We’re sponsoring our third Hacker News Seattle Meetup, tomorrow (Tuesday 12/13) at the Bookr offices in Fremont, a great space with excellent wallpaper and hipster photos. I’ve had fun at the first two, meeting a range of engineers and soon-to-be-engineers, reconnecting with old friends, and continuing to forget to bring business cards.
We’ll have a few folks from Rooster Park there, so please come find us! We’re still growing our consulting team, even in the lazy days of December.
Jimmy Recruiter just called you and told you about a job, and after you swallowed your annoyance and gotten through the obligatory BS, you’ve realized you might actually want the gig. If Jimmy’s with an agency (i.e. not an in-house recruiter), here are the four questions you should ask right away.
December 2009: I call Poppy around 11:30am midweek to see if I can stop by to pick up a pile of gift certificates as thank-you gifts. (I do a mix each year – usually Canlis and one other.) Someone answers and says sure, so I park in a bus lane outside and walk in. Earbuds still in, looking at my iPhone, I mumble how many I need, ask what the right amount would be for a couple for two, and walk out with a pile of GC’s, distracted by something or other.
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, and on Friday I did a power day, with six screens for the same position. (I do love it, but if you’re a great recruiter, I need your help.)
Each screen starts the same: an ice-breaking joke or two, then a monologue – 60-90 seconds about Rooster Park, 3-5 minutes about the job and the company. I pause just once to see if they are familiar with the company to inform the rest. At the end, I always say something like “that’s the overview. What else can I tell you?”
if they all keep getting acquired.
Seriously, congratulations to our friends at Swype on their acquisition by Nuance.
I’ve been a longtime reader and occasional contributor on Hacker News, YCombinator’s news aggregator, which focuses primarily on startup-friendly technical and business-oriented conversations, with occasionally-interesting diversions, and regular broadsides against horrific recruiting practices. (Here’s my profile, 778 days old as of today.) Most notably, I created a Google Spreadsheet of HN freelancers, which still has some life to it more than a year later.
Since we started in 2008, we’ve been a fully virtual company – every engineer and recruiter has either worked onsite for a client or from their homes/coffee shops/etc. This has worked fairly well, for the most part – engineers built dark caves to work in at their basements, recruiters camped out at the Panera that didn’t enforce the wifi limits, etc.
Yesterday (?), Steve Buckley, aka peroni on Hacker News, aka the guy who keeps taking the bullets for recruiters on Hacker News (thanks, buddy), wrote a nice post on how Hackers can Find a Job. I agree with most of what he wrote, but I wanted to add some color and talk about a few things. But first, go read his piece. I’ll wait.
I spoke with an entrepreneur last week, and we talked about a smart hiring trick.
He runs a buy-low-sell-high e-commerce business, picking up distressed inventory and selling it at market prices through Amazon. He wants to get out of the way as much as possible, and hire people or companies to just take care of details so he can think big, and leave early to play with his kids.
… but it’s more important to be nice.
The life of a working freelance consultant swings the pendulum of too-much-work to wondering-where-the-next-project-will-come-from (often both at the same time). When you’re busy, it’s easy to skip answering incoming invites to chat. I get it.