Why Humility is Essential for Every New Startup Hire
When interviewing product managers at Google, we ranked candidates on four metrics: technical ability, communication skills, intellect and Googliness. A Googley person embodies the values of the company – a willingness to help others, an upbeat attitude, a passion for the company, and the most important, humility.
In the past week, I asked two heads of engineering to identify the most important characteristic in new hires. Both responded, “humility”. For one startup ascertaining humility is so important, it is the first filter in the interview process.
Disruptive companies reinvent. They don’t copy and execute someone else’s playbook. To be disruptive, a startup’s team must cast aside preconceived notions and assumptions about doing things the “right way” and start inventing new ways.
TechMeetups presents #TechStartupJobs Fair London 2013
Original post by Red Eye VC
We’ve talked a lot recently about the amazing amount of talent that exists in universities across the country – and one of the main reasons we launched the Dorm Room Fund was to create a new and more efficient way for capital to flow onto campuses and into the best and brightest entrepreneurs. But we realize that not everyone wants to start a company; many students, instead, would love to join one. But it’s often really hard for students to find the perfect startup jobs. Startups typically don’t recruit/interview on college campuses. And they rarely post job openings for internships. Too often, it is often based on who you know. So a lot of top university talent simply end up taking an internship or full-time job at Google or Microsoft. We don’t think this makes sense.
TechMeetups presents #TechStartupJobs Fair London 2013
Hiring for a Startup Is Like Dating
Original post by DAVID COHEN via WSJ
We all know that startups are about people. That’s got to be your real competitive advantage. Great people will figure out the market and crush it. So how do you attract great people to your team early on when the risks are high and the pay is low? How do you compete with big companies offering large salaries and with thousands of other startups offering a chance to be a part of something? The answer is actually quite simple: Be visible, passionate and genuine.
Most startups are invisible. You might think you’re making noise on Twitter or Facebook, but be honest with yourself. Is anyone really paying attention? The kind of visibility I’m talking about is attending and networking at local tech meet-ups, speaking at conferences as a thought leader, and hanging out where your targets are such as college campuses, industry events and meet-ups. Remember that the best people are generally employed already. If you’re spending all of your time promoting your startup on job boards or events targeting new hires, you’re doing it wrong. You’re invisible. Get out there, and be part of the community.
TechMeetups presents #TechStartupJobs Fair London 2013
Original post by BEN HOROWITZ via pandodaily
Aww man, you sold your soul
Naww man, mad people was frontin’
Aww man, made something from nothing
- Kanye West, “New God Flow”
Your startup is going well, and as your business expands, you hear the dreaded words from someone on your board: “You need to hire some senior people. Some real ‘been there, done that’ executives to help you get the company to the next level.”
Really? Is now the time? If so, where do I begin? And once I get them, what do I do with them? And will I know if they are doing a good job?
The first question you might ask is, “Why do I need senior people at all? Won’t they just ruin the culture with their fancy clothes, political ambitions, and need to go home to see their families?” To some extent, the answer to all of those may be “yes,” which is why this question must be taken quite seriously. However, bringing in the right kind of experience at the right time can mean the difference between bankruptcy and glory.
Let’s go back to the first part of the question. Why hire a senior person? The short answer is time. As a technology startup, from the day you start until your last breath, you will be in a furious race against time. No technology startup has a long shelf life. Even the best ideas become terrible ideas after a certain age. How would Facebook go if Zuckerberg started it last week? At Netscape, we went public when we were 15 months old. Had we started six months later, we would have been late to a market with 37 other browser companies. Even if nobody beats you to the punch, no matter how beautiful your dream, most employees will lose faith after the first five or six years of not achieving it. Hiring someone who has already done what you are trying to do can radically speed up your time to success.
Original post by StaffingIndustry
Resource Solutions has released their Social Recruiting Playbook, a ‘working guide’ on how to harness the power of social recruitment.
Written in conjunction with industry specialists at Carve Consulting, the playbook is designed to introduce senior executives in HR to social media. With more than 175 million professionals using LinkedIn and Facebook having just reached one billion users, it is clear that social networks are becoming the primary way in which the world communicates, connects and shares news. Organisations know they need to engage but most simply don’t know how to. The playbook explores how organisations can use their social networks to find great people by considering:
- The key social media platforms available for recruitment and the advantages of each
- How job seekers can be engaged through social media
Original post by Kara Mignanelli via Social Media Strategies Summit
Social Media engages your audience in a more direct way than with other recruiting mediums. Here are some helpful tips to consider when looking at the social impact in your overall recruitment strategy.
1. Identify Your Goal
Before you engage in social media, ask yourself what your end goal is – branding and awareness; client lead generation; candidate pipelining; candidate or client communication; or employee engagement? You should know where you’re going so you can measure your efforts down the road.
2. Open Dialogue
Social media is about creating an open dialogue and building relationships with others, with the end goal of creating an active community. Engage your audience and keep them coming back for more.
3. One Platform at a Time
One step at a time, or so they say. Head to your top pick and get comfortable with the interface and its unique features. Take your time to plan and follow through on posting new materials, developing a user base, and encouraging employees and others to actively utilize another platform.
4. Reputation Management – from the Inside Out
As you know, social media is all about word-of-mouth marketing. Share success stories, from an employee’s perspective, about working with your organization. This unique knowledge will go far with candidates who don’t know the internal culture of the organization.
Looking for a job? How about looking for manpower? You’re in luck, the World’s biggest TechStartupJobs Fair is back in London! In February, we will be hosting our job fair!
Social Recruiting: Facebook Vs. LinkedIn
Original post by Kaitlyn Brown via ExactSource
Facebook recently rolled out its new Social Jobs app, sparking a lot of discussion on whether professional networking giant, LinkedIn, is headed for trouble. Although Facebook wins with more active users – an astounding 1 billion to LinkedIn’s 131 million members – It’s important to remember that quality and quantity are two very different things. Before we go condemning LinkedIn to a fate similar to Myspace, it’s important we understand the vast difference between the recruiting capabilities of these two prevalent social networking platforms.
Recruitment Tools
Let’s start by looking at the actual recruiting tools each site has to offer. Facebook’s current job application gives job seekers a central location to search for jobs – sorted by industry, location, and skills – that are already available through other job sites such as Monster.com, Jobvite, and BranchOut. Although Facebook job seekers now have access to more than 1.9 million jobs through this application, its features are very limited. It’s essentially just a job search engine. Other than posting jobs through one of the affiliated job sites, there’s really no feature to help recruiters scope out the right candidates. Facebook proudly announced that half of employers in the U.S. use Facebook during their hiring process – which only works after they already have the names of their contenders. However, when it comes to finding these candidates to begin with, Zuckerberg can’t be of much assistance.
On the other hand, LinkedIn Recruiter - the company’s enterprise recruitment tool – has much more to offer. Recruiter allows you to search LinkedIn for profiles based on certain skills, education, and background. Last month, LinkedIn rolled out a new feature in Recruiter that will help bring hiring managers and recruiters warm leads. Millions of LinkedIn users are now following the companies that interest them. Some are looking to hear about new products or to stay current on company news, but 70% of surveyed followers said their first and foremost reason they follow a company is to hear about career opportunities. Recruiter is now allowing hirers to zero in on these groupies and filter though the users who fit the role they’re looking to fill. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn is an invaluable channel in discovering hidden talent – people who weren’t necessarily looking to be found. As far as recruitment tools go, I’d say LinkedIn wins this battle by a landslide.
Looking for a job? How about looking for manpower? You’re in luck, the World’s biggest TechStartupJobs Fair is back in London! In February, we will be hosting our job fair!
Be Confident in the People you Hire
The job market is certainly rough right now and it is important for employers to ensure that they are hiring well-rounded and qualified candidates.
Today’s featured startup, JobEscrow, is recruiting insurance for employers. With JobEscrow, employers list their jobs and recruiters take the task of finding the perfect person to match the position listed, making employers confident in hiring and retaining. Learn more about this Startup California startup from its founder, Ken Winters.
Tell us about your product or service
What’s JobEscrow? In short it is an online marketplace where employers and recruiters conduct business leveraging a pay for performance model based on new hire quality and retention. Companies can buy a job credit for $410 – similar to the price of job postings elsewhere. They choose a recruiter through the JobEscrow network and both parties agree to a fee structure and a payment plan over time. JobEscrow doesn’t take a cut of the recruiting fees like other services and the fees are paid out over time through an escrow account based on new hire quality and retention
Starting in December, we will launch our Outplacement service which provides Employers (who are laying off) a system to put a reward in escrow, on the resume of the employee they are laying off, and if/when a Recruiter helps the Job Seeker obtain their next job, the reward will be paid out to the Recruiter.
What inspired you to start your company?
The catalyst occurred in the Spring of 2009 when a CEO friend called me to clean up a mess a contingent recruiter had made. Huge contingent fee, 90 day guarantee, and then that recruiter backdoor poached the candidate away from the CEO’s small company on the 91st day. The CEO said “I will never use another contingent recruiter every again!”
We’re excited to announce we’re holding our New York City, US Job Fair on November 29.
Find out more information by visting the NYC Jobfair page.
Welcome to America. Startups, patent holders, and iPhone programmers, please come to the front of the line
Original post by Alex Salkever via Quartz
Immigration reform looks like it might really happen in US President Barack Obama’s second term. Many have tried before and failed; few ever attempted a total overhaul of a very broken system. But amid sudden political momentum, what if the laws governing foreigners’ rights to live and work on US shores could be rewritten? Who would get to stay? How tight should borders be? Which countries and industries benefit? Quartz has been asking lawyers, advocates, and business leaders what a sound migration policy in America would look like.
For the first time in recent memory, immigration reform in the US appears to be a political slam dunk. Republicans smarting from a poor showing among all minorities publicly acknowledge they need to embrace Latinos and Asians to win the White House. An emboldened Barack Obama is chafing to push forward comprehensive changes to the immigration policy. Much of the noise around this issue has focused on dealing with the millions of undocumented workers.
But perhaps a more pressing issue (as I and Vivek Wadhwa argue in our book, “The Immigrant Exodus”) is reforming skilled immigration rules to allow more high-powered aliens to start companies, work, do research, and remain in America. A 2011 study found that nearly half of the Top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S. had immigrants on the founding or top management teams. Another study estimated that 25% of publicly traded companies founded between 1990 and 2005, that had also received venture backing, had immigrant founders. A 2007 research project by Vivek Wadhwa and AnnaLee Saxenian found that 52% of science and technology companies in Silicon Valley, the global center of tech innovation, had at least one immigrant founder.
We’re excited to announce we’re holding our New York City, US Job Fair on November 29.
Find out more information by visting the NYC Jobfair page.
Facebook Social Jobs App – Not A LinkedIn Killer
Original post by Josh Bersin via Forbes
There was an amazing amount of press last weekabout Facebook’s new social jobs app, even forcing LinkedIn’s stock down a few percent. What exactly is it and will it matter?
The Facebook Opportunity in Recruiting
Well first of all, it’s important to realize that Facebook does have a huge opportunity to make money in the recruiting space, with business models similar to LinkedIn. And today the company is selling plenty of recruitment advertising (we don’t know what percent of its ad revenue is from recruiting, but with nearly 1 billion users there’s plenty of opportunity).
Remember that the recruiting industry, which consists of over $130 billion spent on products and services to help employers find people, is all about “finding the right candidate.” And with so many people actively sharing all their personal information on Facebook, there are a lot of opportunities for companies (Facebook and others) to develop tools to help recruiters find those candidates (and vice versa).
The real business model in recruiting today is not candidates paying to put their resume online, but rather building fantastic search tools to help corporate recruiters find just the right people. We like to call this market “TheGoogle of People” – and a variety of smart companies are working on this now. LinkedIn has built amazing tools in this market, and is now on a runrate to generate a billion dollars in talent management revenue next year.
That all said, going after this market takes intense focus (it’s a complex and highly competitive space), and it does not appear that Facebook is there yet.
The Social Jobs App (or “Partnership”)
The Facebook Social Jobs Application (or Partnership) today is an aggregated search tool that lets candidates search job postings among five of Facebook’s application partners (Monster, BranchOut, Work4Labs, US.jobs, andJobvite). While this sounds like a good idea, it isn’t executed well.
When you use this application, you essentially type a search term into the box and select which of the five organizations you want to search from. And as you can see from the promotional page above, Facebook is promoting the total number of jobs in the system.
Well if you try the app (click here to try it out), you find it to be a fairly poorly implemented search system which doesn’t even come close to the services offered by LinkedIn or Indeed.com (Indeed is one of the most successful job aggregation systems in the market).
Today it has several challenges.
First, you have to select which job source you want to search (which more or less makes the system frustrating, since each of these five providers reaches different and overlapping parts of the market). So when you do search, it’s very confusing where to go.
We’re excited to announce we’re holding our New York City, US Job Fair on November 29.
Find out more information by visting the NYC Jobfair page.