When social travel site Gogobot launched 5 years ago, there were 2 employees; Co-founders Travis Katz and Ori Zaltzman. Their mission: to help people discover great places to stay, eat and play.
Today, Gogobot, headquartered in Menlo Park, CA has 30 employees and more than 16 million people using the site to plan trips and research places to visit. The site boasts more than 900,000 reviews, four million photos and 60,000 city guides. How did they scale this quickly? CTO and co-founder Ori Zaltzman shares what they looked for in building a strong team.
1. What did you look for early on when building a team?
In a startup's infancy it's critical that you get your first few hires right. Early on what we'd look for were candidates who had ties to Gogobot. Travis Katz and I spent a lot of time combing through our own networks. We also looked for hires who we knew could be scrappy and people who enjoyed wearing many hats.
2. Now that you're growing, what's your criteria for a new hire?
Things have definitely changed since we first started Gogobot almost five years ago. We had more than 16 million people use Gogobot in the last year, so we need people who know how to scale and people who want to have their product used by millions of people. The hires we look for now have to be comfortable owning a big part of the product that we're building.
3. What's unique about your hiring process?
As a startup, we have the luxury of being able to take a chance on people who may have unconventional profiles or non-traditional backgrounds. We have people in the office who were working in finance or even biotechnology and their job at Gogobot was actually the first time they worked in a tech company. What's unique about our hiring process is that first and foremost we look for people who are passionate about our space. We want smart people and people who love programming, but they also have to have an authentic drive to discover, and share, their memorable experiences with others.
4. Is there one question in particular that helps you determine someone's abilities? Anything someone should never say in an interview?
Our most successful technical talent at the company live and breathe Gogobot. If you aren't using our product then we can't have a conversation. When a candidate comes in for a role at a consumer technology company, I expect them to be able to talk to me about what they like about our app or what bugs them about our desktop experience and how, specifically, they propose that we solve that problem. If a candidate hasn't done their homework and come prepared, I usually know that person won't be a fit.
The first thing someone should never say in an interview is, "What are your perks and how much time off will I have?" That's not to say that those questions can't come up later during the interview process, but if your first concern is the onsite gym or free ice cream, that's a big red flag.
5. What can someone do on paper or an application to make their skills stand out?
We focus heavily on candidate's real work experience. If we're hiring for a technical role, we want to see that they've contributed to the open source community and that they've posted public work on sites like GitHub. Even if someone is straight out of college, we like seeing that they have tangible projects, that they've built bodies of work that they can point to in their application. We also like seeing candidates who have a real drive outside of work. We'll take a look at candidate’s social media profiles and their applications to see if they're involved in volunteer work, if they're foodies, love music and sports or if they're spending their spare time blogging about their most recent adventures abroad.
6. What are some of the most in-demand skills for working at a tech company today?
On the technical side of the house, its people who have full stack Ruby on Rails development experience. We also look for candidates who have worked in a startup environment before, people who have the ability to scale and can work with the team on creating a truly great user interface. People who have skills and experience working with consumer-facing products are also highly in demand.
