This week I shifted into hiring mode as I have several positions that we are trying to fill. These positions have been open at Swimfish for a little while and filling them is now becoming a critical need. With the high unemployment rate you would think we would have easily filled the support, development, project manager, and web designer positions we have open. So what gives, why haven’t we filled them yet?
- Hiring qualified talent is hard, always.
- Hiring requires focus. Life in the startup-lane is always crazed and you are balancing countless priorities. If you want to successfully hire the right people you must focus on it. You need to clearly identify the job needs, identify if you need recruiters, and work closely with these recruiters that you have brought on board. It will not happen without focus.
- Our Support and Development positions are in El Segundo, CA and our main office is in Danvers, MA. It is harder to recruit outside of your own backyard. Ask your network for help.
Alright, so today began with focus on hiring, how did I approach it:
- Reviewed all open positions to ensure they were clear and accurate. Sometimes you will write a job description and find out a month later that it is no longer valid. Keep it valid.
- Reached out to my personal network, my LinkedIn network, my Twitter network.
- Posted the El Segundo position on twitter. It’s not in my backyard and a $25 investment to post a job is money well spent.
- Repeat step 2.
- Repeat step 2
- … You get the idea.
Seems simple, right? What were the results:
- Nearly 30 applications for the Support job in the first few hours, more continuing to come in. The majority of these came through Craigslist but have 5 or 6 more leads through the networks.
- Have 4 new leads for project managers. All of them are high quality and came from my network efforts.
- Have 3 leads for graphic designers. This is a 3 week consulting gig and the leads were off the mark. The issue is not the network in this case, the issue is with the job description. I will go back and update it
Not bad for one person leveraging the power of their network. Imagine the number of resumes you should be seeing.
John
August 7, 2009 at 1:29 am
John,
Good post, thanks. I’m wondering if you have seen Auren Hoffman’s post on this topic and if you agree with his premise: In a downturn, the noise goes up but the quality remains the same…
http://blog.summation.net/2009/03/why-hiring-is-paradoxically-harder-in-a-downturn.html
Scott
August 7, 2009 at 1:42 am
I do agree with Auren on this point. The hiring pipeline has a lot more leads coming in when the economy is bad, many do not make it to a phone screen
Given the unemployment rate I would argue there are more A-players available than in previous downturns, but as a % of the whole you’re still talking to more B and C players than in good economic times, making hiring even harder.
John
August 6, 2009 at 1:01 am
Hi John — nice post. The one thing I would add is to ALWAYS be in this mode, to a degree. I find it worthwhile to be constantly “soft-recruiting” people in the industry who I know would be a good fit for my organization and good to work with, then accelerating my focus/efforts when we have specific needs.
August 6, 2009 at 1:15 am
Great addition Mike, I agree with you completely.
August 5, 2009 at 2:14 pm
John – I’m seeing what you are for salaries & contract rates – there may be a recession on, but GOOD QUALIFIED talent is still in demand and always hard to come by.
Good post otherwise & agreed. The larger firms tend towards a net zero or less impact given their tendency to SPAM job seekers and employers both.
August 5, 2009 at 9:10 am
good people are always hard to find, recession or not. a question – whats the % salary reduction (if any) for the same role 2 years back?
August 5, 2009 at 11:04 am
Thanks Yadu, agreed. The salary expectations are noticably lower for support engineers and slightly down for project managers and web graphic designers. Developers are pretty close to what they were a couple of years ago for senior people but the less experienced engineers do have lower expectations than before
What are others seeing?
John