Many successful people who've built and exited massive start-ups have suggested that it's worthwhile on the start-up side to spend 25% of your time on hiring when you're actually hiring as so you can easily get above 10 hrs a week given a full time role on this and have that be a good result. Optimizing to minimize the cost of hiring an early engineer is definitely solving the wrong problem, given the early engineers are almost as crucial to success as founders. Unfortunately, hit rate is also often the wrong variable from the company end: if you interview an academic programmer to confirm their product programming skills you generally get someone better with a larger skill set than if you focus in the category you want for the skills you want (early-stage you generally want breadth over depth for many roles). It clearly sucks for people on the receiving end of the low hit rate interview, but I'd caution start-ups against optimizing their process for the wrong things.
I talked to the CEO of a high-growth unicorn once and he said his job description is basically a glorified recruiter. Pretty much everything he does is related to getting the right people on board his startup.
My data as an investor supports your point. For a lot of young startups -- especially those with <=5 people -- people often spend >=10 hours per week on recruiting. Not every person at the company will spend that much time, but a lot of founders spend a huge chunk of their week on recruiting.
Absolutely. At my last startup I was VP of Engineering and at one point I tracked my time and was spending 45% of my week on recruiting activities. But that was necessary, both to protect my team's time and to grow. You can't hire good people without putting in the time to find them, talk to them, and convince them to join if you like them. And that effort can't be outsourced to a recruiter, either, if you want it to be productive.
