A Tale of Two Hiring Seasons

The single biggest factor in your hiring success isn’t your brilliant recruiting team, your world-changing mission, or your A-list investors. It’s the weather.

Not the actual weather, of course. I’m talking about the economic climate. Tech hiring markets are brutally seasonal. There’s Hiring Summer, when talent is abundant and you feel like a recruiting genius. And then there’s Hiring Winter, a desperate, character-building slog where you learn what you and your company are really made of. I’ve survived both, and one of them will teach you lessons you can’t afford to ignore.

Hiring Summer

It’s 2025, and we’re hiring for our game studio. It’s peak layoff season in games. It’s bad. It’s so bad that it has its own Wikipedia page. The games market has never experienced as strong of a whiplash before. Studios closing down left and right. Layoff lists circulating in private group chats. Leadership is trying to find their teams a new home, but many never find one and quit the industry. It’s a game of musical chairs, and seating is vanishing by the day. We interview someone laid off four times in a single year. For job seekers, it’s a disaster. For companies looking for talent, Hiring Summer is officially here.

I’m looking for a stellar Unreal Engine 5 multiplayer physics expert who can do it all. This person is going to be half of engineering. There aren’t that many such specialists in the world, it’s a fairly niche problem and people who really grok multiplayer models and have acquired important scars at it are rarely on the market. Ashby is set up, automation is up and running, the job description is up on game dev boards, Discords, Twitter, you name it. My inbox is exploding with CVs. I start aggressively filtering. There are so many resumes, it all becomes a blur. I have barely a minute to spend on each.

Many don’t seem to have even read the requirements before pressing submit, understandable in this kind of “survive at all costs” market. Or they tell you “Look, I know I’m not what you’re looking for, but maybe?” and throw the resume into the pile just in case. Hundreds of them. Hours later I’m down to 20 who seem in the ballpark. Which ones graduate to a phone call? Crap, more just applied. We’re getting close to 400 applicants in two days. We have to shut the gates. I chat with most of them over Zoom, send half of them take-homes, review the results, do an onsite with half of those, and take one to a work trial. Within a couple of days it’s obvious he’s the one. Three weeks after putting up the job description, we have our dream hire on the team. He’s continuing the few tickets he didn’t get to finish during the work trial week. He’s working the weekend, nobody asked him to, nobody on the team is. His enthusiasm is through the roof, an employer is actually paying him good money to work on games in this market, using his specialization to the fullest. Easiest hire ever.

In Hiring Summer, you’re playing on Easy Mode. Your only competition is time, not other firms. You can be as certain with a hire as you’d like. Take-homes? Presentations? Multi-day interview gauntlets? It’s all fair game now. Need a candidate for a week-long work trial or a contract-to-hire gig? They’ll jump at the chance, grateful to escape the radio silence from every other employer. It’s a powerful position to be in, but remember to be fair and gracious while you’re on top. Hiring Winter is always coming, and the tables will inevitably turn.

Hiring Winter

The year is 2019. ZIRP is in full swing and every software company in San Francisco is juiced to the gills with bottomless VC. Everybody is hiring. LinkedIn is pure recruiter spam. Unicorns are hoarding talent they don’t know what to do with.

A young upstart K-12 EdTech startup, us, is looking to hire a couple of engineers. Growth is modest, as customary in the K-12 tech space, but we have enough capital to expand the team to the next hermit crab shell permitted by the fundraise. Who knows, maybe we get to win the math practice market if only we move faster.

Here’s the problem: the Bay is hot, very hot. Comps are through the roof and growing. The average tenure is two years at best, it’s irresponsible to stay at the same firm any longer when you can 2x your comp in the VC-drunk feeding frenzy. Every other company is better capitalized than our humble education shop.

The market is so steamy that we stop doing reference checks. Whatever you think of them, you don’t expect reference checks to work against you and lose the hire. But that’s exactly what happens to us with one of our dream candidates. He gets to the last stage, he’s about to sign. We do one last call with a former manager–just to be safe–to make sure we did our due diligence.

The next day the candidate drops out. “Sorry,” he says, “The manager you spoke with didn’t know I was on the market. As soon as he found out, he offered me another 70k on top of your offer (which was already 220k). You guys are awesome, but I got a wife and a kid and a house in Seattle, and I really liked working with Tim before, I just couldn’t say no. Best of luck though, rooting for you”. Lesson learned.

It’s Hiring Winter, and you’re not at the front of the pack. How do you survive with this level of competition and barely any resources? What can you do besides lowering the bar? There’s a truism in the startup world: you’re building two products from day one of your company. One is the product itself, what your customers will ultimately pay you for. The other one is the company itself, something you will sell to investors, job applicants, your own team, for as long as you’re selling the product itself.

This second bit is what you focus on. Here’s how.

Step 1. Just like with any product in a competitive market, figure out how you’re differentiated compared to everybody else.

We were in the early wave of remote work. If you wanted to work “in Silicon Valley”, but didn’t want to move your family and two dogs to a beat-up one bedroom in SoMA, we were your ticket. This expanded the pool of accessible top talent far beyond the Bay, which most other companies didn’t do at the time. The team hated it at first, and we failed many of our initial remote experiments in all the predictable ways, but in the end it was a game changer due to being early.

We were among the few companies in the world who would pay you to work professionally in Haskell. If you had been bitten by the bug of writing software in a purely functional paradigm and using opinionated and pedantic type systems, and you wanted to work somewhere small, you came to us.

We were among the few companies in the world who would put your work in front of millions of kids in public schools. You could make a difference in a space traditionally neglected by tech.

You could stay home, you could work on frontier-level tech, and you could make a difference with it. It was a killer combo for the right type of person. Sure, you could have been paid much more somewhere else. You would have found more stability elsewhere. You could have found more growth at other companies. But for many, that wasn’t as important as what we could offer.

Step 2. Be loud and proud about it. We did talks at Haskell groups, blog posts, released libraries. It established the team as a group of world-class experts working on the frontier that you too could join. A group that worked on real-world problems, not one that’s only pontificating from high up in academia.

Don’t pick a technology for this purpose alone, but using a truly unique and hyped technology can save your rear when it comes to marketing your company. It made our job at hiring considerably easier for years to come, but the bet could have easily backfired. It didn’t for us and a few other companies who went with Haskell at the time.

Step 3. Keep updating the team’s unique positioning as the company evolves. Your unique traits will not stay unique forever. Remote work in 2025 is no longer a niche and controversial approach to organizing teams, it’s practically the default. Fully async work with no meetings? Now that’s wacky, and some people will find it fascinating.

Or maybe you are all in on coding with agents, no humans allowed. Spicy, but again, that will attract a certain demographic which may be a great fit for your company.

Or, you could just create interesting work for people to do. Affirm (allegedly) has its engineers rewrite its central data store once a year. It doesn’t need to, but it gives the team an epic struggle to undertake every year, and it keeps people engaged and sharp, rather than resting and vesting.

Survive the Hiring Winter and you’ll emerge grizzled and sharp. The character-building lessons become company muscle. And when Hiring Summer finally arrives, you won’t just find it easier; you’ll be dangerously efficient, knowing who you are, how to find those who resonate with it, and how to tell that story with well-practiced effectiveness. You were forced to trim every excess from your funnel, to waste no time, and to sell your company like its life depended on it. Because it did.