If You Want Your Startup To Succeed, Don't Hire Ex-Googlers

Sure, it might seem sexy to hire an engineer from Google to help push your startup into the wild.

But you should resist the urge, according to Matt Mickiewicz, founder of Hired, an online business that helps connect companies looking to hire developers and engineers. He discussed with Fast Company what he's learned from organizing thousands of interviews.

One major take-away: Startups should probably steer clear of Big G.

"Hiring Google engineers is generally a really bad idea," Mickiewicz says. "If you work at Google you have access to an entire set of tools and technologies that you won't have in a smaller startup environment."

Going gaga for a Google engineer simply for the brand-name, and not because their skills are necessarily needed for your business, is likely to lead to dissatisfaction on both sides.

Still set on the idea? Well, prepare to break the bank.

Mickiewicz warns, generally, that if you're looking to hire in San Francisco, you need to be ready to cough up a Silicon Valley-style salary. If that price range - where paying new graduates up to $100,000 a year is the norm - seems daunting, forget about trying to reel in an ex-Googler. Mickiewicz found that Google engineers are three times more likely than average to reject interview requests on the basis that few companies can match the insane Google price-mark. Google offers the highest average salaries in the tech industry, at $141,00 plus a whole lot of sweet perks.