Can crew members start with experience

When boarding, I tend to aim for the Oxygen subsystem room - it's typically small, and critical enough that I will quickly attract attention. If they don't respond, then I've pretty much sealed their death quickly.

Meanwhile, I'll target whatever critical system I choose (usually weapons, shields, drones, or engines) with my laser weaponry. Once I've hurt one or more of their crewmembers, I'll target the medbay with missiles or bombs. That way, I can finish off heavily wounded crewmembers while disabling their ability to heal. Fire bombs and subsystem bombs are the best for this sort of attack.

I do believe that firing on the rooms where your boarders are will hurt them as well as the enemy, so I tend to avoid this. Trying to get the timing right for lasers (to reduce shields) + beams (to do damage) is also kind of tricky if you're also monitoring a boarding party.

Also, it helps if you've got a couple of teams of boarders - while you're healing the first squad, send the second squad in to keep the pressure up.

Some ships are particularly bad for trying to board, however. If they've got significant crew, especially a lot of mantises, I may give up trying to win by wiping them out. On the other hand, getting into an engagement and realizing they have no medbay pretty much means I've got a win locked down.

As you've noticed, Rock and Mantis crewmembers are the best to send as boarders. Don't forget that you can pause the game with the space bar, so if you think getting your crew back on board is going to be a close call, pausing and unpausing to slow the game down may help you slice the timing razor-thin.

Possible spoilers if you've never been to sector 8:

It's also been noted in a couple of strategies for fighting the final boss that the weapon systems are in isolated rooms with just a single human guarding each. If you send 2 of almost any race of boarders into these rooms, you can kill the guard and disable the system, thereby making this fight easier. The best weapon to start with is (in my opinion) the missile launcher, which is third from the left.

I got this achievement yesterday, and the difficulty is that it is relatively random. However, I'll share my anecdotal advice.

First, hit all the shops you can. Shops don't always have crew, but there's a chance that they might. I've found that shops in a sector belonging to a particular race tend to have that race more often, but it's random - sometimes I've been in Engi space and seen a shop full of Zoltans, for instance. Crewmembers tend to cost less than 100 scrap, but I'd suggest trying to have ~100-150 scrap on hand just in case you find a shop that's got 2 races you need.

One event that I believe is more common in "pirate" and "civilian" sectors is an encounter with a slaver. They may attempt to extort you to give them either some scrap or one of your crew members. If you fight instead, they may later attempt to surrender by offering you a crew member.

From time to time when fighting a ship and killing its crew, I've been told it was a prisoner transport ship and that one of the prisoners wanted to join me. I'd suggest attempting to take ships intact for this reason. I haven't seen any indications in the initial system event that would indicate whether a ship is likely to give a crewmember if taken intact, though.

There are also events where you find a lone survivor on a deserted station, and this can sometimes provide you with an additional crewmember. However, there's also a chance that they will go crazy and murder one of your existing crew, so this is not always a reliable way to make progress towards this achievement. Commenters have noted that having a level 2 medbay can counter this, as can a slug crewmember.