New Year, New Career! It’s Time To Maximize Your Earning Potential.
Some Advice on ‘Letting Go’ as an Entrepreneur
Yesterday on Inc.com there was great article by the CEO and founder of BzzAgent, Dave Balter, that discussed the benefits of positively parting ways with your employees and fostering robust alumni communities. He expresses throughout the article how crucial it is, today more than ever, for employers to keep a level head and make an effort to avoid ‘bad breakups’ with employees. He sights a number of factors that that contribute to this necessity, including the advent of social media. In today’s hyper-connected climate, maintaining communications with your past employees helps entrepreneurs leverage those relationships in order to develop positive word of mouth towards their current companies as well as towards any future endeavors. Additionally, in Balter’s opinion, your company’s alumni can provide you with invaluable insight because they have intimate details of your organization as well as an outsiders perspective. Finally, Balter notes that the tech industry is a very tight-knit community with fairly loose company allegiances. This allows for an environment where you can easily collaborate and learn from those that you have worked with in the past; given you haven’t burned too many bridges.
Balter has the right approach. As an employer it is critical to handle lay-offs and people moving on carefully and respectfully. The benefits of maintaining positive relationships with these individuals vastly outstrips not doing so. Next time one of your key employees puts in his two weeks, take a deep breath, thank him for his contribution to your company and work out a transition plan. Don’t throw his desk out the window. It’ll pay off in the long run.
As any recruiter will tell you, every start up in the valley want the best engineers to join their team. They want engineers from top schools who have experience working for the most renown companies and who are known in the developer community to be experts in their craft. However, the demand for technical talent is currently so fierce that these individuals are often prohibitively expensive or simply not available (not to say it’s impossible to recruit these individuals, but it is by-and-large the exception to the rule). In an effort to combat this shortage of technical talent, some companies, including IGN.com, are taking an alternative approach. For a growing number of companies, no longer is the high academic pedigree and deep professional experience the major metric by which candidates are selected. There are currently a few company-backed programs that will teach those less-accredited and engineering minded in an effort to raise them to a level at which the company would hire them as entry level coders. The notion here is not to take on less talented individuals, but to find equally as talented coders through unconventional means.
Take a look at this article by Fast Company’s E.B. Boyd for a more in-depth look at this current trend. Is high academic achievement and professional experience the best metric to judge potential talent? Or, is it time to widen our idea of what constitutes a viable a candidate?
A New Perspective on the Hiring Process
Is interviewing candidates a waste of time? CEO of Gilt.com, Kevin Ryan, thinks so. Take a look at this article from Inc.com that expresses Kevin Ryan’s hiring philosophy as he stated it at the Inc. 500/500 conference. He finds the interview process to be flawed since being a good interviewee, more often then not, has little to do with being skilled at the job one is interviewing for. Instead, Ryan focuses his attention on candidates references -first hand accounts of someone’s job performance from people who worked along side or managed them. Will the standard in-person interview process start to fade? Unlikely. But Ryan does make a good point to lean heavily on the reference checks and makes sure to, as the CEO, remain directly involved in the hiring process.
Pro Tip: Keep Your Comp Plans Straight Forward
This may sound like a given, but it is crucial for start-ups to have a straight forward compensation plan if they want to hire competitively in this market. Everyone, particularity hiring managers and recruiters, are acutely aware of the current state of the Technology Industry: We are in a hiring boom. Candidates are now constantly faced with multiple lucrative offers from great companies all over the Valley. As a result, they are calling the shots and it is in companies’ best interests to present strong and clear offers right off the bat. As a recruitment firm, we spend every waking hour consulting companies on the best ways to attract technical talent and guiding them through the hiring process. However, all this preliminary work can be for naught if a start-up’s compensation package structure is simply not up to snuff. At the end of the day, a candidate’s base salary is her bottom line.
What do I mean by a straight forward comp plan? In our experience, the most effective comp plans are simply an equitable base salary + stock options ( and medical of course). Keep it simple and set a quick expiration date. Don’t give your candidates anything to worry about, such as variable bonuses that are tied to a number of company-wide and personal metrics; This sort of model will give candidates a reason to pause and move forward with the opportunity that guarantees them the most cash. Things are moving quickly right now and if as a company you want to stay competitive in this atmosphere, keep your comp plans straight forward and lean heavily on the base salary. If you take this advice, I assure you that you’ll find your team growing with the right talent and your company producing beyond the level you expect.
Hiring These Days
Anyone who runs a tech company right now knows that recruiting and retaining talented employees is no easy task. In fact, one company is even going so far as trying to revitalize the sub-standard downtown Las Vegas and shape it into a place that will be desirable specifically to the kind of talent they are looking for: namely, software engineers. This is of course an extreme case, but any hiring manager will tell you that she is pulling out all the stops to get people on board. Here is a great article from the Economist that takes a closer look at what companies these days are doing to not only acquire good employees, but keep them as well.
Tips To Make Your Cover Letter Stand Out
As a recruiter, I have read my fair share of cover letters and this list of cover letter tips, put together by FINS.com, is a fantastic resource for those looking to get over that initial hurdle and be considered as a serious candidate. This list of the 10 worst things to put in a cover letter will greatly aid you in your job search and help you avoid unwanted negative feedback from a hiring manager before they even get to your resume. Not sure if you should include a couple jokes or personal details? This list will tell you exactly what to leave out of your cover letter to give you the greatest chance of success.
One of the most important factors determining whether or not someone is going to make that move to a new company is the compensation package. Developing a good comp plan can be the difference between a successful hire and a huge waste of time. But, it’s not always that easy. Here is a very informative article by Suzanne Lucas that discusses the 10 most helpful tips for a successful salary negotiation. Make sure to take a look at these before you set foot into that conference room and begin your negotiations. It will make the difference between getting what you want or getting nothing at all.
Will Facebook Become the Next Go-To Site For Hiring Managers?
I don’t think that anyone will dispute that Facebook rules the roost when it comes to the social networking game. It currently has over 750 million users worldwide and despite the fact that it (as of yet) has no recruitment features, employers and recruiters alike are using Facebook instead of the the online job boards to find candidates due to the sheer size of its network. Here is an article from the Wall Street Journal that takes a deeper look at how people are reacting to this new trend and how candidates feel about having their personal and professional networks mixed.
Helpful Tips For Prospective Interviewees
About to go in for an interview? Need a crash course in what to expect and how to impress the hiring manger? Take a look at this Forbes article by Meghan Casserly on the 10 toughest interview questions and how to best answer them. After going over these questions and preparing appropriate answers you will definitely increase your chances of being the stand-out candidate and landing the job.
