May 2011

There were 2 posts published in May 2011 (this is page 1 of 1).

Why Work At Your Company?

Recruitment is all about relationships and trust, whichever way you look at it common recruitment practices support neither. While there are countless articles focusing on how hard it is to hire good developers little is said about how to find good companies. Trust work both ways and in order to ‘fix’ recruitment both sides of trust equation must be balanced. Examining each in turn:-

Employer-> Candidate trust

Employers have low trust in external recruiters, low trust in CVs, and low trust that candidates can complete a Fizz Buzz question. This means that it’s not possible to invest sufficient time in individual applications, which in turn makes it less likely they’ll ever attract really good people.

Services like LinkedIn and Stack Overflow have made some gains in solving the employer-> candidate trust problem. In LinkedIn’s case they have scaled the ability to ‘ask around’ for recommendations and Stack Overflow provides a feel for someone’s knowledge. Neither is perfect and in truth the best they can do is give me confidence that the candidate is not a total waste of time.

Candidate -> Employer trust

The Candidate -> Employer problem is more interesting not least because it’s generally ignored. Unless you happen to be Google or Facebook candidate->employer trust is a major stumbling block. How can a candidate be sure that they are dealing with a good company? They can’t trust their agent to have a clue (or care) and they themselves will not be aware of a host of interesting companies. As such applications tend towards the bland and generic since candidates cannot afford to spend days tailoring individual introductions, this in turn fuels the employer perception that passionate interested candidates do not exist.

As an example, I work for a small B2B Telecoms company, our work is on the public eye, but our brand is not. Most developers will not be aware of us. Once hired, developers tend to want to stay with us, with working environment and the freedom to ‘get things done’ playing a big part in that. However as a company I have no easy way to express this. It’s not even a case of saying ‘Isn’t my company great!’ it’s much more about about describing the trade offs. Not everyone will appreciate the chaos, pace and variety of working at a small company, some will prefer the promise of a well defined career path, security and greater opportunity to specialise typicallly afforded by a larger organisation. It’s down to personal opinion.

Individual companies can solve this problem by publishing an engineering blog, sponsoring community events, getting people speaking at conferences and generally exposing their culture and values. It could be argued that companies willing to go to these lengths clearly value recruitment more highly than others and deserve the rewards. However, if there was someway that candidates could pull that information rather than have it pushed then that would be hugely valuable.

The closest example I can see is the Joel Test. To me the Joel Test is starting to show it’s age and could benefit from an update, the best it can say is ‘this company is less likely to be a horrific place to work’. Glass Door also addresses this in part, though practically speaking companies must be a of certain size before it becomes useful.

I’m not sure what the solution might be. Perhaps a curated job board/job fair is the way to go, the curator finds a way to characterise companies and makes sure it only backs good companies. This builds trust with candidates, and should mean that it attracts the top people, especially those for whom money is not the top driver. Companies are happy to pay decent rates because they know how good the candidate pool is, further more there is prestige in being associated with the agency.

The Challenge

So, world, here is my challenge to you. How can I, as a company, express my culture and values in a meaningful and standard way so that candidates can approach me with confidence.

‘We only hire the best’ – I don’t believe you

Ask anyone about hiring developers and the advice is always the same ‘only hire the best’. The principle reasons being that

On the face the face of it this seems like great advice, who wouldn’t want to hire the best? It turns out pretty much everybody.

For instance, how long are you willing to wait to fill the position? What if you are really really stretched? What if you’re so stretched that you worry for existing staff? What if hiring a specific individual will mean huge disparities in pay between equally productive staff? What if not making the hire is difference between keeping a key client or losing them? At some point every company has to draw a line and elect to hire ‘the best we’ve seen so far’.

The difference between the great companies and the rest is how to deal with this problem. Great organisations place recruitment at the centre of what they do. If hiring is genuinely everyone’s number one priority then hiring the best becomes more achievable. For starters you might even have half a chance of getting ‘the best’ into your interview room in the first place.

Of the rhetorical questions posed above, in all cases the impact can minimised (though not eradicated) so long as management understands and anticipates the challenges in recruitment. For example “What if hiring them will mean huge disparities in pay between equally productive staff?” A company that intends to hire the best understands the value of keeping the best. So compensation of existing staff, especially longer serving staff relying on annual raises to ensure market parity, must be at an appropriate level. Doing so can be hugely expensive when multiplied over all employees and this cost comes directly from the bottom line. Companies that put recruitment at the core are willing to make the investment. Yishan Wong’s writing on this subject is brilliant.

If hiring really is everyone’s number one priority then there is a trade off to make, something has been deprioritised or sacrificed to make room. As a result hiring is much more than a partitionable activity, it is a statement of corporate identity. Proclamations like “we only hire the best” are meaningless without an understanding of the trade offs and sacrifices made.