How to Hire the Best Employees

Well known software blogger Joel Spolsky wrote a guest column for Inc Magazine on hiring the best employees. This article really gets at one of the core reasons we started NotchUp - it's really easy for any decent company to attract active job seekers, especially in a bad economy. The problem is that the people you want to hire almost always already have jobs and just getting them to listen to you is a huge challenge. Taking the easy way out and hiring quickly versus hiring well tends to be very detrimental for a company in long run - Joel pegs the delta in productivity between a top performer and an average one at 10x!

"From a recruiting perspective, the problem is that the people I consider to be in the top 1 percent in my field barely ever apply for jobs at all. That's because they already have jobs. Stimulating jobs. Jobs where their employers pay them lots of money and do whatever it takes to keep them happy. If these pros switch jobs, chances are the offer came through networking, not because they submitted a resumé somewhere or trolled a job site like Monster (NASDAQ:MNST). Many of the best developers I know took a summer internship on a whim and then stayed on. They have applied for only one or two jobs in their lives."

Joel's solution is to hire interns and then retain the top ones, and then goes on to describe his solution for attracting top interns (roll out the red carpet). What's really interesting is that when Joel calculates what his company spends aggressively attracting an intern versus what they get back, his company Fog Creek Software still comes out ahead.

You can read the full article here.

Photo by M@rcopako