By The Time You Give Them a Raise, They’re Already Out The Door
There’s an endless amount written on the ‘net about hiring Rockstars. Finding them, not settling, and all that. That you need to spend 20%+ of time recruiting (I said that myself here). That the #1 most important thing you can do is put together a great team. Which is absolutely true. But the #2 most [...]
Why Hiring From Your Direct Competitors Usually Doesn’t Work Out
The time will come when you are first tempted to hire someone from your competitor. They must know so many things we don’t. Have so many skills. It’s pretty tempting. People will tell you about the risks in litigation, trade secrets, etc. I don’t think any of those are necessarily a big deal or a [...]
What a Great VP Sales Actually Does. Where The Magic Is. And When to Hire One.
In SaaS, #1 most common mishire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. In fact, there a VC saying that I used to really hate. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” [...]
Post-Traction, You Need to Spend 20% of Your Time Recruiting
Love him or hate him, Nick Saban is the most successful college football coach of the current generation. Winner of 3 out of 4 of the last national championships. And how often is he recruiting? Every. Single. Day. In fact, every single day he and his team go into their Recruiting War Room, and analyze [...]
Do You Scale? It’s Harder in SaaS.
Generally speaking, I think scaling product in SaaS is about 10x easier than consumer internet. Not easy mind you, but 10x easier. Why? Even Salesforce.com only has a tiny fraction of the concurrent sessions of Twitter, let alone Facebook. Your SaaS apps? It will likely barely tax a couple of instances at AWS. I [...]
Resumes Are Worthless
Ok, so a question came up recently about hiring people for software development roles. In answering that, the group discussing this started talking about resumes. Resumes, which I’m told mine looks good and reads well, hold a certain value to someone entering the field of software development. There are also major problems with having a [...]
Why BranchOut is a Better Recruiting Solution than LinkedIn (Hint: It’s Social)
“68 percent of people who understand HTML prefer nonfiction, compared with 48 percent of people in general.” Based on a survey of 44 people who know HTML and 116 people in general. – from Correlated.org Correlated.org is a new site that helps discover unexpected correlations between seemingly unrelated things. It’s fascinating how they develop the [...]
Social Recruiting – 3 Questions Answered
One of the pressing questions surrounding social media these days is it’s applicability to recruiting and other people management processes within an organization. Specifically, there is an ethics debate around how much of the Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter data are employers allowed to discover, request and use in the hiring process. Today I see organizations [...]
How to handle being fired
The recession still blazes on, and people are still losing their jobs right and left. A friend of mine was recently fired and as we sat drinking coffee in our other office, the question was “how do I handle this?” Handling being fired is not easy, it is not meant to be easy; it is [...]
Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude Over Aptitude)
Startups. We know the mantra: Team matters. Is this philosophy exaggerated? Overrated? Cliché? No. Team is the only thing that matters. Whatever you’re working on now, the half-life of innovation is so rapid now that your product will soon be out-of-date. Your existence is irrelevant unless you continue rapid innovation. Your ability to keep [...]
Job Posts that Don’t Suck!
Ok, as promised, this is the post with solutions. Job posts should get a prospective candidate excited about a possible gig. Don’t lose top talent the second you post, don’t freak out people and load it up with a “we’re hiring so we just have to throw bait out for all you sucker programmers” type [...]
I’m Not Looking, But These Job Posts Just Suck
BEWARE: This is the beginning of a rant. If you’re temperamental it might piss you off. You’ve been warned, prepare to have a bit of rant with reality thrown on top for good measure. I’m not looking for another gig. I’m extremely happy with what I’m doing right now. The Russell Team I’m working with [...]
Turn about is not fair play on the broken hiring process
We have all heard about the problems with finding the right employee for the jobs you are trying to fill. Usually from my vantage point as a hiring manager my biggest problems have been about resumes that did not make sense for the position being filled. It is very hard to go from an AA [...]
The Long-Term Value of Loyalty
Oh, boy. Here we go again. Another post on job hopping. This will be my final word on the topic. I promise. My goal here is to move the debate forward, add my POV but not inflame things any further. Inflaming was never my goal. Let’s see if I can achieve that. My WORD of [...]
Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees
This is part of my startup advice series. This post isn’t going to be popular. I’m sure of that. That’s OK. It’s still important advice for startup founders and something that I’m passionate about. And I care more about the debate than trying to be popular. And it’s important because it’s true. I never hire [...]
