Why We Started NotchUp

In the spring of 2007 Rob Ellis and I were working at a Silicon Valley startup together. I was the newly hired V.P. of Engineering and like many startup Execs my top priority was building a world class product development team. The time frame for completion - yesterday! It's never easy to recruit great people, and it's that much harder when you're under incredible time pressure to do so.

I was fortunate to be able to tap into my own network of past employees to bring in a few great hires, but after that we were left with the traditional methods of recruiting. We used a contract in-house recruiter, ads on Craig's List, searched on LinkedIn, posts on university alumni boards, attended job fairs... We didn't have the budget to use contingency recruiters, let alone retained search firms. We eventually built the small team we were looking to create, but it took a huge amount of time and energy. Fortunately Rob did most of the grunt work of submitting the postings, filtering the large number of unqualified applicants we received, and demonstrated that he was truly the master of making successful cold calls.

We found that when we were able to get people to listen to our pitch about our company most were interested in talking to us, but it was really hard to get someone's attention to be willing to take our call with the busy schedules and non-stop cold calls and emails successful professionals receive today. At one point Rob was talking to a Google engineer who proceeded to hang up on him before he got a chance to start describing what we do and he thought about calling him back and offering him $100 just to listen to his pitch for 10 minutes. And that thought became the genesis of what would become NotchUp.

Photo by jessica@flickr