Fruit Blog

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Lately at Zemanta we went into intensive recruiting mode on all fronts – UX, frontend, backend, research, system infrastructure and administration.  We tried a lot of different methods of recruiting.  So why not share the experience? What worked and what didn’t?

While we were also looking for UX, design and project management talent, this post is about looking for tech talent, maybe we’ll share other experiences in other posts.

First the non-news: using general local job boards gets you lots of candidates. We used Moje Delo free offer (a week long ad) which resulted in about 15 applications. We did phone interviews with about half of them, but decided to pass on all. The mix of candidates was really widespread, some were very good engineers, but with interests in very different fields, some were pretty awful engineers.

We also went to a job fair the Faculty of Computer Science in Ljubljana. This had zero effect. I speculate there were two reasons. One is organizers didn’t know how to promote the event to the right students, they really need to learn a lot. On top of that the most talented students don’t really hang out at the university (they are already working somewhere – this is a specific situation in Slovenia due to how higher education works). For next year we promised to help organizers with some advice.

Posting on our company blog got us good response – the applicants we got were interesting to interview. From almost-graduated students to applications from abroad and a lot of internship inquiries. We were pretty happy to get to know some really talented students through that. One is just finishing his undergrad degree and is joining Zemanta team in the fall. We are actually industry co-mentors for his graduation thesis on content extraction techniques.

Unsurprisingly the most effective approach are tips and referrals from friends. Whenever we have presentations at tech events we let people know we are hiring. That doesn’t generally result in any applications – people just don’t apply on their own. But they encourage their friends that they think should apply. This resulted in many good hires. And sometimes if someone is recommended to us directly, we just pick up the phone and ask.

We are also vigilant about other opportunities – Bostjan  saw a posting on NYC NewTech mailing list that a young techie is looking to work abroad in Europe. After bunch of skype calls and researching the work visa process we decided to bring him over to Slovenia. It was a bit risky, but it paid off. Sam didn’t just bring his great engineering skills and “get the job done” ethos, but he also brought more international perspective to the team. We got a taste of that and want more of it. So we started searching internationally.

So we first tried LinkedIn and it didn’t work. We posted on a few start-up job boards and also got no response. Then we found Stack Overflow Careers 2.0. We advertised a frontend JavaScript position there, making clear that candidates would be expected to move to Ljubljana, Slovenia. All we can say is it really works. Top notch people looking for new opportunities got in touch with us. And we’re relocating someone just now.

At about the same time I was reading Hackers News and saw “Who’s hiring” topic. I posted on impulse. We’ve got just three inquiries, but all of them are again top-notch.

So here are the our lessons learned:

Image via Wikipedia

• let everybody know what you are looking for
• post on your blog, spread the message
• be on the outlook for unexpected opportunities
• and if you have a bit of money to spend, put 350$ on Stack Overflow Careers 2.0

Up next: how does the interview process look like and what we test for.

Related articles

• Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (August 2011) (news.ycombinator.com)
• NSA Hiring At Black Hat (yro.slashdot.org)
• Always Be Recruiting (bijansabet.com)
• Etsy and Other Local Tech Companies Hiring (nyconvergence.com)