

Unconventional Ways Companies are Finding Tech Talent - culturebeat
http://www.inc.com/ss/7-unconventional-ways-hire-best-tech-talent

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agentultra
What a blatantly ignorant article. Most of these tips are yawn-inducingly
_normal_. The last two are almost offensive.

I think it's cool if a company is willing to support someone who has come
forward as having been diagnosed with Aspergers. Someone with this condition
might have challenges in the work place that other people do not. Any support
and understanding is a good thing.

But I think it's ignorant to hire someone with Aspergers "because they have
that genius disease." It's just plain wrong and totally not what Asperger's
is.

~~~
gacba
_When Web development company ArsDigita wanted to expand its programmer force
in the spring of 1999, founder Philip Greenspun went extreme: He parked a
yellow Ferrari F355 in the parking lot, and promised it as a reward to any
employee who referred 10 qualified programmers._

Since this "tactic" is over 12 years old and we know what happened to
ArsDigita (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita>), this might be about the
worst idea you could have...Shame on you Inc for even publishing this crap.

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taliesinb
One of the thing that we (Wolfram) have noticed is that our NKS summer schools
provide a great way to track someone's problem solving ability (and domain
expertise) over a long period. A lot of previous hires for Wolfram|Alpha have
come from summer schools. The Cambridge grad who wrote Alpha's first-
generation parser, for example, studied at the very first summer school in
2003.

Two related things: we get a lot of international applicants, and this turns
out to be a great filter for selecting very motivated and talented people who
have perhaps saturated the opportunities their local countries can provide
them (certainly this was true of me for South Africa).

Another thing is that the math and physics people who apply seem to adapt
better to programming in our house functional language, Mathematica, than
people with a more traditional CS background (MIT's SICP aside, do they still
do that?).

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larsberg
I've recently noticed that > 90% of my gmail ads are job-offer-related (mainly
Jane Street, Google, and Intel). That seems to be a new trend, at least for
me.

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culturebeat
#8: By commenting on relevant Hacker News stories.

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chriswoodford
i've noticed that my linkedin mail from recruiters has doubled (or more) in
the last year. i'd say it's a valid trend

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BenSchaechter
We're currently in hiring mode and finding talent is super tough. You need
people who are not only a good fit (hard enough) but are willing to leave
their cush jobs, join a startup no one has heard of and believe in your
vision.

Some things we've tried:

\- Scouring Dribble for Designers: I built a system that allows me to search
Dribble by location, then pull up all the relevant shots of people from the
locations I type in. A bit of scraping work, but so much more efficient now.

\- Pinging people on Forrst. I've met with a bunch of people off of Forrst.
You can hack some URLs to find all people from a particular location.

\- LinkedIn. I've never once used or enjoyed LinkedIn until I've had to hire
people. Their search is actually pretty awesome for recruiting. Actually
getting people to respond is harder.

\- Emailing local universities. Finding fresh talent out of school. Sending
emails to CS listservs.

Finding people is so tough. Its the hardest part of a startup I've had to do
so far.

Obligatory shameless plug: Let me know if you're interested in an early
employee gig in Palo Alto doing Ruby development + a bunch of awesome
statistical graphing / information mining.

