Little Spoon hits 100% engineering hire rate with Lemon

Little Spoon is a D2C subscription brand that helps busy parents fuel their kids’ healthy development. The company has incredibly high standards for every food product they ship. In fact, Little Spoon is the first and only baby food in the US to set strict limits for 500+ toxins and contaminants – and no product is sold unless it passes rigorous testing.

Besides offering the highest quality meals and snacks for kids, the company also produces best-in-class content, with “Is This Normal?”, a newsletter and blog where parents submit their questions around anything from fertility to picky eating to vacationing with kids, and doctors, dietitians, and other professionals weigh in with support.

As the leading end-to-end platform to support modern parents, the engineering team at Little Spoon has a big responsibility: building and maintaining the infrastructure that enables a seamless learning, ordering, checkout, billing, and delivery experience. And whenever they need an extra hand, they reach out to Lemon.

When Eric joined Little Spoon, the eng team had already been supplementing their full-time roster with several freelancers – including folks from Lemon. Before he started doling out new tasks, he wanted to get a lay of the land, to understand what roles each of these contractors was playing, and whether he could rely on their work for the long haul.

So he surveyed the team.

The contractor-to-hire engineers continued to do great work, so Eric continued to keep Lemon top of mind, forming a closer relationship with the staff there.

Soon after he hired those four devs, Eric started leaning on Lemon as his go-to for staff augmentation. Whenever he and his team started to feel overwhelmed, he would reach out to the Lemon team, knowing he’d get production-ready talent. Here are four reasons why working with Lemon, according to him, “just works”:

1. It’s always a smooth process

One thing Eric likes is how straightforward the Lemon process is. If he, say, wants a QA engineer (his most recent Lemon hire), he:

1. Writes a job description
2. Hands it over to Lemon
3. Receives a few relevant resumes
4. Interviews the candidates he likes

Partly, that’s because the communication between Little Spoon and Lemon is so clear. Eric knows what he wants, asks for it, and gets it.

2. It mitigates risk

Hiring software engineers, especially at a fast-moving startup like Little Spoon, can be an expensive risk. Hire the wrong person, and you may not end up knowing it until a few months in – and then you’ll have to start the recruitment, screening, and interview process all over again.

But with a partner like Lemon, Eric can hire someone part-time to explore a long-term working relationship. After a few months, he considers whether:

• The engineer could be a full-time hire → he invites them on full-time, pays Lemon a commission fee, and saves a ton of time and money on onboarding costs – the engineer already knows and understands the codebase.
• The need for the engineer is actually only temporary → he pays on a month-to-month contract and releases them back to Lemon when they’re done so they can work on other projects.

The only exception to that 100% hit rate was a DevOps role that Eric originally reached out to Lemon for, but didn’t end up needing – he promoted someone internally.

3. It opens the door to all kinds of talent

Eric is one of those leaders who wants to see things get done on a weekly cycle – he doesn’t care when. Tapping into non-US talent has helped him see things get done literally overnight (and gives devs the flexibility to complete their work at times when they’re most productive).

Lemon’s been able to find full-stack, QA, and other engineering professionals, not only with D2C-specific experience, but experience in more granular areas like payment processing and complex ordering structures.

4. It’s a fair price

Eric hadn’t had great experiences with staff placement agencies in the past, so his expectations were low when he first heard Little Spoon was using Lemon.

But for the level of quality talent Eric is getting, price has never crossed his mind in the three years he’s been working closely with Lemon.

Part of the reason Eric trusts Lemon so much is that they’ve taken the time to grasp the nuances in Little Spoon’s culture and the unique needs of their engineering team. Saving specific filters, learning from candidates that were passed on, and listening closely to Eric’s requirements have helped them present the best possible candidates, again and again.

That kind of deep relationship makes hiring a fun exercise instead of a tedious and stressful one. As Eric puts it:

Eric is confident that as Little Spoon keeps on delivering a top-notch service to their customers, they’ll need more and more top-notch talent, and Lemon will be his first call. We’re proud to find the right devs for companies like Little Spoon that are making a big impact in the lives of kids and adults alike.

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