Andrew Kim On Getting A Foot In The Door of Early Stage Startups

Open LinkedIn on any given day and you’ll find at least one post about being rejected or ghosted by recruiters. And not just at one company. People have stories of being rejected dozens or even hundreds of times. That’s crazy! It’s enough to make even the most determined, persistent striver give up and stay home. But that’s not a great outcome because at the end of the day, moving jobs on a reasonable frequency brings you more exposure, more learning, better prospects and yes more money.

And all these are magnified if you move to growth companies. Why? Because unlike mature organisations where the priority is stability, these smaller players are always on the move, always learning, improving, innovating. Many of them also operate on the cutting edge, shaping the future. Which is why career growth at these companies tends also to be faster and the learning exponential. Which makes such employees more valuable to the rest of the world and hence these are natural destinations for early career professionals looking to make a mark.

But in a world where people are being ghosted or rejected hundreds of times even at traditional organisations, how does one actually stand out in the crowd of applicants? What’s really happening behind the scenes after you submit your resume? How does one get a foot in the door of an exciting early stage company?

Today we’re chatting with Andrew Kim, erstwhile startup super-recruiter and currently the Founder CEO of Fynd. He’s going to help us break down what it takes to get into a happening early stage company and also share a bit of what happens on the inside, so you have a better sense of why you might have been rejected or ghosted in the past.

But before we get into it, a couple of quick reminders: if you like this episode, please do Follow or Subscribe. We have a ton of great content coming out this year and I’m sure you won’t want to miss out on it. Second, if you need a recap after the episode, feel free to head over to Crazytok Media to read the full transcript and brush up on anything you might have missed.

So with that said, Andrew, welcome to JobTok. It’s a pleasure to have you here with us today. Perhaps we could start with a short intro? Tell us about your career so far and also do let us know a bit about Fynd. It sounds interesting!

Well, thank you so much for having me here today. I have about 10 plus years of recruiting experience. I was with Uber when they first came to APEC in early 2013, I was with them for five years. So when I first joined the company, we were about 400 people company, five years later, we were about 22,000 people.

Yeah, we both have seen some crazy growth. And it was a fun ride for sure. I was managing our APEC recruiting team there. And then I moved to cloud kitchens, which was founded by, ex Uber founder, Travis. So I was the first person in APEC on the ground. And did a whole thing again. Building the team and scale the business and then recruiting obviously and then, I spent about two years there. And early 2020, I decided to start my own journey and Fynd was actually born because of all the pains that I’ve seen and experienced personally with these two startups. As a startup, people don’t really know who we are. And they really don’t understand why they need to join our company and we depend on inbound applications and very traditional sort of recruiting methods. It just didn’t work. So we had to figure out a totally different way to attract talent. And that was us reaching out to the people that we need.

And, these people typically are very happy where they are right now and they’re not actively looking out. These people don’t spend a lot of time drafting their CV so, we had to do a lot of, you know, outbound reach out. And we were pretty successful because we were telling all the stories. And over time, we sort of understood how to tell our stories more effectively to potential candidates and again, the result was amazing and that’s basically how Fynd was born. And I wanted to create a platform whereby high growth startups will be able to tell those stories to the right group of people.

So Fynd is an invite only community that helps our members who are top quality talents, engage in very private and intimate conversations with top startups and professionals. So we prescreen our members and those who meet our sort of criteria, we’ll be getting an invite code to join our platform and they just need to sit tight. Top startups will reach out to them and we’ll tell those stories to them. And our members will have access to very exclusive insider information about the team, culture, growth, opportunities that are not typically shared online. And you get to hear directly from the employees of these high growth startups.

So I tell our members, you need to be very active – passive job seeker. So that’s basically what Fynd is all about.

That’s pretty clever, actually, Andrew. Essentially, you’re saying that this is a group of curated people whom companies would love to hire and kind of pre-screened and all of that. And then companies come to actually tell their story and they can see it more honestly, and transparently because it’s not like a blog post on the internet.

The biggest pain point when I asked companies is that the people we want to hire will not come to us first. So that’s the biggest pain point. So when I asked the talent side, the professionals, what’s your biggest pain point in job searching. They said transparency and information. They don’t have enough information, enough transparency. They don’t understand what’s happening behind the scenes. They don’t know exactly what they’re thinking, what they’re looking for. It’s not super clear. So that’s always a problem. So what we are trying to do is we are trying to bridge the gap by creating a space for them to really comment, openly talk about themselves. And as you said, it’s a very curated group of people. So the quality is checked and guaranteed.

Okay. Got it. So this is pretty interesting, but for those who are in the broader community or the broader group of professionals who may not have yet been able to work in a tech startup and kind of be that desirable profile and so on. How do they actually get into these hot and happening startups so that they can actually start building that own profile? So maybe for a start how does a person even know how to identify a good startup or, you know, the right place to apply?

Right. As a recruiter, I mean, I think it’s easier to sort of explain how recruiters look for talent. We start from a lot of research. Before even doing research, we understand what kind of people we need. So we need to really think about what kind of people we even need and how many people do we need? And then, where are these people? Where can we find them? And then we go to them and we start telling them stories.

And I think for talents who are trying to identify, trying to look for, trying to understand which are the good companies, they need to do the exact same thing. They need to first understand. What do I need? What do I want? So that’s the first thing that they needed then do and secondly, where are these companies then?

What I recommend is that we have a lot of different channels that we use every day like LinkedIn, Google, Reddit, Twitter and you can easily set your interest on your social media. You can put start-up or tech and these are sort of the keywords that you can set and they will feed you with a lot of information. Whatever, whenever there is a related article, we will pop up in your feed.

And then don’t just ignore it, but read it through and if you like it, then, you can put it in your folder and what I’d do is do some research about the company and try to understand what’s the business model and what they’re trying to do in this market and go to places that you can find a bunch of information on internet. We also applied for YC. We didn’t get into it this time, but there are a bunch of amazing companies within the YC network.

And they are doing really, really well in the us and a lot of them are actually trying to expand your market to APEC. So these are some of the companies that you can also find and you don’t have to wait for them to actually come to you, but you can actually go to them. A lot of startups when you ask them, what’s your recruiting strategy? Like when are you trying to enter our market? In a lot of cases, their answer is when we find the right people for the market, then we will go.

So you can actually go to them and say, your company is super interesting and I know that you guys are interested in coming to APEC. Maybe you should consider APEC and I can help you. You can go to Google and just type “hottest to startups to watch out”. There’s so many amazing companies out there that you have never heard of. So these are some of the places where you can find good startups. And then, you know, once you identify these names, then what do you do? You need to actively reach out to them.

Okay. That’s interesting. So essentially you’re seeing that to identify a good startup to work for, you almost have to think like an investor in some way, right? If you would be willing to invest in that startup, you would be willing to work at that startup. That’s where your point about searching Reddit and Twitter and Y Combinator and so on to look for those kinds of companies that have some traction and presumably good prospects.

A lof of people ask me how do you even identify a good startup to work for? When I was at Uber and clunky, when we reach out to people and try to pitch you bring blockages. And when we didn’t have a lot of so-called brightening and people. They need to think about it because it’s a big investment for them. They have a really stable job. They’re getting paid really well. And now certainly they are asked to join this startup that they’ve never heard of before and they need to understand whether or not they’ll be able to spend the next four years here at least. That’s a big risk. Which means they really need to think as an investor. Am I willing to invest my time, my effort, my energy Into this company for the next four years?

Also, I have gone through this state as well, when we were trying to raise money for Fynd, I spoke to so many different VCs. They always want to know a few things like founding members, what’s your business model, what’s the traction like?

And as a candidate you also need to ask that exact same thing and am I able to work with these guys 20 hours a day and what problem are they really trying to solve? And whether you understand the problem well, or in line with your vision. So I think these are some of the things that you as a candidate should ask even before you put your CV.

Yeah, actually a very valuable point, Andrew, because one is why should anybody join a startup anyway? One is for the learning, the others for the money. You’re joining for future wealth creation. So it is important to do your due diligence, like an investor, because if you are going to make money, rather, you need to know the prospects that you’re going to make money. Otherwise you should probably pick something else or a stable company where you’ll get cash compensation versus stock. So I think that’s a valid point and it’s important for people to think that way, and as the candidate also is bringing value to the table. So it’s not just like you need to beg and plead to get in. You actually are bringing value to the company and you should add in a partnership in this whole thing.

And you know, startup is a very big word, right? There are so many types of startups under one startup keyword. We also need to understand what stage am I most comfortable with? Am I okay with a stage when they are trying to figure it out, the product market fit, testing every day and figuring it out, whether it works or not works. Do you really enjoy all these activities that you get to do or do you maybe prefer more scale like putting things and processes in place or building the process or track things and how to use data to scale to the next stage. Depending on your interest, probably joining a more series B, C type of startup is much better than pre-seed or seed round or series A company.

Actually a wise person, who will go unnamed, told me once that the sweet spot is where the risk and the reward is out of proportion to the risk. So exactly like you said if you’re trying to join a seed stage company, the risk is high. The reward of course is high, but the chances of failure are pretty high. Versus if you join a company that has like 5,000 people already, the risk is very low, but the reward is also pretty low. So the right stage might well be series B or C where there are a few hundred people which for most people meet the right risk-reward trade-offs. But like you said, if you’re the kind of person who’s comfortable with ambiguity, chaos, et cetera, join an early stage one and take the bet, but know that you’re taking a bet and the reward could be exponential.

Okay. So let’s say you’ve identified or shortlisted a bunch of companies through all of this research. How does one actually reach out to them or get in touch?

We talked about looking at this from a recruiter’s perspective or like how recruiters actually build their talent pipeline, so to speak. Now you need to practically reach out to them, but don’t just reach out and copy and paste those messages. I also received a bunch copy and paste messages on LinkedIn and recruiters are very busy. Trust me. There are a lot of people who complain that I don’t hear back from them or I don’t get any feedback. It’s not like they don’t want to give you feedback or it’s not like they don’t like to get in touch with you. It’s just, they’re so swamped with a lot of different stuff. That’s why you need to get to the point and be really sweet and short with your messages, but also very impactful. So, what I’d do is I need to do some research, write about the company and the job that I’m interested in and the best way is just read the JD carefully and identify the keywords that you see in this JD.

And these are the keywords that you should include in your message to get recruiter’s attention right away. And then what I’ll do is it’s also a number game, right? I will do two company research and which means like every week, I identify a bunch of different companies in my list, but every week I will try to go deeper on two companies to understand their history, the business model and the growth and any interesting articles about these two companies. And then what I’ll do is I go to LinkedIn and then just type the company name and you’ll see the people who are working for the particular company and I encouraged my friends to actually send friend requests a day.

But from my experience, the acceptance rate is about 20%. 20% of the people you sent requests will accept your request and 20 % of accepted people you message will respond. The math is if you send requests to 40 people a month, 8 people will accept your request and some of them will reply to you. But from the long list, now you have direct connection with eight people from this company. Even though the percentage is not high, you now have access to the hiring managers, the founding team members or the head of departments of these companies. That’s to me, it’s very powerful and trust me when people reach out to me with a really good message, it’s very powerful and we tend to respond to that really well.

Right. Essentially you’re saying that one of the things people are always worried about or believe that they have no choice is that they don’t know anybody in all of these places. So therefore they will never get a chance and if they send their resume through the website, it’s going to get ignored but you’re saying that you can just cut through all of that and make your own network. Which is to research these two companies a week and reach out to a few people which you can find from LinkedIn and as long as you are sending a genuine sensible well-crafted message, you will get some response. And based on that itself, you’ll start building a network in that company. Which then improves your chances of obviously getting hired or at least getting shortlisted in those places. So, this is fantastic. And given that this is from a recruiter, not from a hiring manager or someone else, I think this is good feedback, Andrew. something that people can definitely just do versus hoping that someday there’ll be found.

Absolutely. I still remember a couple of candidates very early Uber days they sent me a very short video saying why they are interested in Uber and why they wanted to join this company. That really stands out and they reached out to me on LinkedIn, just pinged me on linkedin and said I know that you guys are looking into the Vietnamese market and I’m here and I can definitely help you grow the business. And this is why I can, who I am. And then this is something that I’ve done before that really catches our attention. And we definitely want to spend time getting to know that person and that increases your chance, compared to other people who just basically do the same things most people do.

Yeah. This is great because what you illustrate is the person is proactive. They are creating an opportunity, which doesn’t exist, which is they reached out to you as a cold outreach. Second, they made a video. So maybe that stands out a little bit. But third, they’re not waiting for the role to be posted. And then applying along with a thousand other people, they’re saying, Hey, we know that you’re interested in Vietnam and I’m here and I can do all of this stuff. So if you need a person like me, then I’m ready and willing, which I think is fantastic.

And as you also know, at a very early stage startup, they don’t really have a very set headcount planning, right? Their business model changes every week or every month. So it’s not really conquered a lot of things are still up in the air. But when we meet fantastic candidates, we always think, how can we use this person for our company? Although the role is not confirmed or clear if the person is super good and the person really shows us. Uh, the right characteristics and the culture fit then we will figure out how to invite this person to our company. So again, that really increases your chance. So, as you said, you need to be very proactive about it, right? and that’s what good recruiters do you know? We don’t just wait for inbound CVs to arrive but we actively reach out to the people and start telling our stories. Don’t just wait for headhunters or companies to reach out to you, go to these companies that you’re interested in and actively tell your stories to the company or recruiters or founders on LinkedIn. So you need to definitely take advantage of that.

Right. Okay. Since you mentioned recruiter, it’s I think a good point to also explore a bit. So if you’re proactively reaching out, how do they actually get recruited interests? Does everybody have to make a video to do this?

Let’s talk about LinkedIn as a tool because pretty much every single recruiter that I know in my network, they live in a breath in one LinkedIn, right? Typically a recruiter, a senior recruiter spends anywhere between seven to nine seconds on a profile. The question is, how can you even read everything that is read on my profile in seven to nine seconds and we don’t. What we do is we try to look for the keywords that we want to see, which means if you have the right keywords in your profile, obviously you will get attention from recruiters. As I said, they have a lot of different things happening behind the scenes. They also have to build a process and work with the hiring manager. There are a lot of different things that are happening behind the scenes. So the best LinkedIn profile that I personally appreciate is again, short and sweet.

Right. The best profile that I personally appreciate is the one that has a really strong headline. The headline allows you to put 120 characters; it gives recruiters immediate understanding of the person’s profile. And what I recommend is to try to put your hard skills that the people in your industry will know immediately when they hear those keywords. Do not put your soft skills like you’re a people person. You’re down to earth. You’re a great communicator. These are great, but you don’t really put those things in profile. If you are actively looking out, don’t put, I am actively looking out. But what you do is, say I’m passionate about X, or I am seeking new opportunities in this area. So by looking at those keywords recruiters will understand and maybe reach out to you. So the headline, if you don’t have a lot of time to put a lot of stuff in your profile, try to just spend some time on your headline.

And under your experience line where you put the things that you’ve done in each company, try to put just a simple two, three lines of what you did, what was the result and what was the impact? These are the three things that recruiters really care about and they really want to know the reason why they want to have a recruiter phone screen is because they want to understand what your job title says as such, but what exactly did you do and what was the result? How’d you do it? And what was the impact, right? And these are the things that they try to dig in. But if you put those things in your profile, recruiters will love you and think I need to reach out to this guy and I can really get to the point and spend a little more time on more meaningful stuff.

This is very insightful, Andrew. So essentially, first of all, recruiters use LinkedIn. Second of all, they only spend a few seconds on your profile. Therefore the headline is important and try to put the keywords and particularly skills related kinds of things there. And when you’re writing about your experiences, don’t write long rambling things, just focus on what you did and why it was important, essentially.

Okay. So, we’ve got the recruiter’s attention and presumably, there’s been some conversation and the resume has arrived at your doorstep. So what happens inside? Because this is the part that I think most people don’t understand or realize what is happening because then they feel like they got ghosted. But maybe a lot of things happen. So, what’s actually happening within the company?

Yeah. As we said earlier, they’re still trying to figure it out because they thought that maybe they need ops manager but then things changes and now they have an urgent role and everybody is working on it. Sometimes It’s more of a prioritization issue. It’s not like they’re not interested in you or want to give you any feedback just internally, hey’re trying to just put out some fire.

For most cases they have internal referrals coming in and they have more credibility since they worked together or know the person and that definitely carries credibility. So, some companies, they want to put internal referrals more priority, and then assess that person first before moving to inbound applications or external candidates. Right. So that could be a reason. Or maybe sometimes they just are not super clear on the recruiting process. Maybe they thought assessing A, B or C for a particular position should be enough but it wasn’t and they had to check D and E, etc. And they’re still trying to figure it out and these are very frustrating for candidates but when you are applying specifically for very early day startups, these are sort of the things that you’ll just need to understand. So my advice to you is it’s okay to follow up. You can maybe send out a nice, simple message to put it on top of that and list again and reach out and ask them questions. But again, if you don’t hear back from a recruiter, what I also do is go to LinkedIn and try to find the hiring manager on LinkedIn and ping the hiring manager and check your current status so that hiring manager could reply back to you and then also maybe put some pressure on the recruiter to send out some messages to you.

Right. My takeaway from this actually is the same thing that makes startups the kind of place to which you should proactively reach out because they haven’t quite defined anything yet. So if you proactively reach out, perhaps you can find a role through that process. But sometimes because things are not well-defined, they can change all the time. And so therefore you might have to be patient. So it’s like a double-edged sword here but I think the benefit of this kiosk actually outweighs the downside. Fact is because things are not well-defined you can actually get in early into something attractive and it’s still a worthwhile thing to do.

Especially for an early day startup/ company, their job description changes every six months. Right? So, when your JD changes, you need to quickly understand how to get the right resources to get things done. So, A lot of things are still very fluid and up in the air.

Not really structured and if you love that kind of environment to figure things out and make some nice processes out of this chaos, definitely early startup is a very fun place for you.

Yeah, that’s right. I think maybe just one last question over here. Let’s assume that they do have a role well-defined et cetera and you are going through the process. What are the kinds of things that startups actually look for, which you can try to highlight in your proactive outreach, or maybe even on your resume?

Right. Technical skill sets, experience, and these are very important too. I think it’s about being able to understand how unstructured and how chaos a startup can be. Having that experience expectation set is so important for you first. And then when you reach out to two companies, you need to show that you have the right DNA for startup. And nowadays, when I talked to a lot of startups, I think these are a few common things that I see. They are looking for people who are/ have great and hustle, growth mindset, integrity and trust, innovative and creative mindset, execution focused deductibility flexibility, communication skills. These are some of the common traits that I see when I talk to startups and recruiters from startups. Again, the technical skill sets are important, but as I said things can change and your JD will change completely. Although your technical job descriptions might change, the traits that I mentioned will stay. And then the people that we see who have done really well at a startup, have those traits. These days we are putting more emphasis on these trades over technical skill sets because technical skill sets can be learned. But these traits are the things you have to come with.

Right. So, in summary, what this means is on your LinkedIn and your resume, perhaps you need to have the hard skills listed because that’s the job that people are looking for you to actually do. And that’s what you’re going to be found for. But through the process, the interview process, you need to demonstrate that you have these soft skills. Which are all oriented towards ambiguity. Like how can you deal with a fast moving environment? And that’s what you’re joining a startup to do. So it’s not a big surprise that you should be able to deal with ambiguity and be able to demonstrate that you can do it.

You don’t have to wait until you are in the interview process to demonstrate these skill sets. You can even do it when you’re doing research and reaching out to these companies’ representatives and hiring managers. You can show them, I’m very creative. I can learn, I have this hustle, I have this grit. I can communicate with you really well. I have this integrity. You can show the skill sets before the official recruiting process actually kickstarts. That’s actually even better for them to have that impression of you. A lot of these guy reached out to me on LinkedIn with a cold email, but he was very insightful and he understands our business really well and his communication style was amazing and he was so creative with his message and I can totally see him growing this company. Let’s have a chat with him. So then these soft skillsets or the traits that we just mentioned, this had been already checked even before the interview process. So that’s even better.

Okay. So that’s really interesting. You can actually demonstrate all of this upfront. And actually from the way you were describing how you might kind of present this candidate to the hiring manager, is it that recruiters also sometimes push candidates? Like they aren’t just passive, just sitting there. Here is a candidate, enjoy. Or you actually push?

Absolutely because good recruiters spend a good amount of time where the candidates really try to understand the person’s passion, desire and vision. And then we also try to understand what’s our passion, our mission, our vision, and, you know, can we bridge this too. They spend time with a candidate and really understand them and their passion. And they understand the candidate personally, better than the hiring manager does. So that the hiring manager doesn’t really see recruiters can come in and say, Hey, actually, this person has A, B and C, so we should definitely give him another opportunity.

Right. Fantastic, Andrew. I think I got a really good view of the whole end to end process. And, I do think that you have completely nailed the topic of how to get an entry into early stage startups, because you’ve shown us that even for somebody who is coming in cold has no connections or a prior experience with these kinds of startups, they can also with some effort and I guess some hustle be able to make this whole thing happen. I think you’ve given a whole bunch of very actionable tips. So, just to wrap up, would you like to summarize some of the key points or takeaways, things that people can actually do immediately after this episode to start making a change into an early stage startup?

Sure. Well, key takeaways here are that when looking for a new career, you really need to wear the head of investors point of view when you look for companies. And also you need to think how recruiters work or think and act. But recruiting in general, whether you’re looking for talent, we’re looking for a job to me, it’s marketing plus sales. You need to really understand how to market yourself, and you need to be able to sell and you need to do it very practically.

And don’t just wait for companies to come to you or don’t just apply to the companies through their job sites. But on top of that, you can still practically reach out to them and then try to tell your stories to them. So always be promoting and selling yourself.

And if you really invest your time, I can tell you that you’ll be able to build a meaningful network and you’ll be able to meet amazing people. And through that experience, you will be able to really elevate your career to the next level.

Perfect. And that’s exactly the thought process behind JobTok to help people elevate their career to the next level. So, I think that was a nice point that you made and Andrew, thank you really so much for sharing all your learning with us. For me, honestly, the biggest takeaway was the need to be proactive and reach out to companies even if they don’t have an advertised need. And it’s kind of funny. I mean, all of life seems to be about that. How can you be early to the game? And this is no different. You can’t just sit back and wait for things to happen. So Andrew, once again, really appreciate you being here with us and for everyone listening, thank you so much for tuning in. You’ll find the show notes at CrazyTok Media.

And we’ll also put in a link to Fynd in case you’d like to continue to discuss with Andrew, or you’d like to explore further that way. Do remember to follow or subscribe and if you like what you heard, Andrew has shared a lot of really good tips, please show your appreciation with a five star rating on Apple, Spotify.

Thanks again, Andrew, for being with us today. We were Andrew and Amit with JobTok. See you next time.