Standout Jobs

Newsflash!

Marc-André Cournoyer has launched refactormycode.com, a community-driven peer code-review site.

In the words of James Golick in his Digg submission:

Have you got a method that you’re dying to simplify? A class that’s growing out of control? Or an algorithm that you just can’t get working? Submit it to the new, awesome web app Refactor My Code, and have it refactored.

Great job, Marc-André! We love it when our people launch side projects that are community-oriented, and maybe, just maybe, we might find our next great hacker on it!

The job market is a fascinating one. For all the changes we see online with social networks, blogging, etc. and for all the changes we see in the workforce (changing demographics, skill sets, etc.) companies continue to cling to the same tools they always have. At the same time there are lots of startups (including us!) and big players in the space, trying to figure out what to do next. So it’s a constantly changing and evolving industry, but also so entrenched in the ways of boring job ads and recruiting practices that the dichotomy is clear.

Penelope Trunk suggests five ways the job hunt is about to change.

All five of Penelope’s points are interesting and worth reading in detail. I want to highlight a few:

1. “Candidates will drive the hiring process rather than employers.” Penelope writes, “The conundrum of the new workforce is that they are always looking for a job, but furtively.” Her point is that young, successful, tuned-in people are always looking but not interested in being hounded by employers or recruiters.

   While I understand people don’t like being hounded, I do think there’s more room for companies to promote themselves and put their best foot forward. It just needs to be done in a non-aggressive, relationship-focused way.

2. “Companies will stop writing stupid ads.” No argument on that point. My preference would be for job ads that are culture-focused and personality-focused instead of focused on experience requirements (which are almost always inflated). Explain to me what kind of person you’re looking for, not all the nonsensical things you expect them to know to be perfectly suited for the job.
3. “The quality match will take center stage.” Yes. Yes. Yes. Rather than summarize Penelope’s point, let me quote her directly:
   

   “Companies are forced to invest so much in hiring candidates they can’t afford to make mistakes. And candidates have so many choices that they can afford to demand a great match. This means the matching process between company and employee is going to become personalized.

   Young people are loyal to brands, so another form of personalized job matching could come with companies interacting with people in ways that allow the candidate to know the company.”

   This is where I see the recruiting industry going. Personalized, on-going relationship building between candidates and employers. Companies representing their true, authentic culture & team in a way that gives candidates an unprecedented view. If candidates have the power in the job hunt, then companies need to give them the right amount and quality of information to make a judgment call on whether they should apply or not.

Domainer.com, a newly funded software company building innovative solutions for the domain name industry, is seeking a Web Application Developer to add to its team. You will work as a key member of a team, taking direction and input from other developers as well as working directly with the President of the company.

Web Application Developer

Required Skills/Experience

• Must be able to program in multiple web application languages
• Deep experience with web application development
• Knowledge of cross-browser CSS/HTML/JavaScript development
• Experience with multi-table relational databases and SQL
• Experience developing applications with publicly available APIs (please provide site samples)
• Demonstrable knowledge of effective User Interface design (please provide site samples)
• Excellent oral and written communication skills

Preferred Skills/Experience

• Experience working in a startup environment
• Experience in an Agile development team
• Experience building scalable web applications
• Knowledge of blogging, blog platforms and syndication formats (RSS, Atom)
• Experience developing for open source projects Experience with of SVN and source control
• Comfortable using Linux
• Experience with Java and Eclipse or other IDEs
• Knowledge of the domain name industry and domain registration processes
• Knowledge of Search Engine Optimization techniques and best practices
• Knowledge of revenue generating programs available on the web (eg - Google Adsense, affiliate programs)

This is a full time position located in our offices in downtown Toronto. We offer a competitive salary and stock option participation.

To apply, please submit resumes and covering letters to resumes@domainer.com, with the subject “Web Application Developer”.

About Domainer.com

Domainer.com works with owners of great domain names to turn underutilized brands into great web destinations. The Domainer.com platform aggregates relevant content from participating bloggers, as well as shopping offers and data from various web APIs and proprietary sources. In all cases the goal is to take a domain that is unused or “parked”, and improve traffic and user experience to enhance the overall value of the domain name.

We were very pleased to see that Mint was presenting at TechCrunch40 this week. We were even more pleased to see that they won the $50,000 prize as best presenter.

Mint is hiring.

And we’re excited to be a part of their recruiting efforts with this video that we encouraged them to produce.

The buzz, reviews and excitement Mint is now generating will go a long way to helping them attract top talent. This is something I’ve spoken to numerous companies about in the past — it’s not about one single thing, one single job ad, or even one single video — hiring the best people is a combined effort from marketing, public relations and HR. It’s something that companies should always be doing, and leveraging the buzz they generate to drive potential candidates to apply.

Congratulations again to the folks at Mint. We wish you the best of luck with the business and your hiring efforts!

Standout Vacancy
Originally uploaded by standoutjobs.

Standout Jobs is at it again, looking to hire additional Ruby developers.

We’re hiring Ruby Gurus and Ruby Devotees (mid-level experience).

Over the last few months we’ve hired Marc-Andre Cournoyer and Daniel Haran.

Our expectations for Gurus and Devotees are roughly the same, although we recognize that Devotees will have less experience.

As a Guru or Devotee, we want to know if you:

• Love Ruby.
• Have strong familiarity with the Rails framework.
• Believe in clean code, iterative development and quick prototyping.
• Have experience launching 1.0 products.
• Have startup experience.
• Won’t crumble under pressure.
• Believe in the value of social media and networking, but not the hype.
• Dream of running your own startup someday.
• Believe in giving back, participating in the community and doing good.

Standout View
Originally uploaded by standoutjobs.

If you have a lot of experience in other dynamic programming languages and Web frameworks, please note that; especially for Devotees who want to highlight their strengths as developers, even if they’re not Ruby Gurus just yet. Open source involvement and projects are also a plus.

Code samples are a must. So make sure you send them with your application.

Standout Jobs is a small startup. We live and breathe the startup experience. If you’re not 100% sure you want to work at a startup, this won’t be the place for you.

Send your stuff (resume, code samples, blog, LinkedIn profile, etc.) to rubyguru@standoutjobs.com (devotees too!)

Note: This is a full-time position in Montreal.

Standout Office
Originally uploaded by standoutjobs.

I’m pleased to announce that Standout Jobs will be hosting Montreal on Rails #3 on Tuesday October 2nd.

Our offices are located at 3981 Boul. St. Laurent, Suite #615, in the Cooper Building.

The presentations are scheduled to start at 6:30pm. For more information and to register, please see the official MoR announcement.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the last two MoRs… and you will too, whether you’re a Ruby Guru, a Ruby Enthusiast, or even a Ruby Newbie. Besides, meeting other Ruby folks in Montreal is half the fun!

See you there!

Your brand is controlled by your employees. They’re the ones that are chatting about you through a variety of de-centralized streams: blogs, micro-blogging, instant message, Facebook, social networks, etc. Your job as an employer is to gather all of that data and present it in a useful way to potential candidates…unless your employees aren’t saying anything that’s particularly nice, and then you have a whole other problem to deal with.

Andy Sernovitz, a word-of-mouth marketing guru, takes it a step further in his post: The Employee Evangelists.

It’s not enough to gather up all the de-centralized bits of information spread by your employees about you — you need to be encouraging that evangelism.

Andy writes:

“Your employees should be your most powerful advocates. Are you asking them to be? Are you making it easy?”

Andy has 6 suggestions for how you can engage and encourage employees to evangelize your company, which I’m paraphrasing below (but go read the full post):

1. Involve everyone: Don’t just use marketing & PR people. Titles aren’t important, enthusiasm is the key.
2. Make it easy: Give employees the tools they need to spread the word.
3. Go where they already are: Let employees use the tools they want, whether it’s MySpace, Facebook, etc. and enable them to do so.
4. Make them stars: Public recognition beats internal rewards any day of the week.
5. Employees should be customers: Get your employees using your products, make it easy for them to do so.
6. Beer: Requires no explanation.

I’m particularly fond of #6 myself, but the others have plenty of merit too.

Your employer brand is important. It determines how candidates perceive your company. Ultimately, the best candidates will ask themselves, “Do I want to work there?” Passive candidates have to be encouraged to apply for your job openings, and your employer brand helps entice them. Just look at what Etsy does to stay open, authentic and provide an interesting experience on their site for potential candidates.

But, do you really control your own employer brand?

The simple answer is: to a degree.

Julian and Shannon make the excellent point that it’s really your employees and how they talk about your company that creates and controls your employer brand.

They use the term, “a river of reputation”, which is absolutely fantastic. Through all manner of online tools - Twitter, blogging, tumblr, micro-blogging, social networking, social media, etc. - your employees are talking about you. They’re creating a perception of your company, they’re developing its reputation.

You can’t really control that. But, you can embrace it. Julian and Shannon put together a slideshow online as a quick demonstration of how a river of reputation is created, and how it affects your employer brand.

The two most important points they make are as follows:

1. Your Employer Brand has been de-centralized into a river of continuous data streams.
2. Aggregate the data streams to create a ‘Career Channel’ full of the real content candidates care about.

Aggregating the data streams is key. But it’s also a somewhat scary proposition, to pull together everything that your employees are saying and present it in one neat package to candidates. What if they’re saying nasty things? What if it’s inappropriate? What if it’s a different representation than our corporate brand?

Remember: They’re saying these things whether you aggregate them or not. And any top candidate can easily use a search engine to find and track these data streams. You should expect them to.

When you realize employees are talking about you, and when you realize they’re the ones creating the reputation and employer brand, you can start to use the content they create to your advantage. You can regain a manner of control over the de-centralized data streams and give candidates what they need to see in order to make the right decisions about you as a great employer.

David Earle of Staffing.org has a fantastic article on the key metrics for measuring a great employer brand.

The first thing he does is tackle two misconceptions about building up a quality candidate pool:

“Two common misconceptions are: a) that great products speak for themselves, hence a reputation for product excellence will guarantee an ample supply of eager candidates; and b) that branding equals advertising, i.e. publicize compelling hiring packages in enough places, and the pipeline will fill.”

His second point really resonates with me, although a recent study reveals that most candidates (of all ages) rank a competitive base pay as the most important thing. That’s no real surprise - but what’s more surprising is that the reputation of the organization as a good employer ranked very low. Caliber of co-worker was also ranked low, although in my experience I’ve found people rank the team they work with as extremely important.

David goes on to list the characteristics of companies with great staffing brands and what counts most:

• High levels of employee enthusiasm and commitment.
• Frequent candidate referrals from employees.
• Low turnover.
• High quality recruiting procedures.
• Pipeline partnerships.
• The flow of high quality, unsolicited resumes.

Take a look at the full details David provides in his article on employer branding, there’s a lot of interesting material to digest.

Joe Kraus is a serial entrepreneur with a number of amazing successes under his belt including Excite and more recently JotSpot. One of Joe’s key messages and lessons for startup success is the importance of hiring top talent.

“Joe’s core hiring philosophy: no false positives. Bad hires really screw up your company. A Players hire A Players; B Players hire C Players; and C Players hire Losers. Although it’s hard to resist the urge to hire for the short term - don’t give in. Hire slowly and carefully - it will make the difference between success and failure.”

Of course, this makes complete sense. You want to hire top talent. But what you see amongst startups (and non-startups) is that they regularly slip into hiring less-than-stellar people. As Joe points out, “it’s hard to resist…” Hiring B or C players is easier, there are more of them, and they’re out there looking for jobs more regularly. It takes less time and effort to hire lower quality candidates.

Taking the time to hire right means learning how to present your company well, learning how to attract people. And once they find you it becomes a question of building ongoing relationships with the potential candidates. Getting to know people who might eventually, someday, want to work for you. It’s a long-term process of developing your startup as a worthwhile place to work and developing a network of people that have expressed interest.