How to Recruit Me
(and People Like Me)
Let’s say you manage to launch a smart, rapidly growing company. As your company blossoms, you find yourself in need of developers to fill your ranks and push out the next iterations of your product.
To start the process, you paste your job description into an email and fire it off to every match of a Monster search. Not only that, but you pick up your phone and personally call the lucky owners of the top twenty resumes. After conducting rigorous screening, you get a few people to come in for a face-to-face chat.
You find yourself a little bit disappointed during most of the interviews. However, you have to fill fifteen positions by the end of the month, which leaves you with few options. You hire the most promising ones and hope for the best.
Now, wouldn’t you feel silly if I told you you were completely ignoring a highly qualified and barely contested segment of the job market?
Desperate People Aren’t Always Best
The Internet is a highly competitive marketplace, teeming with developers set on making their livings beyond the mandates of business casual and nine to five jobs.
The procrastinators and bluffers of the bunch quickly fail, retreating to the safe world of office cubicles as soon as their savings run dry.
The survivors are made up those able to prove their skills to one client after another. In their world, credentials and years of experience mean nothing compared to the ability to consistently get the job done. Their reward for thriving in this environment is the luxury to wait for interesting projects.
Most technical recruiters use methods which are so ridiculous as to only attract the first group of developers—the ones desperate to find steady employment.
With a few simple changes to the way you approach potential candidates, you can target the second group with virtually no contenders. It’s from this group than you can fill your ranks with talented, motivated individuals who firmly believe in the products that they build.
Proofread Your Spam
If you’re going to take the Monster route and send the exact same message to 100 people, at least check that message for grammar errors. I know, grammar isn’t exactly the most important thing for business types. But email is formal correspondence—especially mass email campaigns. There ’s nothing more awkward than making potential candidates spend a few minutes wondering if your job listing is a Nigerian bank scam.
If you don’t have the skills to proofread your own messages, pay an undergraduate English major to do it for you. Assuming you can find one for ten dollars an hour, and you can get them to proofread one message every ten minutes, the process will cost you a penny per email.
When one successful hire can bring in thousands, it’d be crazy not to make the investment.
What’s My Name?
How important is it to get the name of the person you’re trying to recruit right? I’d say pretty vital. No matter how much this seems like a simple fact, technical recruiters do not agree with me.
I get called Michael more often than I get called Michelle. My count for last week was Michael: 11, Michelle: 7.1
If you don’t really see where I’m coming from, take your name, and then convert it to its effeminate version (I’m leaving out the ladies in this because most of you already know how this feels2). Now imagine people calling you by that name all the time. Hi, Stacie! How’s it going?
Would you want to work for people like that? I think not.
Don’t just glance at the name and type it out. Copy and paste it.
Make it Interesting
If you call the number on my resume, you’ll invariably get my voice mail. So you’d think that the 20-second voicemail pitch would be important to recruiters, right? Maybe if the world made sense.
95%3 of the messages I get are simple variations of, “Hi, Michael, this is so-and-so from somewhere, I’ve got a great position for you, give me a callback, thanks.” Unless you’re some sort of hypnotist,4 I’m probably never going to call you back.
Messages like that might as well be rephrased as, “We have a job, and we’re hoping you’re desperate for money. Call us back and we’ll hook you up with a computer to sit in front of.” Is that the sort of person you really want to recruit?
Without any actual, concrete information regarding the job, what would possibly entice me to return the phone call? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather fill my cubicles with people who actually care about what they’ll be doing for 60 hours a week.
Embrace Alternate Contact Methods
On my resume, not only do I list my email and phone number, but also a few of my screen names. This tells you that I consider instant messaging to be a completely appropriate means of business contact. I think as time goes on, more and more business people will begin to agree with me.
Developers are at the forefront of technical advances like these. As a technical recruiter, I highly suggest that you embrace methods of communication widely used by technical people. Until the rest of the business world catches up with you, you’ll have a major advantage.
Instant messaging has a 95% success rate in reaching me. Unless I’m sleeping,5 I’ll reply to your message. If taking three seconds to type “Hi Michelle,” might lead to a successful hire, isn’t it worth the effort?
Be Curious
I love curious people. If you can ask intelligent questions and fake an honest interest in the answer, you’re practically one of us.6 Even if you don’t know the difference between Windows and Linux.
The smoothest—and I mean, absolutely smoothest—recruiters are the ones who send me a message on AIM asking for me to explain something about something in my field of expertise.
These questions don’t even have to be advanced. If you’re completely lost in my technical areas, you can kill two birds with one stone and educate yourself as well as gain mega points in my book by asking me a simple question.
What is a JavaScript framework? What does OO stand for? What does “semantic markup” mean? All of these questions are simply defining phrases clearly listed on my online resume.
Anyone who makes an honest effort to learn something new not only has a much higher chance of making a successful lead, but they also become memorable to me. Even if you don’t recruit me, you’ll have done some successful networking. IM me every few weeks or so, and when I’m actively looking for a job, I’ll come to you first.
This has worked in the past, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my next gig comes from the same place.
Google is Your Greatest Ally
If you were to Google for my name, you’d find out immediately that I make shiny open source MooTools widgets. A little digging might even lead you to my name on the MooTools site. If you’re any sort of useful technical recruiter, you should know a little bit about the position you’re trying to fill (ie, a Web development position), and that MooTools is a JavaScript framework. If you didn’t know, a simple Wikipedia search would tell you this.
In about five minutes, you’ll find out that my name is Michelle (not Michael), I’ve shown some competence7 in the code I have up on Widgets@Rabidlabs, and that I’m pretty damn interested in MooTools. You’ll also find my homepage, which lists extra contact information and presumably the contact methods I’m most likely to respond to (hint: I don’t have a phone number on my homepage).
If you’re really lucky, you’ll find this very article. You’d have to be illiterate not be able to recruit me with all that firepower.
Pretend I’m Famous
Now that you’re armed with all the Google information about me, you pretend you’ve actually heard of me. Most developers have blogs, and most people with blogs have inflated egos, fueled by the seven people8 who actually read what they post. Use this to your advantage.
This trick lets you reap all the rewards of networking without having to actually network. If you use a friendly tone and mention things about me that aren’t explicitly listed in my resume, you can effectively trick me into thinking we’ve already met. I’m a software engineer, not a people-person.
Make it seem like you’re sitting in your staff room looking at a giant stack of resumes saying to yourselves, “This one’s no Michelle Steigerwalt, but let’s call him in for an interview.” There’s no way I’d be able to refuse something like that.
Seriously, I’ve taken the shittiest offers just because someone invited me to join an all-star team. The sort of offers that include nothing but equity in a doomed startup.
Personalize Your Emails
So now that you’ve got my life’s story in front of you, it’ll take about five minutes to write me a simple and to the point email. Remember all the advice about sending emails that says you should make them short and to the point?
Don’t copy and paste the job description you’re trying to fill. Simply tell me the same sort of thing you’d tell your client/boss about me if I was on your list of potential candidates. What’s the position? What will I be working on? Why am I a fit? Are there any special perks I might appreciate? Get creative.
For example:
Hi Michelle,
I’m recruiting for a large Web company in Townsville. They have a contract-to-hire (3-6 months) position open for a front-end web developer with a bit of knowledge on the backend (PHP) as well. They’re building a new application from the ground up, so there’s a chance you’ll get to use MooTools in it. I can give you more information about the company, or put you in touch with the head developer if you just send me your resume.
The environment is also great—fresh fruit in the office, the cutest kitten in the world lives under the reception desk, and Mallo Cups rain from the sky outside of the office building. They literally rain from the sky, Michelle.
You can contact me on AIM with the screen name xyzjdoe, or give me a call at 555-555-1234. I can also contact you if you let me know the best time.
Let me know.
Now you understand why XYZ & Associates gets the brilliant people. I’m not even looking for a full-time gig and I’d take that one in a heartbeat.
It might seem like a lot of work, but doing a little extra is what will put you miles above your competition.