Billions With Zero Knowledge

I’ve been spending a lot of my time on recruiting lately.  It’s long and hard work to find and assess how great people will fit within our culture. Even though it’s hard, I love to recruit. Creating great teams is part of what I love doing as an entrepreneur. 

At Akoha we hired 5 developers in the last month including a python wrangler, human cannonball, javascript ninja, drunken master and UI jockey.  We have an incredible team shaping up at Akoha. We are still getting everyone familiar with our tools and experienced at releasing software together, but I think this is one of the best teams I’ve ever put together. We’ll be introducing the team in due course over the summer.

Recruiting takes a lot of time to do right.  Throughout my career I’ve been involved in the recruiting and hiring of hundreds of people. Having recently used most of the recruiting tools, and jobs boards out there I can say honestly they pretty much all suck.   I’m not the only person to notice this. 

Based on my experiences, with the exception of LinkedIn, most of the money spent on online hiring tools is ineffective. 

Companies pay to use these services because they don’t know what else to do, and they are so desparate to find people they throw away a lot of money on postings that don’t work.  They rotate from niche job boards, to big job boards.   From contract recruiters, to in-house recruiters.   The entire time many of the best people never appear on the ‘job market’ as friends, recruiters and referrals drive the best people to the best jobs.

During all of this huge sums of money are wasted, and the entire process is repeated each time a new search is started.

At Zero-Knowledge Systems we were pretty infamous for our approach to hiring and recruiting.  Our old recruiting site showed the personality of the company and the people who worked with us.

The video job ad we did for our python wrangler and my blogging were two very effective tools that helped tremendously in our hiring.

There is a big difference between recruiting top talent and advertising a job opening.  One treats humans as resources looking to fit people into narrow and boring job listings.  The other focuses on people, culture and personal relationships.

Announcing Standout Jobs

I’m really proud to announce that I am a co-founder and investor behind a new startup founded by, Ben Yoskovitz and Fred Ngo.  Standout Jobs will be bring a new concept to recruiting that I believe will help companies change how they find, and hire great talent.

There is a funny story how I came to be involved in the project, but for now I can say that it had just as much to do with the chance to work with Ben & Fred as it did our joint belief that there is a great opportunity to change how recruiting is done.

We will be announcing more details over the summer.  Ben posted his announcement on his blog.   Fred has the announcement up on his blog as well.

Look forward to more news from us in the coming months.   If you are a CEO, or hiring manager interested in working with us to fill a critical position feel free to contact me or Ben.

On Tue 8 May 2007.