The Collison brothers' Stripe is trying to recruit whole teams at once
The billion-dollar payments company is calling the approach ‘an experiment’.
THE COLLISON BROTHERS’ billion-dollar payments-processing company Stripe is testing an out-of-the-box approach to hiring good staff – making a pitch for entire teams.
In a blog post, engineering manager Avi Bryant said the company was calling the approach “bring your own team” and Stripe was asking for whole groups to apply for positions at once.
“Any group of two to five people can apply as a team to Stripe … if we make an offer, we’ll make it to all of you, at the same time,” he said.
Stripe was founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison in 2010, when they were 22 and 19 respectively. It was valued at $5 billion on its last fundraising round mid-last year, when it raised money from investors including Visa.
The company is based in Silicon Valley, where the tech scene’s voracious appetite for skilled staff is reportedly forcing companies to look increasingly far afield when hiring. It currently employs about 440 people and has previously said 100 of its workforce would be located in Dublin.
An experiment
Bryant also flagged the possibility that some of the positions would be based away from the Silicon Valley base when questioned about the recruitment approach on Twitter.
While the company was mainly expecting interested teams to be made up of software engineers, it would also “love to see” groups involving designers and managers, the post said.
It also gave an idea of how Stripe planned to run the recruitment process, adding that all the potential hires would be brought into the office on the same day and there would be at least one “interview problem” they could tackle as a group.
“This is an experiment and we’ll tweak it as we go. We’re excited to try it out, though – the industry has always focused on hiring atoms; we’d like to try hiring molecules,” Bryant said.
