Communications of the ACM
Finding Talent: sing the Web to Hire a Team of Peers
Credit: GigaOm
Based on his experience hiring for a startup, Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, comments on the most effective ways to hire a team of peers. Growing from five to 65 employees within 18 months, Huddle scaled up quickly despite the inherent difficulties of building a great team. As McLoughlin explains, making sure that you get the right people for the job can be a lengthy, expensive and sometimes painful process. This is especially true for a startup, which needs to attract the best talent without having the recruitment budget and resources that large organizations have. Fortunately, there are numerous online networks and tools that can help employers find ideal candidates without overspending on recruitment.
Facebook can be a powerful tool for identifying new talent and tapping into the power of personal networks for recommendations. Advertise available roles on your profile and encourage your colleagues to do the same, even if there are only a few of you. Build a Facebook page for your organization that highlights your company culture, promotes available job openings and keeps people informed of your latest news and views. Make sure you keep the profile up-to-date and respond to any comments. Twitter has proved particularly successful for many startups when hiring a tech team. As well as targeting people interested in and following your company, you can tap into your teams' followers. It's likely that staff will be followed by people in their industry, past colleagues, employees and others with the same interests as them. You can also track relevant industry conversations and events thanks to hash tags and keep note of who is participating in discussions.
Make sure that your company's website has a jobs or careers page that states the benefits of joining your team. To attract the best people, you need to create a place they want to work in and talk about. If you are not able to entice people with large hiring bonuses, you may be able to entice them with a good coffee machine, regular team lunches and some free office food. LinkedIn is also a great way to advertise job positions to your target audience. As with Facebook, you have the opportunity to create a company profile and keep people informed of your latest news and job openings. However, an added benefit is that for a relatively small fee you can advertise available job positions, targeting people by industry, job function and experience. However, this approach is more effective for finding marketing and sales candidates than expanding a product engineering team. At the end of the day, you need to trust your gut and be patient: hiring someone who looks great on paper may not work out in the end.
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