Standout Jobs

Fred (CTO / Co-Founder) and I are currently in the San Francisco airport waiting for our next flight to Palm Springs. Then we’ll head to the Marriott Palm Desert where DEMO is being held.

I’m sure lots of people are already there and getting there today - I look forward to meeting them all.

The list of companies presenting is very interesting - lots of diversity. And companies from all over: Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, US, Scotland, etc.

Hopefully I’ll have some time for quick updates on the blog, and you can also follow me on Twitter — http://www.twitter.com/byosko — where I hope to update people as well.

On January 26th we’ll be flying to Palm Springs and getting ready for DEMO 08. The event itself runs from January 28th-30th. We have to be there a couple days early because our on-stage practice session is on the 27th.

Jonah Paransky has a great post highlighting some of the companies attending DEMO, and I wanted to highlight those and a few others I’ve found.

• Asankya
• atlaspost
• Big Gravity
• blist
• Caaving
• Celsias
• Citrix
• Chipin
• Circos
• Cozimo
• Eyealike
• hubdub
• huddle
• Iterasi
• Kaazing Corporation
• LegiTime
• LiquidPlanner
• LiquidTalk
• Port Space
• StackSafe

There are many more companies presenting at DEMO 08, but I haven’t found news about them yet. If you know of any, feel free to let me know!

In the meantime, there are six days until we leave, and only a few things left to do. *grin*

The short answer: Yes.

The toughest time to be recruiting is when you realize (often months too late) that you need to bring someone on board, and now, everything will be delayed or hampered because that person’s not already hired.

Liz Lynch at The Stealth Networker Blog notes that job seekers who only network when actively seeking work often have a tough time of it. She points out that active job seekers don’t network as effectively because of a “me-first” attitude and a scent of desperation. You can understand it — they need a job, and being out of work is awful. Some say looking for work is the worst thing in the world.

Her recommendation is simple:

Make networking a priority when you already HAVE a job. You’ll be rid of all scent of desperation and your me-first tendencies. Keep in touch with your contacts when you don’t need anything and they’ll be more likely to be there when you do.

Now turn that around for employers. Companies can also have a “me-first” attitude and come across as desperate when they’re trying to actively hire, and they’re way behind the 8-ball. Companies may also jump the gun, hire the wrong people, because they need to get people in the door.

The solution is simple: Companies should always be recruiting.

Companies should know their hiring plans for an extended period of time. As one person noted, that’s basically your “marketing plan.” With that in-hand, companies should always be scouring around for people. You never know when someone great will pop up on the radar.

If you’re not always looking you will miss potential candidates. And when you finally realize you need to hire someone, it’ll be too late.

Mark Davis hits the nail on the head with this: “I use a phrase that attempts to highlight the importance of hiring decisions in a company: You are what you eat and your company is who it hires.”

He goes on to say:

Simply put, excellent companies are very often comprised of excellent people. Quality in, quality out. From an operational perspective, excellent people tend to both improve efficiency and identify new opportunities. The value of these contributions often can’t be quantified when the people are being hired because excellent people create value that is unexpected. By hiring excellent people you create the potential for great things to happen.

Mark does “backtrack” a bit when he points out that sometimes you do have to settle for “good” vs. “great” if you can’t find great people.

I’d be very interested in Mark’s thoughts (and everyone else’s) on how companies can attract great people?

There’s no turning back now! Standout Jobs is very excited to announce that we’re launching at DEMO 08 in Palm Desert, California. The event runs from January 28th-30th.

This is a huge opportunity for us. The DEMO stage is really like no other. We get 6-minutes to give a product demonstration and make our pitch. It’s 2 days of networking, pitching, schmoozing and generating as much buzz as we possibly can. Only 70 companies are invited to attend, and we’re honored to be one of them.

If you’ve never taken a look at DEMO, I encourage you to do so. There have been some great presentations and companies over the years. The conference has been around a long time, is incredibly well-established and run. It’s one of the best launchpads for a tech startup.

Canadian startups have a great history with DEMO. In the last couple of years the folks at Tungle and Iotum won the coveted DEMO God Awards, given out to a handful of the top companies. I’ve spoken to both CEOs, Marc Gingras and Alec Saunders, and they impressed upon me the scale and professionalism of the event. And how much I should practice the presentation!

The focus of DEMO is on product launches, which I think is great. Your presentation is a sales pitch, of course, but you have to show a working product. No slides, graphics or any other wizardry. Just show people the product. And that’s what we’ll do…

Since we are launching at DEMO, we’re not allowed to publicly announce anything about our product until the conference.

If you’re interested in learning more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me directly by email or call: 514.582.4749. Companies in hiring mode should definitely get in touch. We can help generate some great buzz for you at DEMO, which is a wonderful opportunity to showcase your company, team, culture and recruiting needs. I’m also interested in talking to recruiters.

So there you have it. Standout Jobs will be launching at the end of the month, on-stage at DEMO. We’re looking forward to it and a great 2008!

Are you looking for top tech talent? Does your company desperately need to hire developers?

Look no further. Today I found the answer (and no this isn’t a pitch for Standout Jobs, although in a way it is) courtesy of Jim Stroud’s blog. I’m not sure how he came across this brilliant video, but I’m glad he shared it, so I could do the same.

All your recruiting needs solved, just like that. Enjoy!

(It looks like the original video is from here. Nice job!)

You do have hiring plans right? An estimate of the job openings that will become available for the next year?

Most companies put considerable effort into planning their years. And this work often happens at the end of the previous year or the beginning of the new one. Sales targets are assessed, company plans are put in place, etc. But it’s less common for companies to have an assessment of their human capital needs. And that’s a big mistake.

If you don’t know what sorts of people you’ll most likely need to hire in the coming year, how can you possible do a good job of recruiting?

You need to know as far in advance as possible that you’ll need - say a Web Developer - because you should start the recruiting process immediately. Yup, there’s no time like the present. Oftentimes when posting a job advertisement on job boards, you’re doing so months after you really could have used that person. It’s a reactionary move: “Oh oh…we really need a web developer to help us, this is getting desperate. Quick, let’s post on the job boards and hire someone ASAP.”

That’s precisely what you want to avoid. It’s not always feasible, and plans are never 100% precise, but if you had a hiring plan in place telling you that a web developer would most likely be hired, you could start the process right away. And recruiting takes time. To pick the best people you want to build relationships with them beforehand. You want to let them know as soon as possible that you’ll be hiring, so they have the time to learn about your company and decide for themselves if it’s a good fit. You need time to sell the best people on your company. A hiring plan helps you do that.

So before getting too far into 2008 sit down with your team, management, bosses, etc. and look at your potential hiring needs in 2008. And then…start recruiting…

A quick note to friends, family and those that have been following the progress of Standout Jobs in 2007 —

Happy New Year!

2008 will be a huge year for Standout Jobs. For starters, we will be launching this year (more news coming soon.) That will mean moving into a very new phase for the company. Development will certainly continue full speed ahead, but a great deal of effort will be put into making noise, marketing, partnership development and customer acquisition. I expect a bumpy, wild and exciting ride.

I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays and has a wonderful, prosperous and healthy 2008.

There’s a great article over at SystematicHR entitled The Top Role of Brand in Recruiting. It’s referencing a recent post by Tom Peters arguing against the notion of a “war for talent”. In essence, Tom’s arguing that companies shouldn’t look at recruiting as a competition, but look inwardly at their own culture and environment and how that’s projected outward to the world.

“…it’s not an externally directed “war to snatch talent from the other guy” by “being more aggressive than the competition”—but an internally directed competition against ourselves (and our outrageously strong beliefs about people) in which we aim to create an unimaginably attractive workplace.”

Tom’s certainly preaching to the choir about the importance of a company’s brand, culture and work environment. But as the SystematicHR post points out, you still need to go find people. You need to reach out, find people, and draw them into your kickass work environment, and show them why they should work with you.

This is where we get an intersection between sourcing and employer branding.

If all you’re doing is hunting for people and nothing else, you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone to join your company. You might find a lot of potential candidates, but where are you driving them? What are you selling them? If your culture, team and work environment are all hidden behind closed doors, you’re simply not providing enough information.

On the other hand, if you do a great job of promoting your brand and culture but expect that to solve all your problems; again, more trouble. You could have the best workplace in the world, with all the killer perks and an idea worth billions — but if no one (or not the right people) know about it, you won’t build up a big enough candidate pool.

SystematicHR puts it nicely, “The great brand probably can never replace a great sourcing effort, but the sourcing effort can be completely dismantled by the lack of a brand or by a negative one.”

I haven’t used this blog much for keeping people up-to-date on how we’re doing at Standout Jobs. That’s because, in part, we’re still under the radar. As well, we’re so incredibly busy that it’s hard to keep things flowing on the blog at a good pace.

Having said that, you can expect more news coming out of Standout Jobs in December and certainly into the New Year. We are working like mad fools to build the product and make sure we launch successfully. It’s an exciting time.

There’s a couple other things I want to mention. For starters, although it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, we are still hiring. We’re looking for Ruby on Rails developers, at all levels of experience. If you’re into Ruby on Rails, you want to work at a startup and you’re ready for a great experience, please get in touch with us.

As well, it’s time to announce a bit of news with respect to our financing. Although we announced some time ago that we raised money with Garage Technology Ventures Canada, that did not in fact come to pass. As we got deeper into the process with Garage, it was clear that it was not the best fit for us. We wish Garage the best of luck.

We’ll announce financing news soon. It’s all systems go at Standout Jobs, so stay tuned.