Adam Wathan: how small startups hire employees (Tailwind CSS)

How do founders of small bootstrapped companies hire new employees?

Adam Wathan got over 1600 people who applied for two new roles at Tailwind Labs (a small team of six people). They ended up hiring two people, but neither of them actually applied. This wasn't how Adam expected (or hoped) this process would go. There were lots of surprising takeaways and lessons learned from the whole experience.

"If you figure we spend 5 minutes on every single application, that was like 133 hours straight reading applications. Processing these job applications was basically my full time job for 2 months." – Adam WathanLinks:

Hackers Inc podcastTailwind job opening announcementDesign Engineer job postingStaff Software Engineer job postingReddit: 11 months of job searching visualizedHave feedback on this episode?

👉 ​Leave a voicemail here​🐦 Reply on TwitterTimestamps:

(03:40) - What's the size of Transistor and when did you last hire?

(05:24) - How did you meet or find your employees?

(07:12) - Adam's process for hiring

(12:44) - The energy required to process applications

(17:32) - What got people in to the 100 list?

(21:03) - Did Adam get any videos in applications?

(24:49) - Previous employment was a good indicator