

Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk - petesoder
http://blog.petesoder.com/blog/2013/09/23/why-engineering-pr-is-not-crazy-talk/

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jgrant27
There's something important missing from the post. Interviewing. Interviewing
is a horrible experience for most engineers. It's often costly in time and in
preparation. Keep this in mind if you're hoping to hire anyone that's not
still green in their career. Provide honest insight into the process for
candidates. Keep your engineers from getting into the usual pissing contest
during the white-board "dance" and under-graduate level homework details that
don't really tell you anything about someone but are often just an excuse to
technically "haze" a candidate.

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petesoder
yep - this is totally designed to be a more scalable lead-gen strategy (top of
funnel).

Next post will be on effective interviewing by/of engineers. I find many
companies don't tend to do that in a scalable way, either.

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clinejj
This was big for me when I was applying for jobs earlier this year. Teams that
had a blog, updated it reasonably often talking about their recent challenges
they overcame or fun projects went a long ways in making me want to work with
them. The careers page is nice, but talking don't really present the culture
and specific work that gets done in a very good way.

There's a couple companies that come to mind that I feel like do a pretty good
job with this - Tumblr (look at some of the intern reports from this summer
and the rest of the staff blog), and Etsy's Code as Craft blog go a long ways
in making their engineer teams attractive.

~~~
petesoder
I couldn't agree more. Engineers are loathe to enter into a traditional
recruiting process (i.e. go in through the front door) when they have so many
options out there.

It's far more attractive if they can 'window shop' and get a true sense for
your team/culture/challenges without kicking off a gauntlet of interviews for
them to learn the same stuff.

Obviously, interviews are still important for the hiring team, but it's time
to make the overall process better (and more front-loaded with the company's
engineering project info) for the engineer candidates.

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peterbell_nyc
Great post. It's a real issue for many startups I talk to that wonder why
they're having a hard time recruiting tech talent and haven't spent the time
to build a brand and relationship with engineers. If you happen to have a
consumer brand, that's great (Apple, Google, etc) but the most important thing
is to create an engineering brand that tells the story of what kind of shop
you're going to be to work for and why people should work for you instead of
one of a huge number of other startups.

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petesoder
If you can't explain in 60 seconds why an engineer should want to come and
work at your company, you're dead.

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gergles
Step 2 is really the unique part here -- what you need to do is to figure out
who you want before you can figure out how to communicate with them. The
oldest adage in the book about speechcraft is "know your audience" but it
really applies to any sort of communication, even 1:1 ping-type emails. Can't
emphasize enough how much you need to introspect within your org to figure out
who you're looking for if you have any chance of convincing someone that they
are who you're looking for.

~~~
petesoder
It's very true. Many times orgs write generic, catch-all engineering job
specs. Or they say they're looking for any 'good' engineer.

They think this is a good idea since it seems to apply to the broadest number
of candidates. But it totally backfires - no one gets excited about the role
since it's not targeted at anyone.

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knes
Great read. I was actually in the process of writing a blog post about the
exactly the same thing. at Pusher
([http://pusher.com/jobs](http://pusher.com/jobs)) we are revamping all our
jobs, about us, etc pages but also blogging more about our technical
challenges and what we do as a team outside of work. Slowly but surely, we can
see the increase in spontaneous applications and the quality.

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sjheinz
Prudent advice. Building a reputation to attract great people to your team
demands honesty about who you are and how you work together. This should not
manifest itself as a list of buzzwords, but a genuine introspection about what
kinds of talents and personalities will benefit your team in the long run.
Clearly explaining to a candidate why you want them to join your team and what
it is you value about everything they have to offer can be a powerful and
persuasive conversation to convince any candidate to choose your team above
all others.

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timrosenblatt
This is a good writeup.

In general, this type of mindset is important, especially for company
founders. It's not so much "PR" or "sales" or "marketing", but more about
understanding what's important to the target audience, and explaining why what
you're offering is a good fit for what they want.

VCs, business partners, employees, customers...they all have a different
perspective on the world, and it's hard to be successful in business if you're
unable to get your message across.

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petesoder
Thanks. It's been a ton of fun learning to teach story-telling to
engineers/CTOs. Every good developer cares about an interesting engineering
challenge, but nailing the quick story around it can be slightly challenging
sometimes.

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WhitneyLand
It sounds like like you're trying to encourage more meaningful connections
between engineers and recruiters. That's a good thing, but the term PR is a
turn off even used as an analogy.

Even if engineers are the mark rather than the intended audience, those roles
often overlap so your message should appeal to both.

That said I think your content is on the right track. Maybe title it something
like “here’s how to encourage more meaningful connections between engineers
and recruiters”...

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petesoder
Good feedback, thank you.

Although I'm not sure it's about creating meaningful connections between
engineers and "recruiters," Although I guess it depends who the recruiter is
in the company. Sometimes it's the CTO or engineering manager - but sometimes
the initial story-telling (aka company pitch) is delegated to a traditional
recruiter (which normally isn't as effective with engineers).

I'd prefer to see traditional recruiters go the way of the Tyrannosaurus.

If you want to hire the best team as an engineering manager it's typically
best not to delegate the job to someone else.

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godisdad
Excellent post. I think the aversion engineers have toward PR for teams is
unfortunate. A similar attitude toward prof. networking exists. Good team PR
and good professional networking is predicated on mutual benefit.

Teams that are innovating, working on novel problems and dedicated to quality
shouldn't be afraid to present themselves in a positive light. There's nothing
sleazy about trying to attract and retain like-minded people.

~~~
petesoder
Good comment, thanks. And appreciate the connection with professional
networking.

As a young engineer, it was very hard for me to come to understand the value
of building my network. I guess when there's so many horrible 'networking'
events out there (just like 'bad' marketing), it takes some time for one to
overcome an adverse knee-jerk reaction and really apprehend the value.

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danmccorm
Great post. I think this isn't discussed enough (which just benefits those
companies who have nailed it). This ties into one of my prime lessons of tech
management: always be recruiting. To do that well, you have to start with an
awesome idea/company and then hone your message to get the best people working
with you.

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petesoder
Yeah - great point. Recruiting is so hard these days that most people don't
get enough leads in the top of the funnel in order to really see enough
quality candidates get through the screening process.

Establishing an engineering story (and telling it well) allows you to add more
interested engineers to the top of the funnel. It's a longer term strategy,
but I think it's required based on present market dynamics.

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gabestein
I think Pete is right on. Content marketing as a by-product of engineering,
especially open-source engineering, is only going to become a bigger part of
recruiting. Just look at GitHub. Super engineer-driven company, incredible
content marketing generated by their engineers that helps them find folks.

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adamjlev
Pete, great advice here.

I definitely will push for this hard as I grow the team at makespace.com

Few examples of successful engineering PR: New Relic, Stripe, Uber. Of course,
solving interesting problems is appealing in it self

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girishrao
Good stuff. Fully agree with the last point -- having the CTO or engineering
lead build the story and reach out to potential hires makes a huge difference.

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m1try
Cool post! I'm actually doing my own business on the pain described in the
original post. Keep up the good work.

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thejulielogan
misleading title, though it is a nice little bow to wrap around the idea.

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petesoder
Curious, why misleading?

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thejulielogan
Public Relations for your Engineering Team suggests working on getting them
out in front of the product, not just hiding behind it.

You touched on it, "Engineers are no longer the loner geeks, working in dimly
lit rooms, hacking away" but didn't realize the potential of that statement.
Instead you used the idea to jump into a different topic; using the Tenants of
PR to hire Engineers.

