You're looking for a job. You can either take the "spray and pray" approach or you can make a "hit list" of companies you want to apply for. If you decide on the latter, it can be considerably time-consuming to do properly. If you customize your resume for each job and write a cover letter, you're looking at a pretty significant time commitment. How do you get someone's attention with your resume in under seven seconds?
This is part II of how to attract top quality engineering candidates. This is where we will break down the anatomy of a good job description. As we elaborated previously, a good job description is one of the most important factors of attracting candidates to your company. This may be your only chance to make a good first impression.
How do you find top quality candidates? Top candidates that keep up with evolving technologies are getting quickly snagged up by companies before you can even put together a job description. How do you compete in highly competitive market that is controlled by candidates?
We've all heard that Austin's tech market is growing year over year, becoming a destination for software engineers from all over the US, especially converting Californians to Austinonians. It's estimated that 150 people are moving to Austin daily. The low cost of living (about 4% under national average) the expanding tech scene, and high demand for technical workers are all factors contributing to Austin's attractiveness. Here are some interesting statistics on growth of the Austin tech market.
We continue to expand our teams in Portland and Boise. We're excited to announce yet another new hire – Ben Brandt. He joins our team as our latest software engineer.
It's amazing that there is still such buzz about "how to attract millenial talent", or "what millenials need out of their jobs", and so on. The reality is that employers still, shockingly, don't have millenials figured out. When I attended a workshop on this topic, it became even more apparent that employers are still decoding what it means to employ and attract millenials.
Thanks to Boise Startup Week, we were able to join Nick Crabbs at a workshop on what to look for in development jobs as a recent engineer graduate, as well as best practices pre-, during-, and post-interview.
As a continuation to Part One, this post covers a unique perspective of raising capital from the standpoint of someone that has done it already. Leif Elgethun founded Retroflex in 2012, spending the next few years navigating his way through the trials and tribulations tied to raising funding.
It's been an exciting week for the startup community, thanks to Boise Startup Week. We've been attending several helpful workshops ranging from raising funding as a startup, recruiting millenials to the workforce, to demos in virtual and augmented reality. Hashtag, radical.
Several members of our team attended a workshop geared towards raising funding as an early stage startup. The panel discussion included several notable members who all had great contributions to the topic. In this post, we cover Matt McKinlay's advice. Matt is a partner at Advanced CFO Solutions, where he helps grow, renew, or restructure medium-sized businesses through operational and financial consulting.
Joining Talentpair as our third hire in two months, Hannes Hapke is the latest addition to the team. Hannes will play a large role in developing our API's and infrastructure, while also improving our algorithm with machine learning.
If you're building a team, there are several challenges you can expect to encounter during the recruiting process. We are strong proponents of listening to our customers, we interviewed five executives at tech startups in the Silicon Valley. All of them have engaged with contingency recruiters previously. We distilled their pain points down to five common hiring challenges (specifically as it relates to technical recruiting.) Here's what we found...
We had the pleasure of meeting Benton Alexander Smith a week or so ago, where he joined us in our Talentpair office to meet the team, interview Joe (our CEO), learn more about our history, we're building, how we're building it, and why.
As you can assume, we take our hiring very seriously. We know people are at the center of innovation and progression. Without a good team, you're bound to fail.
We have been very selective in who we hire because we stand by our theory of building great teams with only great people.
As a company that is built on the idea of scaling teams with the best possible talent, while also giving candidates the best career and growth opportunities, you can imagine that we take hiring pretty seriously here. We're pretty picky about who comes onto our team, so when we find a unicorn - we grab it by the horn and wrangle it in!
As a follow up to our last blog on takeaways from 1 Million Cups Boise, we also wanted to give a big kudos to Jeremy Robin, our CTO, and Hobson Lane, our Sr. Data Scientist, for presenting at 1 Million Cups PDX. We hope that everyone who attended found value in our presentation. Keep caffeinating, 1 Million Cups startups!
If you haven't heard of 1 Million Cups, they are an organization that is "caffeinating an entrepreneurial nation." 1 Million Cups is a free, national program designed to educate, engage, and connect entrepreneurs. Our team attended 1 Million Cups Boise at the same time as our Portland team presented at 1 Million Cups PDX! Our takeaways from the Boise event can be found here.
This last Wednesday, we headed over to Trailhead where StartupGrind Boise was hosting Natty Zola. Natty was Co-CEO/Co-Founder of AOL-acquired company, Everlater. He shared startup stories from his days as a research assistant for Jim Collins, as well as lessons learned from working in finance during the crash of 2008, traveling the world, opening a hostel in South America, and moving to his parent's basement to start Everlater.
The Boise startup culture is clearly growing. We've seen success in companies built and scaled right here in Boise - names like TSheets, Cradlepoint, Clearwater Analytics, and more. We anticipate that the startup scene will continue to grow, and are excited to be a part of the growth.
