Building a Culture for Recruitment

Posted in Hiring, Job Interviews and Resume Resources, Links, Technology by engtech on September 06, 2006

Joel has another great article on the subject of hiring. He notes the conundrum that the people you want to have working for you are rarely the ones who are available on the job market. His major points are:

Go to where the great developers are.
- Conferences they would be interested in.
Get them as co-op/intern students.
- Don’t go for job fairs, get them with summer internship programs.
- You get to evaluate them before they’re on the job market.
Build a community that brings the talent to you.
- Such as his website of programming articles.
- You can see game companies like Bioware doing this where they build tools for game modding, and then look to hire the best modders to develop their next games.

He also attacks some of the sacred cows of tech recruitment in his usual insightful manner:

But the real problem with employee referrals is what happens when recruiting managers with a rudimentary understanding of economics decide to offer cash bonuses for these referrals. […] The trouble is that suddenly you can see the little gears turning, and employees start dragging in everyone they can think of for interviews, and they have a real strong incentive to get these people hired, so they coach them for the interview, and Quiet Conversations are held in conference rooms with the interviewers, and suddenly your entire workforce is trying to get you to hire someone’s useless college roommate.

Great read as always.
>> Finding Great Developers – Joel on Software