How Do You Get Great Engineers To Join Your Startup?

brett fox
5 min readSep 10, 2024

It shouldn’t be a surprise that you’re going to need great engineers to join your startup if you’re going to be successful. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that the competition for the best engineers is fierce. So how do you get great engineers to join your startup?

Picture: Depositphotos

I’ll share with you my secrets, based on building a team of great engineers, to reliably getting great engineers to join my startup and stay at my startup. And the great thing about what I’m going to tell you is you don’t have to overpay to get these great engineers to join your startup.

I’m going to assume that you and your CTO or VP Engineering have already technically vetted the candidate. Let’s also assume that the candidate fits your company culture too.

So you have a really great engineer, and it’s your job to close the engineer to get them to join your startup. How do you do this? It boils down to the secret I’m going to share with you today:

You have to sell your ass off!

How do you do this? There are five secrets. Let’s start with the first one on my list:

1. Have a great technical co-founder.

Okay, how is this related to selling your ass off? Well, the first engineer you’re going to have…

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brett fox

I work with startup CEOs to help them grow their businesses . I built several businesses from $0 to >$100M. Learn more at https://www.brettjfox.com