I’m posting up a few reply posts to James McCutcheon’s blog entries tonight – mostly because they are thought provoking. This one I found particularly facinating, because it talks about the difficulties of finding technical talent.
My personal opinion (I’m not going to share the secret sauce if such a thing exists) is that the responsibility of recruiting good people rests with every single individual in the company. Everyone who understands this rises to the challenge in different ways – here is how I do it.
- Keep a list of people you want to work with. I keep my list in OneNote with one page per person, on it I put the reasons I want to work with them and what I know about their current situation – if for ethical or business reasons I can’t recommend them straight away I know where I can find that information
- Always hire people that are smarter than you. This is the selfish rule although people who don’t hire correctly don’t follow it. If you want to create a company where you are happy everyone else around you needs to be smarter than you (by your own estimation). Note that I am not talking about technical l33tness in technology X – I’m talking about raw talent. Without exception I can look down the list of people that work at Readify and tell you why I think they are smarter than me and what I hope to learn from them.
- Not sure almost always equals no hire. I never used to say “almost always”, I used to say “always” but I recently overlooked someone because of this simple rule and it wasn’t until someone challenged me on it that the mistake was corrected – so I adjusted it to increase the risk, but also the potential rewards.
Hows that for a recipe?
P.S. I added two people to my list this week!