Announcing Rooster Park Office Hours

Job searching (and the decision to think about job searching), both for contract and full-time work, is stressful, even for the most coveted candidates:

Hiring is also tricky, especially for startups without a history – how you target candidates, how you evaluate candidates for engineering and culture fit, etc.

We try to be helpful on an ad-hoc basis – we’ve helped at least two people get the jobs they wanted this year in a completely behind-the-scenes way, and helped another company redo their CTO search, which they’re now doing with another company – but we’d like to do more.

Starting next week (5/23), we’re holding open office hours on Wednesdays. Most of our meetings these days are with candidates and companies in South Lake Union, Downtown, and Pioneer Square, so we’re going to switch between two locations:

This office hours are open to both candidates and companies, completely confidential, and completely free (of money and obligation).

  • Candidates and companies: we’re happy to advise on both your own strategy finding a job, or on how you should find great candidates for your own team – including messaging, job descriptions, etc.
  • Confidentiality: we won’t share anything you tell us with anyone else, including your managers. Obviously if you’re concerned about being in a public place, we can try to meet somewhere else afterwards, but trust me – we meet people all the time in these places, and nobody knows why you’re there. We don’t have horns.
  • Free: no obligation to talk to us ever again, no salesman will visit you, your email address will not end up on a newsletter list forever (we don’t have one anyway), etc. This goes for both clients and companies. If you want to hear about our jobs and services, we’re happy to tell you about them, but we won’t lead or pitch you.

We’re doing this because a healthy hiring ecosystem benefits us: we see a lot of folks who struggle with these things, and if we do a good job, you’ll probably tell people. That’s worked for us before.

The only thing we ask is that if you think you’re going to stop by, please email us at officehours at roosterpark dot com and let us know, so we know to look for you.

We’re looking forward to meeting more people and being as helpful as we can. Hope to see you soon!

Posted in Rooster Park | 2 Comments

Handling rejection

A few weeks back, we had a candidate interview onsite with a client. It didn’t end well. Some quotations from a mail we received the following day, errors left intact:

I was exposed to a couple of rank amateurs with an agenda.

If you wanted a code monkey, you should have advertised that fact and not waste my time.

I am not amused by seeing dogs running around in a business setting. It’s unprofessional and quite infantile. Indeed, the  the idom “The Country is going to the dogs” has become more than a metaphor.

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Investing in 500 Startups. Boom!

I met Dave McClure at Gnomedex 2007, where we argued over the future prospects for Spock, had sushi at Shiro’s (and saw Juliet from Lost), and otherwise enjoyed ourselves. (That’s also where I learned Dave Schappell knew everybody, and met probably ten other entrepreneurs in Seattle who I still talk with semi-regularly – no single conference has ever had so great an impact on my career.)

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Our commitment to investing in startups

Our success is inextricably tied to the success of the technology community, and in particular to the opportunities being created by new startups. While a slim majority of our revenue comes from Fortune 500 companies, those companies invest and acquire startups for talent or technology, are part of a healthy ecosystem, and individuals from those companies occasionally ask our thoughts on the people or potential making up those startups. Much of our revenue does come from small and medium-sized companies, and we’re well aware of their careful need to manage their spend on a weekly and monthly basis. We also spend a fair amount of time either supporting entrepreneurial events or just providing free advice on recruiting (both for employers and employees).

That stuff’s all good, but I wanted us to do something more directly beneficial to the community, so we have a new plan. Starting with 2011′s results, we’ll be investing at least 10% of our net income in technology startups. That is, >=10% of our income that we make in a year will be invested either directly in individual startups (as angel investments) or in angel or venture funds. We’ve already committed the 2011 investment: I’ll write about that in the next few days.

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Tell Us What You Make!

There’s a common conversation on Hacker News and the like about whether you should tell a recruiter what you’re paid. We ask this of virtually every candidate at the end of our first phone call with him/her: not at the beginning (so it doesn’t seem we’re just on the phone for a transaction). We try to ask it in a way that’s not aggressive, but where the question and the reason is clear: something like “just so that I can make sure that we’re in range for this position, can you let me know what you’re making today and what you hope to make?”
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The SuperDuperMegaGuide to employee vs. independent consulting

I talk to engineers all the time who are interested in being contractors or consultants but are concerned about being “independent” – they still want the perceived safety of being an employee. I’m constantly answering people about “What’s the difference between a W-2 and a 1099,” and so this post lays out the details. (To be clear, this is the difference to the consultant, not the employer. Employers are subject to all kinds of rules about employing you or not.)

Quick Version

If you’re a US citizen or green card holder and you don’t require a group health plan, there’s no functional difference between being an employee or an independent contractor. There’s a financial difference, explained below, that you need to factor into your personal budget, but there’s nothing financially “safer” or “better” about being an employee.

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Job Offers and College Admissions

I was doing my monthly poking around in Quora when I found the age-old question “How should I handle multiple job offers?” I started writing a response there but decided to keep it for ourselves, because I hit this scenario on virtually every position we work on, from exec to junior-level tech: a candidate starts looking for a job, gets a job offer, and wants to wait to make a decision until their other interviews/offers come through. Sometimes they think that will just be a few days: this person (who, to be fair, reads as somewhat new to the working world) wants a month.

Here’s what I tell every candidate who thinks this way: the job search process is not like the college admissions process, where every letter arrives at the same time. It’s easy to understand why you would want to wait until you had all the data and then give every company an answer on the same day, but that’s not how the real world works. You’re going to need to make decisions with limited information.
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Congratulations to TeachStreet!

Big news today as our friends at TeachStreet were acquired by AmazonLocal. (Announcement here.)

TeachStreet started a few months before we did, and I’ve really enjoyed watching them try out different product ideas – but more importantly, I’ve seen them hire great engineering and product talent and mentor more junior folks to be future leaders in the Seattle startup community. Having TeachStreet on your resume is a badge of honor in this town. Dave Schappell‘s also been kind enough to refer great clients to us, and we’re lucky to have him in our corner.

AmazonLocal is chock-full of smart, experienced Amazon leaders, and adding this team to the mix (which has a lot of ex-Amazon blood in its veins already) will only help. Congrats to Dave, Daryn, Scott, and the rest of the group. On on!

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Getting what you want (including the job)

In the last few weeks, we’ve had a number of candidates for permanent positions enter the negotiation phase – the client wants the candidate, and now they’re talking about terms. As a recruiting firm, we’re paid by the company; for our long-term success, we have to be helpful to both parties, be able to keep confidences as needed, and help them come to agreement.

We’ve been dealing with roles from $60K IT professionals, to $100K software developers, to two different $200K+ executive positions. In almost every case, we see the same pattern:

  • Client offers the candidate a package: salary, stock, vacation, etc.
  • Candidate wants movement on a range of different terms, and discusses those with the client (either through us or directly).
  • Client goes back and starts seeing what she can do.
  • Lather, rinse, repeat.

Nobody wants to be in this cycle. How do you get out of it?

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Stupid Answers to Snappy Questions, or Making a Great First Impression

Happy New Year! I wanted to kick off 2012 (and end our December blogging hiatus) with a quick post continuing on a theme I started with The Power of Your First Question - setting the initial tone of a recruiting conversation at the level you want to be perceived.

We list a subset of the jobs we’re trying to fill at any one time from a link on our Careers page. We do this because those job descriptions get distributed to Indeed, Simply Hired, and other sources, and while there’s much more noise than signal, occasionally a great candidate finds us.

Every one of those jobs links to an application page: here’s the general one for an example. The application page is the same for each job – the idea is to make it easy for people to contact us – but there’s one question that requires thought: tell us “One interesting thing you’ve worked on recently.

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  • Rooster Park Blog

    This semi-regularly updated blog is written by Rooster Park CEO Scott Ruthfield and includes musings on Seattle-area technology, staffing practices, and web development techniques.