I’m in the process of starting a new Internet business. We’re about to close a Series A round with several venture capital firms here in the Bay Area and are actively recruiting developers, database and product people. The labor market is tight in the Bay Area right now and the job boards are certainly cashing in.

Finding good and experienced talent is currently as challenging as ever. Here are the different ways I’ve found one can go about finding talented employees:

1. Post your job listing on a high-traffic board.
2. Pay a site like Dice.com to search their repository of technical resumes.
3. Troll the free resume repository on Craigslist
4. Cruise social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook and attempt to connect with and poach already employed people at other companies
5. Pay a head-hunter to bring you candidates. If you hire one you will pay them between 25-30% of the employee’s annual base salary and usually an additional fee on top of that. This really adds up for developers who make in excess of $100k.
6. Spam all of your friends and let them know you’re hiring. Cheap yet typically ineffective and typically detrimental to friendships.

Craigslist:
I’ve had a lot of luck with Craigslist so I posted there first. They charge $75 per listing - mainly in order to keep spammers from destroying the board. Unfortunately, because it is free to respond, the spammers just destroy it that way instead. One listing for a full-time, in-office technical position with our SF-based startup will typically get 50-75 responses. 80% or so of those are from people or firms outside of the United States (even though the listing clearly says ‘no contractors’ and ‘no telecommuting). Another 15% or so percent are from local contractors not looking for full-time work or local headhunters wanting to charge you astronomical fees to deliver typically less than perfect candidates (just my experience). To date, I’ve posted each of my listings on CL twice and have received between 0 and 3 qualified candidates for each position.

Trolling the CL resume repository is a different story. I’ve found that talented and often employed people will post their resumes here just to keep a net in the water in case anything interesting happens to swim by. I’ve snared several very qualified (and typically employed) candidates from here that have turned out to be excellent prospects. It has also been my experience that if a candidate looks especially appealing but says they prefer contract work, email them anyway - your startup might just be compelling enough to pull them back into the full-time world. Expect to have the old “we’re subsidizing your salary with equity” conversation because consultants are used to making big dollars (sometimes I wonder why I left that world).

Trolling is of course free but takes time. The nice thing is that you can create a search that will find what you’re looking for and then turn it into an RSS feed very easily so you can keep an eye on new resumes.

Free Job Boards:

I don’t know of any other job boards where it is free to list and someone will actually see your posting. I’ve posted to StartUpers.com which has a very cool look and is easy to use but has only yielded several responses - all spam. I also managed to get an invite to Doostang.com, an “invite-only career community started at Harvard, Stanford and MIT.” The rather pompous site has yielded zero leads, legitimate or otherwise - but the listing was free.

It’s really too bad that SimplyHired.com won’t let you post a job to their system. They’ve got one of the best search engines for open positions but they seem to only take feeds from other boards. There are probably competitive issues in play - IE their data sources don’t want them competing with them while monetizing their data.

Not-Free Job Boards:

There is no shortage of these. I’ll give a quick and non-comprehensive list of the ones I considered and ultimately did not post to - mainly because we’re a startup and we can’t afford it (although I’d probably pay if I thought it was worth the fee).

Keep in mind - these are technical positions so I did not consider generic boards like Monster or CareerBuilder. I need to go where my candidates go.

1. TechCrunch’s CrunchBoard : I know this network gets a lot of traffic from the Silicon Valley community. I’m not convinced developers spend a lot of time reading it (seems like more of a business / product crowd). They charge $200/listing.
2. LinkedIn is an excellent site that I’m a big fan of. I’m not sure how many developers use it to look for jobs outside of their network (or at all). Their listing fee is $145/listing but gets cheaper if you buy in bulk. I’ve actually had much more success trolling my network for developers here. Most of my connections were happy to pass along messages to developers to the effect of, “Hi, I know you have a job but you look like a stud and I’d like to talk to you about my new startup.” If you happen to find people that you’d rather contact directly (a good idea if you think you’re linked to this person via their existing boss who won’t be inclined to pass along your solicitation) you can upgrade your LinkedIn account to send InMail - IE contact people you don’t know directly. $20/month gets you 4 InMails. The prices climb quickly from there. We’ve had some success with finding people this way.
   11/15/07 UPDATE: I bit the bullet and spent the money to post the listing on LinkedIn. I’ve only had 3 hits - two from people in Eastern Europe (even though I specified no telecommuting) but one was local and is a very strong candidate which made the listing worth-while.
3. Dice.com. When I was hiring for my last startup between 2004 and 2006 Dice was a great resource. They are certainly capitalizing on the tech labor market these days. They have a large (possibly the largest) resume database and almost 100,000 tech job listings, making it an excellent resource for both job seekers and employers. That is, employers who have the cash. They charge $459/listing to get your jobs on their board for 30 days. Accessing the resume database is so expensive for an employer that they won’t even publish their rates. I had an aggressive sales person from there call me after I filled out the “more info” form. He quoted me about $1,000/month for access to the resume database (I’d be doing my own searches) or I could buy their “special” and get 1 year of access plus 10 slots to post my openings in for something like $10,000/year. This might work for Google and Yahoo! but not for the startup.
4. 11/15/07 UPDATE: GoBigNetwork.com: I listed the job here after reading about these guys in TechCrunch. The job posting process makes no mention of a listing fee until you are finished creating the listing - pretty sneaky. After spending the time creating an account and the listing, they expect a fee to make the listing go live. I can’t remember what the fee was (well over $100) and there is no way to find out what that fee is from their site without going down the road of creating another listing. I abandoned the listing and was contacted the next day by a GoBig employee. He said he’d give me the listing for free for 30 days. So far I’ve received 3 spam messages via the posting - no candidates. Even at $0 I don’t think it is worth posting there.

I know there are many more sites that will take my money to post the job but after Dice I discontinued my research.

Disruption:

Clearly there is an opportunity here for a superior offering to disrupt the current pricing model. The spam issue is a very real one but I’m sure there are some creative ways to usurp this, even if it involves charging a nominal (even less the CL’s $75) fee.

I don’t see an open community platform for job seekers right now. One that allows employed people, unemployed people and companies come together and keep an eye on each other for opportunities. Plenty of employed people would leave their current position for better pay, a better position, better equity, better work environment, etc. That doesn’t mean they’re going to spend any time looking at openings or applying for them. And plenty of great positions aren’t getting in front of the qualified candidates. I’m a little biased here, but I feel like job seekers using Dice are probably not being exposed to young and innovative startups that need their services but aren’t interested in paying exorbitant fees.

A site that combined listings from sites around the net, LinkedIn-style employee profiles, a vibrant community and company reputation/feedback system that did not charge all the fees we see today would certainly be effective at stealing market share on both the seeker and employer side.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Internet Business, Jobs, New Business Models. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.