Online Communities and Their Impact on Business: Ignore at Your Peril (Introduction)
In our strategy work with tech companies, we’re frequently asked about web communities — how they operate, what they can and can’t do, and how a company should look to work with them. The companies we deal with generally fall…
Harvard Business Publishing: Umair Haque - What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t
Too often, we don’t recognize the power of platforms - even in Silicon Valley. Nilofer Merchant, Rubicon’s CEO, writes frequently on the topic and ties it together with strategy. The piece below by Umair Haque, draws an interesting difference between…
Customer Delight Produced by Delighted Employees
One thing that’s been keeping me up at night is ways to scale Rubicon. I know that ultimately we need to add staff as we have a high-class problem of serving our customers well and with the range of what they need done.
Fundamentally, I believe that great hiring is the key to customer delight. Finding an incredible employee is challenging. But my team and I really put some elbow grease into it. And in case it helps you, here’s the approach I took:
First, we wrote a compelling Rubicon_SrAssociate_062006.pdf job description. We spent time circulating this amongst the team, and getting the job description to be crisp. I had clients give me feedback so they could help ‘shape’ the role. That caused both great intelligence from another set of senior managers, but a general buy in.
2nd, I then wrote personal 1:1 emails to all the people I know in the industry who already have similar profiles. Effectively thinking that the person is already someone I know, or that someone who is similar to this job would know like-minded-skilled people. I asked them for help, knowing that asking for help is the #1 way to get people to commit to your resolution. I specifically focused on people who had recently been hiring since I knew they likely had another 10 resumes of people they liked. This went out to about 40-50 people from my email and then another few from teammates.
3rd, I wrote in my email that I was personally offering a $500 thank you / bounty for the person who does the referral that leads to the winning candidate. I wanted them to take 5 minutes and forward. I wrote the amount $500 twice in the email to get their attention. To make it seem less cheesy, I said it could buy some new shoes for women, and some new gadget for men. I heard that one of my candidates had it forward *through 4 people* to him. That gave me confidence that this worked. People sent it to groups, and essentially did the role of an HR group really well to get the word out.
4th, I only then posted the job on Linked In. For $95 bucks, you get to focus on folks already in technology since Linked In is centered on that.
5th, I put 5 questions at the back of the job description. I wanted candidates to show that they could think by answering some open ended questions. I figure I only wanted people who could write, create an argument, show their intelligence. So I used that as a screener for sheer intelligence and communication skills.
6th, I had instructions on how to submit the resume in the document itself. I wanted to see if they paid attention to detail. Then, I put a strict policy in place that anyone who submitted without following the instructions got tossed as a candidate. That took discipline on my part but I figured if they didn’t listen to instruction now, they weren’t going to listen to stuff later. This also helped weed out candidates who were just sending out their resume.
7th, I trolled. I then used my key words and spent about 4 hours trolling on Linked In and sought out candidates. I thought that did 2 things. One, it reminded people that I was looking (which raised candidates) but it got me really focused on the target skills. I found 2 unbelievable candidates from that process so I considered it well-spent time.
I think this is my biggest company decision in ‘06 which is why I spent so much time on it. And since I believe that the great brain trust on the Rubicon team, matched with our methodology, produces great results…it seems like finding the right employee is key.
Wish me luck.
Categories: Entrepreneurship & Game of Business
Tags: business , consulting
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On July 20, 2006 Marsha said:
With the right people, you can go out on a limb, take risks and win continuously. It’s a smart thing to honor the synergy that occurs between people. In doing so, we’re honoring each individual and the greater whole that our coming together creates.
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