Here is a new business for you - I’ve even given you the tagline. Please, someone start this. With the pool of talented programmers running dry these days in San Francisco, I’ve resorted to working with recruiters to help find qualified and skilled candidates. The fees are hefty - 20-30% of the employee’s first year base salary plus many of them even want stock in the startup - sometimes as much as the employee they place gets! Recruiters are very easy to find these days. In fact, they seem to find you even when you’re explicitly not looking for one. For instance, Craigslist has a box you can check that says “please, no recruiters”, yet the majority of responses I get from the ad are from recruiters. I’ve decided to allow about some of these recruiters to send me resumes. After all, they all work on contingency so I only pay if they place someone.

Some recruiters will want to come out to your office and soak up hours of time chatting about your “culture” and what you are looking for in a developer (as if “LAMP” skills needed more explanation).   Although the face-to-face does add some value to the process, I think this is mostly a networking play on their part to forge a relationship and make sure their future unsolicited email to you will at least be opened. Many of the recruiters we’ve had come by the office wrote vigorously on their notepads as we described the very basic skills we were looking for (I got the distinct feeling they hadn’t heard of PHP or MySQL before). Others (mainly the ones from Craigslist) will just start showering you with resumes once you’ve given them permission.

Both groups send plenty of unqualified candidates - obviously more from the ones that don’t stop by in person. I have some great and rather embarrassing stories about many of these recruiters already just after a few weeks of working with them. I have yet to see any “hireable” candidates through this channel.

I wish there were some sort of a directory I could reference each time a recruiter contacted me to see what the community thinks of his or her performance. I’d like to know:

• What kind of luck other employers have had with the recruiter.
  • What is the ratio of good resumes to bad ones?
  • Do they do ridiculous things like send candidates who aren’t willing to commute to your office after you’d been clear about the fact that you need someone in-office?
  • How many actual hires have come from the recruiter?
• What the candidates think of the recruiter.
  • Does the recruiter thoroughly test and get to know the candidate to ensure more efficient placement?
  • Is the recruiter responsive to calls and emails?
  • Does the recruiter provide feedback when an opportunity is not right so the candidate may learn and improve their skill set?

It’d be nice to have all of this information in a publicly viewable, yelp-style site. If the site got enough audience it could probably get into the job listings business itself! But remember (see previous post about job boards) - keep the listings free!

RecruiterWatch.com (taken w/ no site)
RecruiterWatch.net (available)

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.

It is always difficult for me to hear a story about massive unmet demand for something in the marketplace without exploring why its being under-served and finding creative (profitable) remedies. Especially when its a service that can easily and cheaply be provided. American Public Media’s Radio Show “Marketplace” ran an interesting piece today about how thousands of immigrants to the US are being turned away by English language training schools in New York City due to the classes being constantly booked. The students, from all corners of the world, are trying to learn English as quickly and efficiently as possible so they may become more productive members of the American economy as quickly as possible.

There’s a lot of political debate around immigration and what our “National Language” ought to be here in the US. I won’t be touching on any of that. I think there’s too much money to be made in satisfying these unmet demands.

Language schools of this nature are obviously not very profitable. If they were, there wouldn’t be so many students being turned away. Its not like there’s a shortage of people who are able to teach English to others in the US. Monetization of this under-served market gets more interesting, however, as you look further down the human resource “supply chain”. These immigrants want to get jobs and contribute to our economy in both unskilled and skilled positions. From bus boy to doctor, they are typically motivated and hard-working individuals that want to integrate as quickly as possible.

The unmet demand in this space is actually two-fold. Not only are there not enough English schools, there are not enough skilled workers in the economy to meet US business’ demands. This is exemplified by US businesses lobbying so strongly for increases in the H1B work visa program over the past decade.

After learning English, many of these immigrants will be eager to join the work force. Many will need training on computers or simple accounting so they may effectively fill office jobs in the US. In a strong economy, such as the current one in the US, staffing companies and temp agencies need to continually replenish their supply of these types of workers. What if the language school these immigrants attended also provided computer and other types of training for a fee? The school would take the student from not knowing any English to full-time employment in a skilled job. If the student could not afford the fee (probably a common scenario) the school could loan the student the money and allow gradual payback once the student is employed and income-producing. The real bread and butter here is the healthy fees from the staffing and temp agencies the school would earn. It would eventually make sense for the school to become a staffing/temp agency itself because it would have such an excellent supply of freshly-trained and eager human capital.

Done properly, the school/staffing agency could be quite profitable and would likely have many of its operating costs subsidized by the government all while fueling the strong growth of US businesses by providing quality workers. If the upcoming immigration bill mandates that English proficiency be a prerequisite for attaining visas or citizenship, your customer base just got substantially bigger.
Today’s Marketplace transcript on this topic: Marketplace: Huddled masses yearning to learn free

By Adam Jackon

Many services here in the US that were once expensive are now progressively becoming less so. Broadband Internet access seems to be in a race to the bottom, largely thanks for fierce competition between providers. Local and long distance phone service is much more affordable now thanks to competition from VOIP.

Conversely, some services that were once free or cheap are lately becoming more expensive. Television, for instance, used to be either free or very inexpensive for the average American household. Now its probably the largest monthly bill in the household behind the mortgage or rent payment. Admittedly, television has gotten a lot better over the years: more channels, better picture, DVR capabilities. I think the price increase is justified. Celular service, if not increasing in price, seems to be maintaining its premium pricing as time goes by. Sure we can TXT and PIX each other now, but does the service really need to be as expensive as it is?

Before we get into what this cellular provider of the future might look like, let’s establish what sort of technology we’re dealing with in the average American’s cell phone here in 2007.

Phones these days are location-aware. Even if you’re not using or paying for the service, the phone always knows approximately where on the planet it is, provided there is cellular coverage. The accuracy is even good enough to build a driving directions (GPS-like) service into the offering. Blackberry’s and other devices offer this - for an additional usage fee, of course. Cellular location technology is much better than GPS, though, because you don’t have the line-of-sight issue. GPS units must be able to “see” the satellites that give it geographic positioning information. If you try to use one indoors they’re useless. Modern cell phones use the cell towers for this information and thus will work anywhere that the phone work gets a signal.

They may not be doing it now, but cellular service providers are able to easily track where their users are, geographically. We know this because some of them even offer a “track your kid” feature as an add-on service. The location sensors in the phone beam the location of the kid to the cellular provider’s servers, which host a map that the parent can watch to track the location of the child. As long as the child’s phone is on, the location is known. I’m not going to get into the (very real) privacy implications here. Instead I’d like to think about some potential service offerings that could defray cellular operational costs.

1. Tracking the rate at which individual cell phones are traveling on surface streets and freeways is the most accurate possible way to monitor traffic congestion in real-time. In California CalTrans uses our FastPasses and assorted highway sensors to give a general view of freeway traffic speeds, but cell phones would be a much larger and more accurate sample and would transcend past the freeways onto congested surface streets. This data stream could be sold as a subscription service to be integrated with the very phones providing the data or with in-car navigation systems.
2. The social network possibilities here are endless. Have you ever decided where to eat a meal based on how crowded you thought the restaurant would be? What if you could jump online and see for yourself? “Restaurant X has a dining capacity of 120 and there are currently 145 cell phones in the building.” Sounds like there’s a wait - even after you count the staffs’ phones. The best part is that the restaurants and bars wouldn’t have any way of cheating and making their place look more full or empty than it really is.
3. Imagine a new social networking site thats let users create profile pages similar to MySpace and associate them with their cell phone. Users can choose whether or not they want their location to be known and who should be able to see it on a map, live. Maybe you only want your friends and not your coworkers to see it on the weekend. Better idea - maybe you never want your coworkers to see it. It’s similar to twitter or dodgeball but with far less effort and better accuracy. This social network would be much more compelling than existing ones because it dives more deeply into our offline lives. Collecting basic demographic data on cellular subscribers, combined with this rich stream of location data would yield such unique information as:
   • Which bars and restaurants are most popular and which days/times of the week/month. Consumers and competing bars would love to know.
   • What demographic frequents different bars and restaurants. I know some guys that would probably pay to see where all the girls were hanging out each night of the week.
   • Where do the different age groups tend to live? That would help make outdoor advertising more targeted and relevant.
4. I saved the most obvious and most irritating for last: targeted marketing. It doesn’t get much more targeted than this. You walk into a Target and you start receiving coupons for Walmart. You walk into Starbux and a $2.00 off coupon for Peets along with walking directions to the Peets down the block pops up on your phone. Annoying? Maybe. Profitable? Definitely. Maybe customers who don’t want the ads offers pay a slightly higher monthly subscription fee. Perhaps the cellular provider can ask the customer on the web, during signup, which offers he or she wouldn’t mind seeing. The service could, if done right, actually be a feature to some users who value saving money on purchases they’re just about to make.

The data the cellular providers have access to provides an unprecedented view into the offline habits of almost every citizen in the country. There are probably many more business models that could leverage this data that someone smarter than I will think of. The point, however, is that if a smart provider decided to build some new service offerings around these under-utilized assets and then use the new revenue streams to lower the cost of the basic cell phone service (maybe even to $0), they would be unstoppable in stealing market share from their competitors in a what has turned into an increasingly commoditized industry.

— Would you sign up with a cell phone provider if you could get free (or say under $20 / month) cell service if the provider was engaged in the businesses outlined above?