July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Searching for a job is a stressful process that involves web searches, exhaustive emailing, networking, and ends with anxiously awaiting a phone call. However a study issued today found that job seekers are increasingly turning to mobile devices for every part of the quest for employment, starting with search.

The study was conducted by Glassdoor, a career and jobs community site. It has information on more than 250,000 companies, 20 million registered users, and 13 million monthly unique visitors. Glassdoor launched an iPad app last week and led an accompanying effort to explore mobile job seeker behavior.

Glassdoor found that 68 percent of job seekers are using their mobile device to search for jobs once a week or more. 3 in 5 job seekers has searched for jobs on their mobile device in the past year, and 30 percent search for jobs more than once a day from their phones. As anyone who has been unemployed (or in transition) knows, the state of uncertainty lends itself to compulsive searching, hoping that your dream job has popped up in the last hour.

60 percent of people are likely to search for jobs on their mobile device, while 54 percent are likely to read company reviews, 52 percent will research salary information when they are on-the-go, and 46 percent want job alerts pushed to them. One in four job seekers are deterred from applying to a job if the company’s career site is not mobile optimized, and 30 percent think applying for jobs on mobile devices is difficult. Phones are good for some tasks, but answering questions about why you are the best suited for a position is best done at an actual keyboard.

As we continue to rely on a smartphones for everything from social media contact to managing health care, job searching is likely to head in this direction as well. 84 percent of respondents said they believe mobile devices will be the most common way people search for jobs within the next five years. Mobile technology lends itself to situations where you want immediate, context-driven results. Part of looking for a job is typing in search parameters and receiving results, but word-of-mouth, referrals, and networking drive recruiting and hiring, at least in the tech world. If you hear about an opportunity while out-and-about, your phone is the clearest method to learn more.

Mobile devices are also useful for staying on top of a company’s news and being prepared for an interview. 64 percent of candidates said they check a company’s social media channels in the hours before an interview. 43 percent of candidates use their smartphones before an interview to read the job description and 34 percent said they visit the company’s website. Once the interview starts however, 78 percent avoid using their phones.

Glassdoor surveyed 1,100 employees and job seekers online. The company has raised $42.2 million to date and is based in Sausalito, California.

Photo Credit:antrophe/Flickr

Mystery funding of the day? That’d be YesGraph, a stealthy startup in the recruiting space founded by Ivan Kirigin, a former product manager at Facebook and Dropbox.

Kirigin today secured $1.2 million of a $1.8 million round, according to a Form D. A total of seven angel investors participated in the funding.

“The financing has enabled us to build a good product and hire talent — there is a lot that is hard about this space,” said Kirigin on a phone call.

Ivan Kirigin

Kirigin would not say much about the product at this stage. But he did reveal that YesGraph is building tools for tech companies to improve the hiring experience — and not just the “output.” To that end, Kirigin just released a survey, an attempt to find patterns in how startups make their first hires.

“Companies have a hard time hiring good people — we are trying to help them,” he added.

Serial entrepreneur Kirigin is also the founder of a micro-payments service called Tipjoy, which both Facebook and Twitter considered acquiring, TechCrunch reported. After negotiations fell through with Facebook, the company made Kirigin an offer, and he joined in 2009 to work on a virtual currency product. He would later join Dropbox, where he claims on his LinkedIn page to have helped drive growth 12X over 2 years.

Investors in Kirigin’s previous company Tipjoy include Chris Sacca and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham.

Top image via Shutterstock

Collegefeed is a social network along the lines of LinkedIn, but it’s geared toward students and recent graduates. The online career marketplace helps them find desirable opportunities and companies use the network to search for candidates without having to go from campus-to-campus.

Founder Sanjeev Agrawal used to be Google’s head of products. He observed college students struggling to enter the workforce and saddled by record amounts of debt. At the same time, companies like Google were struggling to fill open positions and willing to spend thousands of dollars to find the right candidate. LinkedIn and Monster.com are often not effective for students who don’t have the professional network or work experience to stand out, and on-the-ground recruiting is a time-consuming and expensive process for employers.

This is the problem Collegefeed is trying to solve.

“It is no easier to get a good start in life today than it was 20 years ago preweb, presocial, premobile,” Agrawal said in a Q&A. “Starting this week, 1-plus million new college graduates will struggle to enter the workforce. Almost 50 percent of them will fail, according to most recent research, but more and more companies understand that their future is somewhere in college right now. Think of Collegefeed as a social career platform that brings together students, employers, alums, industry insiders and college career services in one place.”

Students create short profiles with their work experience, skill sets, and interests and the system will search for matching jobs and internships. They can also enter the names of companies they like and a recommendation engine will suggest similar companies and jobs, “like Netflix does for movies.” Agrawal said this will help them discover new opportunities with companies they may not have heard of or considered before. Students can browse through custom news feeds with updates on their preferred employers. It also has networking and educational opportunities, and students can share experiences with each other.

Employers on Collegefeed benefit from access to a wider network of potential hires at a lower cost. They can push content to news feeds, sponsor contests, and get a newsfeed of their own with recommended students.

Collegefeed launched in private beta in March with Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie Melon. Agrawal said students have already secured interviews, jobs, internships, and financial awards with companies including YouTube, eBay, Facebook, Morgan Stanley, and Microsoft. Today, Collegefeed is open nationwide to any students and employer.

Agrawal said that over the past few years, multiple companies have popped up using social media to address challenges in recruiting and hiring, but “no-one has created a new social network that combines everything together in one place for both students and employers.” Competitors include LinkedIn, Readyforce, and AfterCollege. However, Collegefeed makes use of “push” technology and the popularity of news feeds to curate, aggregate, and present the information in digestible form to both students and employers.

The founding team of six has 10 college degrees between them and is based in Mountain View, Calif. It’s a bootstrapped company.

Neil Parker is VP of product marketing at Vision Critical.

“The Chief Customer Officer is a powerful asset that can help resolve chronic customer issues, create sustainable competitive advantage, help retain profitable customers, and drive profitable customer behavior through the effective customer strategy…Creating the role is a serious undertaking and executives must be firmly committed to supporting the role vocally and visibly to ensure the CCO has the authority and credibility that is necessary for success.” – Chief Customer Officer Council

In 2011, Forrester boldly called the era we’re in the age of the customer, a time when focus on the customer matters more than ever before. In this era, Forrester argues that companies need to start treating customer experience as a business discipline instead of a cliché.

The age of the customer has rightfully put the spotlight on the buyer experience—and ultimately the arrival of the chief customer officer.

The role of CCO (which also sometimes stands for chief client officer) has been around for some time, and originally grew organically out of frustrations with organizations who realized no one person in the organization owned the end-to-end customer experience. In most organizations, multiple departments share the responsibility for customer experience. Marketing, sales, professional services, account managers, customer support, training, legal, and accounting are just some of the departments that have some touch points with customers.

During the Gartner Customer 360 Summit this year, it was revealed that there are more than 2,000 companies who have a chief customer officer now.  This number is growing, but it’s a small number in comparison to other C-suite roles.

You may wonder – does your company need a CCO? In my opinion, CEOs thinking of adding this role might want to pause and think about the following challenges.

1) The role is still poorly defined.

As a relatively new position in many companies, the CCO’s day-to-day tasks are broad—and also very vague.

The CCO responsibilities typically include customer service, customer acquisition and retention, and most importantly, customer advocacy.  While many organizations have a customer reference program, customer advisory councils and customer retention programs, customer advocacy is often sorely lacking.

CCOs centralize the ownership of the customer relationship; they ensure long-term value is created in the relationship between the brand and the customer: a two-way street benefiting both parties.

Essentially, the CCO is expected to form deep personal relationships with the company’s customers to truly understand them. This broad description sometimes discourages companies from hiring a CCO.

2) CCOs are difficult to find and difficult to keep

CCOs need to have depth in various practices across the organization—a leadership characteristic that isn’t easy to find.  CCOs typically bring marketing, sales, distribution, customer service and support experience to their role.

Because of the depth of expertise required for the position, bringing a CCO from outside the organization isn’t easy. In fact, 55 percent of CCOs are internal hires with a median time at their firms of more than seven years.

Successful CCOs orchestrate organization-wide change, a difficult task that requires collaborating with a wide range of employees and partners in the company.  This shift in culture requires leadership skills, but also influence and trust.

With an average tenure of only 26 months, the CCO role is the most fragile in the c-suite. As the Chief Customer Officer Council notes, many new CCOs are relatively new at their jobs. The CCO’s role is stressful with an extreme scope and a massive potential for error and scrutiny. Picking the right person for the job is no easy task.

3) The need for CCOs signals deeper issues

Before hiring a CCO, a logical question from the CEO is this: why do I need one in the first place? Is it because our culture has forgotten the importance of the customer? Is it because the voice of the customer is silenced in our internal meetings, or given mere lip service?

If your executives and rank and file are so separated from the values of—and the voice of—your customers, you may have a systemic problem. Without addressing these tough issues first, hiring a CCO is nothing but a Band-Aid solution.

Before adding a CCO to your team, it is worthwhile to get a holistic view of your business. Are you building a customer-centric organization from the top down? Are you listening to your customers on social media? Are your customer touch points being recorded, measured and improved? Are you measuring the right things to determine how consumers perceive your brand? Do you have a community of customers who will honestly tell you when things aren’t working?

The transition to a truly customer-centric organization is no easy task. While adding a CCO to your team is a good way to drive change, it shouldn’t be an attempt to result your organization’s complete failure to serve customers well. If you’d like to learn more about this role, I recommend Chief Customer Officer by Jeannie Bliss, a book she wrote based on her 25-year experience as a CCO.

Happy customers art via Shutterstock

Neil Parker is VP of product marketing at Vision Critical. He’s enjoyed the last 17 years of his career in Product Management and Marketing, including senior roles at Glenayre (paging infrastructure), Infowave (wireless software), Sierra Wireless (mobile devices and software), and most recently, Contigo Systems (wireless location-based services). He has held a variety of leadership roles, and has managed product, engineering, customer service and sales teams. Neil has enjoyed bringing customer-ready solutions to market for wireless network operators, infrastructure manufacturers, enterprises, and consumers alike.

With Microsoft’s chief financial officer Peter Klein announcing that he would step down from the position during the Q3 2012 earnings, the company announced today that corporate vice president Amy Hood will take over the role effective immediately.

Hood has spent over a decade at Microsoft, having previously worked as the CFO of Microsoft Business Division, which is responsible for its suite of Microsoft Office products and cloud-based Office 365 services. She was also “instrumental,” according to chief exec Steve Ballmer, during the high-dollar acquisitions of both Yammer and Skype over the few years. Prior to her time a Microsoft, Hood worked in various roles for Goldman Sachs. So basically, she’s got plenty of experience working with the company’s largest services and divisions.

As for Klein, he’ll stick around to assist Hood with the transitional period through June 2013. The company didn’t indicate his future career plans.

“I’m excited to step into this role and look forward to working closely again with our investors and shareholders,” Hood said in a statement. “Peter has built a world-class finance team, and I am set up well to continue the company’s strong discipline around costs and focus on driving shareholder value.”

Photo via Microsoft

Music and TV discovery/bookmarking service Shazam has hired former Yahoo executive Rich Riley as its new chief executive, the company announced today.

Shazam is best known for its mobile applications that allow people to identify music that’s playing in the background. The company is now offering its technology to identify television shows that are currently playing. Both the music and TV show ID tech comes with social tools that let you connect with friends and family. The service claims to have 300 million users (90 million in the U.S. alone) in over 200 countries. The company makes money through adverting and by driving affiliate sales to music stores like Apple’s iTunes and Amazon.

Riley, who was previously in charge of the Americas during his time at Yahoo, will replace outgoing CEO Andrew Fisher who will shift to Shazam’s executive chairman. Fisher said he plans to focus on Shazam going public in the near future while Riley strengthens the company’s advertising in second-screen TV advertising.

“With 300 million install base and 2 million new users per week, there’s a tremendous opportunity to bring new advertising opportunities into TV and letting consumers connect with those advertisements,” Riley said in an interview with VentureBeat.” Both he and Fisher reiterated that point specifically, noting that the TV ad industry was a $3 billion per year business. “We don’t want to go after the digital budgets of popular brands, we want a portion of the regular commercial TV budget.”

The company said it wants to sign on more brands and companies to help prolong that 30-second commercial into nearly three minutes of engagement. Riley used the example of playing a full trailer as opposed to a 30-second cut as one way to do this. I’m not sure that would make sense for every brand right out of the box, but I suppose it is possible. (For example, how many people would really be engaged for three minutes about laundry detergent?)

As for going public, the company isn’t setting any dates — meaning we won’t see Shazam make an initial public offering this year.

“There’s a lot of work to do at Shazam to get us ready for the public arena,” Fisher said. “We’re not in a rush to go public, but we are in a rush to build a successful business.” He noted that the company’s ambitions have changed drastically over the past two years, and the recent hires of Riley and former BBC staffer Daniel Danker as chief product officer are only the first steps.

Founded in 2002, the London-based startup has $32 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, Acacia Capital, and DN Capital.

Photo via Shazam

Murphy joined Yahoo in November 2010 as the VP of engineering for cloud services. Murphy was poached by Blake Irving, Yahoo’s former chief product officer, who became CEO of Go Daddy on Jan. 7, according to a report in AllThingsD. In that short time period, Irving has already taken another Yahoo employee, SVP of consumer and global platform group James Carroll, who is now in charge of Go Daddy’s international efforts.

“From my perspective as a product guy, Go Daddy is not yet a world class platform, but we have the opportunity to build the largest scale platform for tiny micro-businesses in the world,” said Irving in an interview with VentureBeat. “What you saw today is Elissa Murphy saying she thinks this is an amazing story and different from other companies. You can be a cog in a company that has already changed the world in a significant way, or you can come to a company that is poised to do it and be the reason that happened.”

With two defections in two weeks, Irving has quite the track record. Go Daddy is the world’s largest provider of web hosting, domain name registrations, and SSL certificates. He joined Go Daddy to fuel growth at home and abroad, and change the way people view the brand. Irving said recruiting top people with expertise at building global technology companies is a priority, and he has also hired employees away from Google, eBay, and Microsoft.

“Go Daddy is a sort of unknown quantity within the technology community, few people know what we really do,” he said. “We are doing something huge and making that apparent through hiring right now. I am looking for people who have done big things and are taking on things that are important. Every person I have hired shares a passion for customers and wants to do something good. You will start seeing us make that apparent to marketplace over next months.”

Photo Credit: Life at Yahoo blog

InnovateCV will be launching a new company and product, Apploi, in April. I chatted with CEO Adam Lewis about the new product which, taken to its logical conclusion, could obsolete much of the founding company.

“Our enemy is the resume,” Lewis said. “We want candidates to show their true colors  … which you can’t do in a black and white resume.”

Apploi is a modern, mobile solution to the problem of finding employees, or, if you’re a jobseeker, a job.

Essentially, it’s a tablet app which walks candidates through a short and customizable series of basic questions, and then gets to the interesting part: video answers, audio answers, sliders to indicated data like hours of availability, and quick, simple tap-to-submit multiple choice answers. The goal is to give jobseekers the ability to be unique, be interesting, and be memorable … and to give hiring managers the ability to get a much deeper sense of what candidates are like than can be derived from a resume or an applicant tracking system.

At first, Apploi will target high-turnover industries like food and support services, Lewis said, starting in New York and working into InnovateCV’s biggest markets soon after. It’s multi-user, so an owner can use it for multiple businesses, or any particular group of owners can form a group as well, allowing them to share questions and formats without have to recreate the wheel.

“Rather than redoing the resume, which is an old, tired paradigm, it’s reinventing the resume,” Lewis said. “The beauty of this is that it’s very light-touch, very simple for companies.”

Lewis has adopted a pay-as-you-go methodology for Apploi: 40 responses to 40 resumes will cost you $39. The rate goes down as the number of responses goes up. And the results can be fed into an applicant tracking system, if companies wish to do so.

The iPad app will be out first, within a week, and an Android tablet app will follow about six weeks later.

But Lewis and company will have their work cut out for them. Hiring and recruiting is an intensely competitive space, and I see a ton on new startups who are focusing on hiring and recruiting, including KarmaHire, Zao, Path.io, GetHired, Quixey, Wowzer, enRecruit, VisualCV, and Spark Hire.

photo credit: pursuethepassion via photopin cc

DeveloperAuction, a startup that focuses on…

No, let’s make this interesting.

Complete the sentence, multiple choice! DeveloperAuction is ___________:

A) A mobile app that lets you share photos with your friends. But this one’s totally different, I swear.
B) Airbnb for oil tankers.
C) A site that helps developers get jobs.
D) Subscription commerce for the $10 billion bear-hunting industry. It’s been 12 days since the last accidental postal-worker bear-trap maiming!
E) In stealth mode. Sad trombone sound effect.

If you guessed C, you might be literate! DeveloperAuction, as the name would imply, lets developers set up sexy websites for themselves and try to find new job opportunities. It gives them tags for skills, brief résumés, and even handy GitHub widgets. In that sense, it’s very much like Work for Pie.

But wait! There’s a twist: the “auction” part of DeveloperAuction, where companies get two weeks to bid on top candidates.

To date, the startup tells us via email, the platform has played host to around $225 million in job offers. And with today’s news, the company is seeing some inbound cash as well: $2.7 million in a first round of institutional funding led by NEA and Sierra Ventures with participation from Google Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and Jeff Clavier’s
SoftTech VC.

“The most common tactic for recruiters is spamming LinkedIn, and it’s not unusual for a Silicon Valley engineer to receive 30-50 unsolicited and off-base LinkedIn messages a month from recruiters,” said co-founder/CEO Matt Mickiewicz in a statement on the news.

“It’s a waste of time and resources for all parties involved.”

So, auctions. In the current inflated developer job market, when there’s a lot more demand than supply, these kinds of tactics presumably work well and cater to market dynamics.

There are a couple other interesting twists: The site will only feature 300 auctions each month, so only the top talent will be sold to the highest bidder. Each dev gets his or her own agent, who represents and guides the dev through the process. And if a dev gets a job through DeveloperAuction, the company pays out a signing bonus.

DeveloperAuction is based in San Francisco and was founded by Mickiewicz (99designs founder), Douglas Feirstein (LiveOps founder), and Allan Grant, serial entrepreneur.

Image credit: Shutterstock/leedsn

This post is written by VentureBeat contributor Jon Soberg 

I recently wrote a post entitled “Hiring B players will kill your startup” and I got some great feedback, ranging from supportive to visceral. I would expect nothing less from a topic so important.  A few of the comments addressed a related topic — the growth and development of B players to become A players — so I decided to write a follow-up piece.

Let me start with a simple statement: B players will not become A players.

Why not? 

I make this statement because moving up is difficult, and it rarely happens.  B players in an organization either don’t have the right skills, the right drive, the right fit, or a combination of all these.

Does this mean if someone is an average employee, they can’t be a great person?  Of course not.  One of my favorite comments I received involved deciding on a brain surgeon. Would you opt for the best (the A player), or the average (C player) surgeon with better bedside manner?  I think nearly everyone would opt for the best surgeon.

If you need a specific set of skills, attributes and attitudes, and a person doesn’t have them, you will be hard-pressed to discover them hidden somewhere.

The best managers can’t optimize everyone’s performance 

Before the comments flow about how this is not black and white, let me delve into context.  I am fully aware that I am not talking about inanimate objects, and that these are not absolutes.  I’m also not going to try to argue with anyone about exceptions.  Of course there are exceptions.  The world doesn’t fit nicely into a bell curve.

That said, the world grades on a curve.  Valedictorian status is given to the best student, not to everyone for giving their best effort.  This isn’t Lake Wobegon — all employees are NOT above average.

Leadership, culture, and many factors contribute to each person’s performance, both in absolute terms, and on a daily basis.  There is no question that environment plays a big role.  There is a full nature versus nurture argument, but organizational culture rarely adapts and even the best managers are hard-pressed to optimize everyone’s individual performance. Many people believe that a great manager can make everyone perform at their best.  I totally agree, but the A players working for that manager will outperform the B players. The best teachers in the world still have some A students, some B’s and some C’s and below.

B players won’t become A players:

1. Within the same organization;
2. Within their role.

Suffice it to say here that taking someone who is coasting in one role and shifting them to another rarely turns them into your best employee.  How many great managers reading this post can relate to having one or two “go-to” people on the team who always rise to the challenge?

A Players versus B Players

The difference between B players and A players is not measured by intelligence, education or raw skill.  It isn’t about who went to Harvard, and who didn’t.  A players possess the rare combination of drive, intelligence and pride in their work that is above and beyond the norm.  They don’t associate their names with anything short of excellence.  The best of the best are those with the lethal combination of natural talent coupled with drive.

At the top of the spectrum, A players are dynamic leaders and visionaries — they take on huge challenges that would seem insurmountable by others. But A players can be great at any level, and in different roles.  We have all had the experience when we spoke to a great customer service person who went above and beyond.  A players tend to transcend roles; they excel, wherever they are.

As soon as I mention the term “A Player” most people have images of Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, or Steve Jobs. These people are obviously A players, but the key to their success is only partially their innate abilities.  Renowned for their extreme drive, work ethic, and attention to detail, none of them wanted a flaw in their game or their products. A Players don’t have to be selfish, prima donnas, or arrogant.  Plenty are, but that isn’t what makes an A Player.  Some of the most accomplished people I know are humble team-players.

Some will argue that coaching and leadership can make B players into A players.  In some circumstances, that is true, but in most business cases, it just doesn’t happen.  Work ethic is tough to change.  Initiative doesn’t simply appear.  Attention to detail is not simple to coach.  Not saying these areas can’t improve, but you don’t normally see quantum leaps.

Bottom Line

Everyone cannot be an A player.  This is the harsh reality.  In the US we idolize people like Jack Welch, who famously advocates cutting the bottom 10 percent of an organization every year.  It gets more difficult when the worst people are already gone, but at the end of the day, even when it gets difficult, some people perform better than others.  In our competitive world, only a small percentage of people are truly A players, and moving into that echelon from below doesn’t happen often.

Jon Soberg is a Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, where he invests in early stage companies, specializing in FinTech, SaaS, and eCommerce. Prior to joining Blumberg Capital, Jon has been a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in multiple companies including Ditech, Broadband Digital Group and Adforce, which had a highly successful IPO.  

A CFA Charterholder and adjunct faculty in the Wharton Marketing Department, Jon earned a B.S in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, an M.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University, and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from the Wharton School, where he is a Palmer Scholar.

Top image via wavebreakmedia // Shutterstock

Top image via Shutterstock

I tweeted to female entrepreneurs and developers to ask whether they enjoy the “women in tech” conversation or avoid it, and why. I hit a nerve and received dozens of responses, which we compiled using Storify. Check it out at the bottom.  

Silicon Valley’s tech industry still has a gender problem.

The woman-in-tech topic has been debated ad nauseam for years. You might be bored sick of it, but the numbers refuse to budge.

“We don’t want to be seen as crazy bitches moaning about the same issue,” explained Jenn Wei, a twentysomething investor at Blumberg Capital, when asked about the lack of women in venture capital.

Women represent less than 10 percent of venture capitalists, and they have been leaving the industry at twice the rate of men, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Wei is well aware of the gender imbalance and has written about it, but said she is fearful about “overplaying the victim card.”

For this reason, women in the male-dominated tech industry have historically shunned the topic, particularly in conversations with the press.

Former Epiphany chief executive Karen Richardson was one of the few women executives in tech in the 1990s and 2000s, and she spent most of her career deflecting questions about gender. It was considered “whiny and snively” to draw attention to it, she said.

But the tide is changing. With the emergence of all-female workshops, meetups, and social groups like Women 2.0 and Women Who Code, many female entrepreneurs that were shy are now forcing the issue. And better yet, they are banding together with men — and each other — to actively make improvements.

“For the first time in over 30 years, the gender conversation can be a productive dialogue,” Richardson said.

We can all stand to benefit from a more balanced workforce. A recent report from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology observed that gender and ethnic diversity in a workplace strengthens decision-making, and diverse teams tend to be more innovative. Women-led startups are proving to be more capital-efficient, and venture-backed 
companies run by a woman have 12 percent higher revenues than others, according to research by Illuminate Ventures.

Many women say it’s a great time to be in tech, although they believe there is a long journey ahead and much progress still needs to be made. The primary problems they currently face, and their suggested solutions are the following:

‘It was harder for me to gain the same level of respect…’

Knotch’s team (L-R): CEO Anda Gansca, Designer Rebecca Chaika, CTO Stephanie Volftsun.

Stephanie Volftsun is the technical lead at all-female tech startup, which is a surprise to most people that she meets.

Female chief technical officers and senior engineers are a rare breed in Silicon Valley. Why? Women’s share of bachelor’s degrees in computer science at colleges and universities is decreasing, according to the National Science Foundation.

Volfstun is the daughter of Russian immigrants — both engineers — and has been coding for most of her life. At 23, she is a “full stack” engineer, meaning that she can build mobile stack, web stack, or native applications for her startup, Knotch.

Volftsun would earn a six-figure salary at any tech company, but she is reluctant to work at a male-dominated tech startup again.

“At college, I didn’t feel the pressure of being the only girl in my computer science classes because everyone starts out on a blank slate and you have your grades to build you up,” Volftsun said.

As a professional (she landed her first job as a back-end engineer at financial technology startup Addepar), she found it more difficult to prove herself to her fellow developers. “It was harder for me to gain the same level of respect my male peers had,” she said.

This perspective is shared by hundreds of women in the tech industry, according to a report by the Level Playing Field Institute. Its 2011 study found that IT workplaces, including tech startups, can create hostile or unpleasant environments for women and people of color, prompting those employees to seek out other industries.

The problem isn’t just too few female engineering grads — it’s that junior-level programmers are leaving the industry in their droves.

The NSF conducted deeper research that revealed that workplace culture is a big problem. In a survey of almost 4,000 female engineers, a third of respondents said they left the industry due to a bad boss or negative working environment.

One quote from the NSF report is particularly troubling, especially as it reflects the experience of many women: “At my last engineering job, women were fed up with the culture: arrogant, inflexible, completely money-driven, sometimes unethical, intolerant of differences in values and priorities. I felt alienated in spite of spending my whole career trying to act like a man.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Wherry cofounded a startup called Meebo, which raised $70 million from True Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Draper Fisher Jurveston, Khosla Ventures, and others before Google acquired the company for $100 million in 2012. Meebo provided social-messaging and advertising tools that helped publishers achieve greater engagement with their users.

Meebo began to takeoff in 2009 and Wherry needed to double her JavaScript team by the end of the year to meet the companies first real revenue target.

“If I didn’t, innovation would stall, and without revenue, our business would in serious jeopardy,” she wrote in a post on her personal blog.

To make the situation worse, Meebo’s recruiting team lost many of its core member to maternity leave. To find the best developers, Wherry needed to find the best recruiters, and to find the best recruiters, she needed bait.

So she created a fake online persona named Pete London, a JavaScript “ninja.” Wherry wrote a resume and posted it on LinkedIn. Shortly after, the interest began to flow. “Pete” began receiving email from Google, Mozilla, Bing, and Facebook. He got 530 messages from 382 recruiters across 172 organizations and averaged a ping every 40 hours.

Wherry recently told this tale at First Round Capital’s CTO Summit last month. She said Pete was also offered seven iPads, one Xbox, one MacBook Air, $1,000 referral cash incentives, two $10,000 referral cash incentives, eight coffees, seven phone calls, and six lunch invites.

The whole experience taught Wherry a few valuable lessons about the battleground of recruiting technical talent to work at startups rather than Google or Facebook. She advised, “going guerrilla,” which means searching outside of LinkedIn for talent, emphasizing what makes your startup unique (beyond being a startup), and shelling out for professional (trustworthy) recruiter until the company can afford its own team.

Everyone trying to build a strong and growing technology company is faced with this problem. Hiring top-notch technical talent is a crucial part of building a successful startup. The ideas and network can be great, but without the technology to execute and scale, a company won’t get anywhere. If only technology could form real developers, instead of fake Internet ones. 3D printing and robotics are at least a step in the right direction.

Photo Credit: JulyYu/Flickr

Cliff McKinney is CEO of Work for Pie.

Having talked to lots of companies about recruiting, I know that most struggle with some version of the same gripe: Hiring great developers is hard, and it’s getting harder by the day.

Most blame external forces for the difficulty like the talent shortage, or how all the best developers get swallowed up by competitors with deeper pockets. But in my experiences, very few people point the finger where it truly belongs, which is right back at themselves.

Recruiting is one of those things that most people talk a lot about, but that few do with any kind of real effort. It’s one of those important but not urgent tasks that never quite gets fully addressed. But hiring isn’t getting any easier, and you should know that your lack of success — despite all those alledged external factors — is decidedly your fault.

Still, there’s hope for people who really want to learn from past mistakes and get better at recruiting awesome developers over time. And if you have a great company, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to find plenty of great people to come work for you. Here’s how to start:

Think proactively

Most people look at recruiting and hiring as a reactive activity. An employee leaves, so it’s time to start looking for her replacement. Best case, this approach means more work for your existing employees, and worst case it means that you give up and settle for a warm body rather than the ideal candidate.

Reactive recruiting is the wrong approach. You know your company is going to grow, and you know that folks are going to leave from time to time. Plan for it. Think about recruiting before you have to recruit. Recruit the best candidates year round, regardless of whether you have positions available for them. The time will come when you do, and if you’ve taken the time to build a genuine relationship in advance, chances are much better that they’ll be there waiting.

Proactive recruiting does one thing that puts those who do it miles ahead of other companies: it eliminates perfect timing as a part of the recruiting equation. There are lots of great candidates out there, but not all of them are going to be searching for a new job at the exact time you have a new job available. Understand that and address it by recruiting them when they’re looking, not necessarily when you are.

Understand that the best outcome is not a job application

Think back to the last time you changed jobs. There’s a good chance you hit up giantjobboard.com (not a real site), entered something like keyword: “Ruby on Rails”, location: San Francisco, spent all of two seconds on most of the posts, and flagged a few that seemed interesting. If you’re like most of us, you did not apply, even for the positions that seemed interesting. The job board was only the first step.

Changing jobs is a big, potentially life-changing thing. It’s not a decision that’s made in a few seconds. Candidates do research. They visit company websites, they look for pictures of the office, they read the blog, they search for interview tips, and they do a million other things before they even decide to apply.

The initial goal in proactive recruiting is not to have candidates apply to your open position. The initial goal is to become a part of the conversation the candidate is going to have with her friends, her spouse, and herself. You know job candidates are going to research your company. Your job is to make sure they’re not learning all of that stuff from sources you don’t control. So that’s where the work comes in.

Here are some tips for get started:

• Write blog posts about your work environment, your interview process, and how you work. Just once or twice a month is enough to keep the content fresh. See Zach Holman’s excellent “How Github Works” series for inspiration.
• Make sure that your social profiles are up to date and have relevant information for potential employees. Make sure the URLs match something a candidate will actually search for. Otherwise, Googling doesn’t help.
• Spend time (and yes, even money) on your careers page. Include pictures and avoid boilerplate. Job candidates are humans. Treat the copy on your careers page accordingly. See the awesome AirBnB jobs site for inspiration.
• If your office is awesome, then make sure pictures of it are all over the place. Put them on Facebook, Tumblr, Instragram, etc.
• If your team is awesome, then show them off. Let them guest post to your blog. Send them to meetups and conferences on your dime. Get them out into the world advocating for your (their) company.

That’s it — or at the very least this should give you a good start. Remember, proactive hiring is not about a transaction — either I apply or I don’t — it’s about building a relationship. And building a relationship means being a part of the conversation first.

Cliff McKinney is CEO of Work for Pie, a startup that hopes to greatly improve the process of recruiting technical talent by increasing transparency and communication between developers and companies. This Spring, they’ll be launching Kufikia, a service designed to help seasoned developers learn new technology and find better jobs.

Groupon’s board of directors is looking outside its current management for candidates that could assume the now vacant position of CEO, according to a Bloomberg report that cites anonymous sources familiar with the situation.

Last week, long-time Groupon CEO and founder Andrew Mason was terminated from his post after the company lost a fifth of its value and for its consistently disappointing quarterly earnings. The move was hardly a surprise, with several critics on Wall Street clamoring for Mason’s departure November. And until Groupon finds a replacement, executive chairman Eric Lefkofsky and vice chairman Ted Leonsis have been appointed as temporary leaders.

The company’s dismal financial results come just as consumer demand for online-coupon services like Groupon have drastically cooled down compared to a year ago. However, it seems that the board is still confident in the group-deal business model, just not its execution thus far.

According to Bloomberg’s sources, the board’s decision to look for an external leader means Groupon Chief Operating Officer Kal Raman isn’t being considered for the position. Also, Lefkofsky, Leonsis, and other board members are also out of the running, according to Groupon.

Whomever the board does determine as a credible candidate to take over, they will likely have a hell of a time turning Groupon’s dismal business around.

After a four-year stint as CEO of Federated Media Publishing, Deanna Brown is stepping down from the position, the company announced today.

But Brown, who helped FMP’s ad network audience reach grow larger than long-time competitors AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft, is leaving the company in good hands. FMP founder John Battelle will assume the role of chief exec in addition to his duties as executive chairman of Federated Media’s board.

FMP is among the top ad agencies in the industry, with 180 million monthly unique page views and over 145,000 publishing (content) partners. [Disclosure: VentureBeat is one of Federated Media's publishing partners.] Back in November, the company made a big shift to its business strategy by getting out of banner ad sales. The company is now focusing its resources on growing both conversational/native advertising (sponsored posts, special sections) and programmatic advertising (Lijit, or automatically displayed ads).

Battelle was initially succeeded as CEO by Brown after deciding to take a step back from the company he helped launch in 2005, but he admitted how much he missed the role in a recent blog post. He plans to continue running events and has hired a coauthor to finish work on a forthcoming book.

As for FMP’s future, Battelle writes:

I am utterly convinced that the media company of tomorrow will have both a technology-driven programmatic foundation, as well as the ability to execute bespoke, beautiful ideas on behalf of the entire media ecosystem – creators, marketers, and communities. When you bring the scale and precision of data-driven platforms to the brilliance of great media executions, magic will happen. Delivering on that vision for the Independent Web is the mission of Federated Media Publishing. And I couldn’t be more excited to rejoin the company as its next CEO.

Brown will continue working at FMP with Battelle through March to ensure a smooth transition, but she declined to disclose where she’s headed next.

By Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, 

When scaling a company, it’s the easy things that become most difficult. Whether you’re bringing on new employees, organizing team workloads, or simply trying to keep open lines of communication, bigger teams often mean bigger headaches.

In five years, Xtreme Labs has grown from an office of eight to a staff of 250.

While many companies stumble at this point, our business goals for 2013 require us to bring on 100 more people by year’s end. How did we reach this point and what will allow us to meet the growth required for 2013, you ask?

Here are three tips that every growing software company needs to consider in order to grow consistently, efficiently and effectively.

Hire fast, fire faster

This mantra comes from entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster.

Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance. Candidates often test as false positives and false negatives. For example, a candidate could have the ideal skill-set for the position, but may not have put her best foot forward in a two-hour interview. When software companies ask coding questions, expect answers on whiteboards, and disqualify for giving the wrong answer, they are forgetting that most people don’t write code on whiteboards.

This scenario sets the candidate up to fail because it forces her to use a method that few engineers use in their regular workday.

The opposite may also happen: she may have mastered the interview, but is an incompatible fit in skills or culture. How do you counteract these scenarios?

Don’t drop the concept of a defined interview process altogether. Instead, recognize that interviews aren’t perfect. Ask challenging questions that try to establish how the candidate thinks, and don’t disqualify someone for giving the wrong answer.

Organize your work environment to be a good indicator of whether or not an individual is a good fit relatively quickly. This is a better predictor of performance because it uses real in-work data instead of interview data. Instead of trying to create questions that elicit a symptom of fit, build performance indicators directly into the culture and work experience. A lot of companies follow a “hire slow, fire fast” mentality, which involves an extremely rigorous interview process but often results in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Instead of using the interview as the proxy for performance, use an internship or a few months of work experience, for valid, real-world data. Recognize that “the map is not the territory;” a great interviewee is not equivalent to a great employee.

Monotasking = efficiency

Over the past few years, it has become normal for people to do many things at the same time. Now, we’re starting to go overboard with it.

In multitasking, the time it takes to switch between tasks, also known as the context switch, becomes extremely expensive as more and more tasks are attempted simultaneously. When you examine context switching costs in aggregate, it’s clear that multitasking wastes a lot of time.

People often think the end-goal is to be the most efficient multitasker possible. They take joy and relief, in catching up on their e-mails during a meeting. However, multitasking often leads to messing two things up simultaneously. Should we be rewarding employees for this behavior?

Emphasize the idea of monotasking—doing one thing at a time.

Implement processes like pair programming that allow your engineers to monotask. Teams of two that are accountable to each other are less likely to get distracted by e-mail, the Internet and social networks. Consider organizing an open, agile team room where everyone can see what others are up to.

Don’t let the calendar dictate when to meet

It’s extremely difficult to have an effective one-on-one meeting.

People are busy and often don’t prepare properly. An effective one-on-one requires both sides to be in the right mindset and to queue up topics, requiring regular bookkeeping. However, these necessities usually don’t coincide in the real world, and the reason why is simple: A career reflection moment is unlikely to happen during a scheduled one-on-one.

When an issue arises, come together and fix it right away. Being available to host an impromptu meeting allows employees to grab you for a chat while the topic and context are fresh. It’s also possible to combine the merits of an unscheduled one-on-one with a 15 or 20-minute lag time in order for both sides to prepare properly.

As companies grow in size, coordination costs increase. As headcount increases so does the overall communication. A potential alternative to unscheduled one-on-ones is to host scheduled meetings, and cancel them if neither side needs it. At the end of the day, everyone has their own management style, and it important for managers to remain flexible when communicating with their team.

Filtering out candidates post-hire, monotasking, and impromptu meetings, are just a few of the principles we’ve used at Xtreme Labs to guide our growth while protecting our company culture.

If you’re managing a fast-growing company, we hope they come in handy for you too.

Realistically, the company will need a lot of its own good karma to win in this super-competitive startup niche. But CEO James Clift is optimistic:

“We’ve been able to convert about three times better than the industry average,” Clift says. “And we’re just getting started.”

Source: John Koetsier

KarmaHire CEO James Clift

KarmaHire’s flipping the funnel, in a sense, on recruiting. While most job ads these days are about what companies want from people, Clift is switching that to what people want from companies. A huge shift the company has uncovered, he says, is that huge numbers of people are not looking or that starter job or the subsistence salary. Instead, they’re looking for a great working environment and hard problems to solve.

Seventy-five percent of job ad viewers, the company says, are already employed.

They don’t just want a job; they want an awesome job. So KarmaHire, which just graduated this week from Vancouver-based accelerator GrowLab, built a platform to make that happen.

“We transform job postings into job advertisements,” he said.

That means they look like elegant, designed — not like Craigslist or Monster.com listings:

Source: KarmaHire

KarmaHire’s job “ads”

The company has seen success and is helping companies find talent faster.

But it has a ton of competition in the recruiting space. Zao is gamifying recruiting. Path.to is following the eHarmony match-made-in-heaven model. GetHired is doing daily deals for jobs. Quixey wants you to solve puzzles to get recruited. And any number of new video-based interviewing companies like Wowzer, enRecruit, VisualCV, Spark Hire, and InnovateCV want to make video the center point of the hiring experience.

All of which means that recruiting is a vastly competitive marketplace.

Clift, however, thinks KarmaHire has what it takes, saying the company is already successful and has a lot of room to grow.

KarmaHire is based in Vancouver and is in the process of raising a $250,000 seed round, some of which is already committed. The service is in a private beta test right now and will launch into public beta next week.

Nicholas Holland is founder of Populr. The following post is a rebuttal to Jon Soberg’s guest post “Why hiring B employees will kill your startup.”

Regardless of their level of experience or expertise, most entrepreneurs can agree that unicorns are majestic, magical creatures that absolutely do not exist — never have and never will.

So, it seems a little ridiculous when I hear people talk about stacking their startup’s roster with only unicorns — aka A Players — while completely dismissing anyone for employment that’s considered a ‘B player.’ Those people need a reality check when it comes to hiring.

I’m a three-time entrepreneur and I’ve hired over a hundred people — often under duress because my small company was light on work one day and overloaded the next. Moreover, I usually find myself looking for tech talent that is hotly pursued by companies much larger than mine. I don’t think this an uncommon practice for startup founders.

It’s also common to hear advice like “only hire the BEST!” and “seek only A Players” when looking for new employees — something that always makes me laugh. I wonder which entrepreneurs these sage advice-givers think they’re saving from failure. Is there someone out there who purposely chooses a sub-par team-mate? (The short answer is no.)

Worst, the cliché of ‘hiring A Players’ creates an atmosphere that lets the business always blame the employee if they don’t work out. “Ah snap! Jody didn’t work out… Guess she wasn’t an A Player”. This lets the entrepreneur off the hook and often keeps them from self-reflection.

Truth be told, it’s incredibly simplistic to define someone as “The BEST!” or as an “A Player.” I’ve had employees that are absolutely brilliant in one area, and terrible in another. What does that make them … a C? Or what about employees that do exactly what you say, but don’t take any initiative. Are they A Players for the leader that leads them, but F players for the entrepreneur who depends on ‘self starting’ as a crutch for their lack of management skills? What about A Players that are loaded up with B Player work and never get a chance to shine? Do they get downgraded?

Before you start looking for your sparkly horned beauties, consider some of these points:

The downsides to searching for the Unicorn employee:

• It greatly extends the search process, and in the meantime, the work is piling up. Consider finding someone who meets the minimum expectations and then get back to work. You’d be surprise how much more productive your startup will be if you aren’t waiting around for someone who matches your dedication and work ethic.

• Even the most skilled hiring techniques can’t guarantee you’ll hire a Unicorn, so be careful about analysis paralysis that leads to even more delays in your growth.

• If you have problems with someone after you’ve hired, writing them off as B-Players means you get all the joys of firing, losing money with turnover, and decreased team morale (which is terrible for your business). Instead, own the responsibility of helping that employee be successful. Forge them into “only the BEST!” or A Players.

• Last, avoid the trap of assuming that A Players are always leaders. Some of your best people will crave your leadership and will follow you to the ends of the earth. But, they won’t be leaders. And that’s OK.

Always seek the best employees you can get, but be mindful that you have limitations to balance. It makes people uncomfortable to accept a “good enough” version of anything, but that is often what you’ll get when you’re faced with other business factors. Plus, there are a million factors that go into making an employee successful — more than I can share in this post.

So take some personal responsibility and check yourself before you whip out the trusty “B Player” card when things don’t work out with one of your employees.

Top unicorn image via Sari ONeal/Shutterstock; Batmanicorn art via Unicorns Rock

Nicholas Holland is the founder of CentreSource interactive agency, mentor for Nashville, Tenn.-based startup incubator JumpStart Foundry and a seasoned entrepreneur. His latest startup Populr, a service that enables customers to easily create and publish POPs (published one pagers), recently made its public launch. Follow him on twitter @nicholasholland.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

This is a guest post by Bright.com’s chief scientist David Hardtke.

The New York Times published an article in recent months detailing how employers increasingly rely on internal referrals in hiring. In the age of “spray and pray” job seekers, where the cost of submitting an application is a few recycled electrons, this may seem like a rational solution in the war against resume spam.

Many companies are building technology to exploit this trend. Last month, for instance, Google integrated its career site with Google+.

When the herd starts doing one thing, the smart sheep sees an arbitrage opportunity. Hiring should follow rational economic principles —  the goal is to hire the best workers as cheaply as possible. Unusual hiring tactics are the way to score big in the labor arbitrage market.

Which brings me back to my story. I am now the chief scientist at Bright, leading the group that is refining the Bright Score technology (the Bright Score is a scientifically driven way to quantify the match between a job candidate and an open position). In 2007, however, I was a research scientist at UC Berkeley and an experimental nuclear and particle physicist. I decided to make a career change and targeted two areas where my expertise in big data would seem a natural fit — hedge funds and web search. In retrospect, I am lucky I didn’t get a job at a hedge fund.

Since I decided to go into web search (information retrieval would be the technical term), I immediately applied to Google. To their credit, they dug my application out of the pile and arranged for a phone, and then an in-person interview. Along the way, however, the same question came up over and over “Who do you know at Google?”

I didn’t get that job, but did get a job at a search startup (Surf Canyon) that built enhanced search functionality on top of Google. We even published research showing a technique that could dramatically improve search results within Google search.

Every year or so a clever Google recruiter contacts me. I’d really like to work at Google at some point. Google’s like Mecca for an information retrieval specialist.

But each and every time they contact me, I still get the same question: Who do you know at Google? They beg me for names.

Herein likes the problem – I don’t know anyone at Google. They are remarkably thin in terms of former high energy nuclear physicists on their staff. At IR industry events, they are usually poorly represented. When I attended one of the premier research conferences in the field (CIKM), there were about 30 people there from Microsoft, but exactly one researcher there from Google. I tried to befriend some Google IR researchers I got paired with on the golf course, but they were reluctant to have a conversation about their work.

From my interaction with Google recruiters, I can tell that by not knowing anyone at Google I am unfit to work at Google. This reminds me of the classic Economist article on the topic of teacher credentialing that shows a picture of Einstein with the caption “unfit to teach.” A hiring heuristic that gives massive preference to internal referrals means you’ll throw away some of the best candidates.

Reading all three-million unsolicited resumes is certainly not the solution either. Using technology like the Bright Score, TalentBin, Entelo, or Linkedin, smart companies can mine the pool to find the best talent. It is surprising, however, that the company that revolutionized the way we find information is still basing its hiring decisions largely on internal word of mouth.

Good people who don’t have internal connections do apply for jobs. But finding those great candidates among the crowd is not easy. Reviewing every resume is not possible, so it’s hard to sort the good from the bad, so a common trend is to increase the importance of internal referrals. This is dangerous.

Ideally, a company finds a healthy balance between taking the time to find that needle-in-a-haystack candidate and relying on internal referrals. Companies that want to be the most creative and profitable need to recognize this and adopt practices that keep a healthy mixture in their workforce.

David Hardtke is the chief scientist at Bright.com, a San Francisco-based company that is building algorithmic tools to match candidates and employers. Prior to joining Bright, he founded a new meta-search engine called Stinky Teddy that utilizes the real-time web to improve the timeliness and pertinence of web, video, and image search.

[Top image credit: Luna Vandoorne/Shutterstock]

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Scott Cooper

I spent the first 25 years of my career in large multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporations. I managed thousands of people in dozens of countries with budgets in the hundreds of millions.  Although I thought of myself as entrepreneurial, I didn’t have much prior startup experience when I struck out on my own to found ShopAdvisor, a shopping experience that deepens reader engagement in tablet magazines.

I had some hesitation about how applicable my experience would be in the land of incubators, hyper-speed pivots, and capital preservation. I received both encouragement and cautionary advice from some of the most successful local VCs, who were willing to help with seemingly no vested interest.

Clearly the culture is very different between a startup and corporation (beer and pizza in the car after the sales call versus corporate off-sites with fancy dinners at the world’s finest hotels). But, after a couple of years navigating the hallways of VCs and low-rent office parks, I find more than ever the instincts and experiences that served me well in corporate America are even more valuable in the startup world.

That experience helps me see what I call “invisible processes” that matter just as much as your killer 10 slide pitch. Here are a few of them.

Finding a product-market fit 

There is wealth of innovation in large companies, and often the financial wherewithal to bring new product ideas to market. The preponderance of extremely clever engineers and product managers was exhilarating, but it was my responsibility to understand that a great technology or solution also needed to fit a real market need with a channel to reach it.

This combination only comes along once in a blue moon. For many who have not been through it yet, discerning the intangibles beyond the core technology is a painful leadership lesson.

It’s no different in the startup world. In fact, the stakes are higher, as failure to detect this “invisible” requirement can lead a start-up down the wrong path with not enough resources to switch course. At ShopAdvisor, we have pivoted twice in a short period as we sought a product-market fit that works.

Navigating the “invisible” sales process

There is a normal human temptation in sales to believe your first big customer “gets” your solution in the same way you and your team thinks about it.

But customers, particularly at a large corporation, have a set of issues to deal with that are completely outside the scope of your product or service. You can’t overplay your hand with an internal advocate. And you need to understand that a relationship with a CEO is both an opportunity and a danger. Personal knowledge of how C-level internal issues affect an otherwise straightforward sales process goes a long way in taking the stress out of those first big customer wins.

Honing an investor pitch

When I started ShopAdvisor, I realized it’s not just a great sales pitch that will get investors to jump on board. It didn’t take long for me to realize that while the fundraising process itself isn’t all that tricky — the relationships, motives, and rivalries behind the process are. “You are always fundraising” remains some of the best advice I have received from a seasoned entrepreneur and friend.

This is why serial entrepreneurs do so well — they have trusted relationships with financiers based on years of working together.

There are tricks to help you fundraise, which isn’t disimilar to moving through the ranks at a large organization. The most important one: enlist a mentor, someone who has a vested interest in you, and can help you as you navigate new waters. Their guidance, expertise, perspective, and assistance will be invaluable.

Scott Cooper is the Founder and CEO of ShopAdvisor – a deferred purchasing platform that connects consumer intent to ecommerce.  He has 25+ years experience in general management and product development at Eastman Kodak, Lotus, IBM, and Nokia.  He has grown a diverse set of businesses from inception to $100M+ in revenue, grown large business segments through acquisition, and built relationships with companies of all sizes.  During his career he has led multi-product business units, large global development organizations, and one of the worlds largest indirect channel marketing organizations.  He is a pragmatic leader with a passion for identifying world-class talent and innovative business ideas that lead to value creation for shareholders.

Businessman taking a leap image // Corepics VOF, Shutterstock

SPARCIN debuts today to “create better interviews.” The software opens up a crowdsourced question pool in which members of the community can submit and rate interview questions.

“Interviewing is traditionally a pretty terrible experience. It’s awkward and intimidating for the interviewers and even more so for the candidate” said founder Patrick Hutchinson in an email. “What we’re doing is creating positive experience for both the interviewer and candidate so that at the end of it all, the interviewer is able to make an informed devision about the candidate.”

Interviews are an opportunity for employers and recruiters to dig a little deeper into an applicants experience and judge whether there is a personality match.

By contributing questions, employees not normally involved have the chance to participate. The more they participate, the more of a role they play in supporting the company’s interviews. Contributors can also vote for other people’s questions to promote the queries they think are important.

SPARCIN currently has thousands of questions across hundreds of content-specific categories. The Interview Builder tool finds the highest scoring questions that meet specific needs (category, difficulty, and so on), and the Live Builder feature displays those questions along with possible answers and tips to the interviewer to keep the momentum flowing. After the interview is over, it has tools to aggregate and quantify the results to help recruiters with the next step.

While many recruiting and interviewing products are on the market — like Hirelogy, which provides questions for interviewers, or video-interviewing service HireVue — SPARCIN distinguishes itself by focusing on crowdsourcing.

SPARCIN is the second product crafted by SPARC, a web development shop in Charleston, S.C. Hutchinson was spending significant amounts of time growing SPARC’s team from two to 175 and realized the interview process was not as effective as it could be. In February 2012, he cofounded SPARCIN with Jake Benardot. It was the first launched out of SPARC’s ‘interpreneurship’ program SPARC Ventures.

Check out this infographic from SPARCIN:

Washington state is the toughest recruiting market for companies looking for agile developers, according to staffing and recruiting agency Yoh … which makes it the best place to be looking for a job. California is not far behind, with San Francisco being the city with the highest ration of open jobs to job-seekers in the agile market.

Yoh and jobs site CareerBuilder say that the imbalance is resulting in impressive earning opportunities for Java developers, web developers, project managers, business analysts, and .Net developers. Agile developers are getting average salaries of $110,781 — and a 90th percentile salary in the $160,000 to 170,000 range — as startups, development shops, and established enterprises such as Microsoft, IBM, and Northrop Grumman compete for scarce talent.

The states with the most demand include:

• Washington
• Oregon
• California
• Utah
• Minnesota
• New York
• Massachusetts

The cities with the most talent, however, have only a partial overlap — which means that developers who are willing to move could see impressive income gains.

• San Jose
• Chicago
• New York
• Houston
• Atlanta
• Austin
• Dallas

Here’s the full infographic:

photo credit: Tess Aquarium via photopin cc

The infographic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on work by Yoh at www.agiletalentstudy.com.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dropbox has had no trouble convincing consumers to use its tools, but it will need a dedicated sales team to reach large enterprises. To bolster its sales and support team, it has brought on Kevin Egan, a vice president at Salesforce.com, and Kim Malone Scott, who ascended the proverbial ladder at tech giants like Google and Apple.

Kim Malone Scott

The San Francisco-based company develops software to help businesses and consumers store files, photos, and more. The market is full of competition from the likes of Box and Google Drive, but Dropbox is the undisputed king of cloud collaboration, and it hit the 100 million user milestone in November. The company has two offices — in San Francisco and Dublin, Calif. — and a burgeoning staff of about 250 employees.

[Related: Read more about how business-focused startups are putting off hiring a traditional sales team, and favor the "freemium" distribution model.] 

As Dropbox continues to grow its team and rumors fly that its readying for a 2013 IPO, it may struggle to keep its startup culture in tact. New hire Scott may be able to help with that; she recently taught professional development and management skills at Apple, where she wrote the curriculum on company culture. Prior to Apple, she spent six years at Google as a director, and has sales and operations experience with AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick.

[Related: Read more here about how Salesforce and Intuit are working to maintain a startup-like culture.]

Dropbox has also poached Egan from Salesforce, where he spent a decade working in its sales and operations teams. In his current role, he works as a senior vice president of global recruiting.

This year, Dropbox has primarily focused on building out its engineering team. It lured the designer of the Facebook “Like” button and the creator of the programming language Python. It also boosted its engineering firepower through talent acquisitions; it recently acquired Audiogalaxy and Snapjoy.

I’m curious to see whether Dropbox is successful in selling its products to large companies, given the spate of high-profile security breaches. Competitors Box and Egynte are already making headway in the enterprise with a traditional sales push — it’s a massive market opportunity for any cloud software company.

Paper chain image via Dirk Ercken, Shutterstock 

The New York-based flower-delivery company unveiled a university-like program today that offers business and leadership training to junior-level employees in three core areas: sales, operations, and management.

This program, which CEO Bryan Burkhart refers to as “H.Bloom University,” is an expansion of the company’s Start-up Education and Entrepreneurial Development (SEED — geddit?) training initiative.

Professional development programs like these are common within large corporations, but are a surprising move for an early-stage startup. It appears to be paying off. Zach Brown, a graduate of the SEED program who was tasked with running the Chicago brunch, is set to pull in over $1 million in revenue.

Education is broken up into six-month cycles. During that time, employees can expect interactive training modules covering business and leadership topics. Just like college, each module is led by an expert from within the organization and consists of case readings, class lectures, group discussions, and skills assessments. Employees will start the first training modules this December and will graduate next May.

With its focus on cutting-edge technology and talent development, H.Bloom is not your average flower-delivery company. It operates in five metro areas — New York City, Chicago, the District of Columbia, San Francisco, and Dallas — and plans to expand to 25 new markets in the next five years. Its users purchase the luxury floral arrangements on a one-time-only or subscription basis — the company is often described as the Netflix for flowers.

Since launching in 2010, it has raised over $18 million in angel and venture capital. It now serves approximately 500 corporate customers, which accounts for the lions share of its revenue. Burkhart is looking to local leaders who can run operations and manage staff as they expand into new markets. He said the program’s participants are college-educated but typically do not have much managerial experience. I followed up with questions about the new university:

Bryan Burkhart, H Bloom’s CEO

VentureBeat: How is this different from a training program at a large corporation, Goldman Sachs, for example?
Bryan Burkhart: It’s funny that you should use Goldman. One thing that makes it very different is that while formal training programs and leadership development classes have always been available at the largest firms that started 100 years ago, it really isn’t the case with young companies. Yes, we’re a startup, but we’re thinking long-term.

VentureBeat: Does this idea stem from personal experience?
Burkhart: Right out of college, I went to work for a company called Trilogy in Austin, Tx. The CEO, a Stanford dropout, had a similar focus on providing tremendous learning opportunities. I think back on that time fondly.

VentureBeat: You’re starting with sales and marketing training — what’s next?
Burkhart: Next year, we’ll expand it further to our floral designers. These are typically people that do not have a traditional four year college degrees. Before coming to H.Bloom, they didn’t have a full time salary and were typically paid an hourly wage. We pay them a full salary with benefits. There’s also an opportunity to move up the ladder.

VentureBeat: You launched a SEED program for training junior-level staff. What were your takeaways from that experience?
Burkhart: Well, one piece of feedback we got is that participants were surprised by the hours. I would schedule classroom trainings for 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning. The reason I did that isn’t because I scientifically thought that was the best time for people to retain information. Rather, it gave me the opportunity to assess commitment. We are developing the future leaders of H.Bloom. So there is an emotional and dedication grading too.

VentureBeat: How has this impacted the culture of the company?
Burkhart: It’s unusual for a startup to say on the first day of your new job that one of its goals is to help you develop skills so you can become the very best person you can be. We continue to grow fast, and we hope to keep your interest as a person and worker. What we realize is that at some point our interests might diverse and you do something else. My goal is that if employees leave, they will have more skills then they did when they started. That the company cares about every individual getting better has been a big deal.

Related: Read about how the company was able to outlast the U.S. postal service by delivering flowers during Hurricane Sandy.

Top image via Gina Smith // Shutterstock

This guest post is by Jim Yu, the founder and chief executive of BrightEdge.

Every Silicon Valley company knows how difficult it is to hire top talent right now. But there are three roles that are especially hard to fill: SEO Director, Growth Product Manager, and UI Designer. Who are these people and why are they in such hot demand? Here are three top hires every company should make in 2013.

SEO Director

An SEO Director is responsible for search engine optimization (SEO): Making sure that the billions of people searching on Google, Bing, and Yahoo find your company’s products and services. Today, search is the primary way prospects and customers find out about your company, so the SEO Director is a critically important role. A great SEO director will have a huge impact on customer acquisition, revenue generation, and long-term company growth — which is why great SEO Directors are in such hot demand.

What makes a great SEO director? The best candidate is a rare breed who possesses a mix of technical knowledge, business acumen, and marketing savvy.

SEO Directors not only have the technical skills to build ‘searchable’ websites, but also deeply understand how search engines work. Google alone changes its search algorithms over 500 times per year, so a crack SEO Director must stay on top of constantly-shifting technology changes every day. He or she must also understand how engines crawl landing pages, how links are searched and catalogued, and the impact natural searches have on conversion.

But technology expertise is not enough; SEO Directors must also have marketing and business savvy. They must understand marketing goals and how paid search, display, social, and email campaigns impact natural searches and vice versa. They must work closely with the CMO and marketing teams to ensure SEO programs work alongside campaigns to drive the most people possible to the company’s site.

Lastly, a great SEO Director knows how to use the sophisticated SEO tools available on the market today to improve your company’s search programs in real-time and over the long haul.

Some of the most well-known SEO Directors in Silicon Valley are Ken Yamada, Mark Fiske, Leo Haryono, Luisa Escobar, and Dave Lloyd. If you can’t poach one of these SEO superstars, you’ll need to find a great SEO Director through a stringent recruitment process.

To find the right candidate, give them a test right up front. Ask them to look at your site and provide a detailed plan for how they would improve SEO. Ask them to provide technical, optimization, and marketing strategies to improve overall searchability of your site. You can also test them on the latest SEO technology platforms. A great SEO Director won’t balk at these tests; in fact, he or she will probably relish the chance to show their expertise.

Growth Product Manager

Product management — with its long planning cycles, focus on minute product specs, and endless meetings — hardly has a reputation as a ‘hot’ job. But Growth Product Managers, otherwise known as ‘growth hacks,’ are the hippest hires of the year. GPMs focus on how to create products people actually want to use now and continue using for a long time. GPMs spend all their time thinking about how to create long-lasting product engagement. GPMs understand that users aren’t drawn to a new product because of its list of features, but instead are looking for an ‘experience’.

Companies, especially software firms, desperately need great GPMs on staff in today’s competitive market. In a cloud-based world, customers can switch software vendors on the fly. So it’s not enough today to create a product and convince companies to buy it; now, technology companies have to create an ever-evolving product experience that is great to start with and just gets better all the time. Customers expect a great product experience, and they’ll jump ship if they don’t get it. Growth hackers increase and protect your revenue stream by creating engaging products that boost both new adoption and renewal rates.

What makes a great GPM? The right candidate will have extensive product management experience, but also understand social dynamics and what motivates people to use a product. They’ll be super-connected via social media themselves, using social networks to evangelize your products, and well versed in both marketing and technology development.

One of the most well known GPMs is Andrew Johns. But there are new GPM superstars in the making; your company just has to find them before your competitors do.

To find these needles in the haystack of product management, ask interviewees to lead through you a product they developed and provide measureable metrics for how this strategy delivered revenue growth. Don’t forget to ask for proof that this product management strategy delivered long-term value — not just a short pop in new business — because a successful GPM creates products that people value using for the long haul.

UI Designer

Remember when phones and computers were extremely complex and hard to use? If you’re under 30, you probably don’t, and you can thank User Interface Designers for making products like the iPhone and Facebook easy to use and intuitive. UI Designers are in hot demand, because people have tasted elegant, simple, easy-to-use technology products and they won’t ever go back. Every company is striving to create products with the simple appeal of the iPhone, but software companies in Silicon Valley must do so or die.

Creating a web, mobile, or product interface that’s intuitive and easy to use is much harder than it looks. What makes a great UI Designer? These multi-disciplinary folks not only have computer science or engineering degrees, but many also have advanced degrees in psychology, computer-human interaction, or design theory. Some are creatives from the design or agency worlds who then got technology religion, but most are engineers with a passion for creating intuitive, human-centric products.

In Silicon Valley, the shortage of UI Designers is especially acute. In the Valley, where the main roles fall mostly three categories — write code, support customers, or sell products — UI Designers don’t fit into a box. They are techie design über-geeks, and every company designing a consumer product wants at least one of them on staff.

Some of the leading UI Designers in Silicon Valley include Alan Tifford, Brendan Bond, and Catherine Courage. How can you snag a gamechanger like this on your team? Hiring a UI Designer takes patience and persistence. The best way to weed out the wheat from the chaff is to ask candidates to walk you through their thinking on a project. Why did they design the interface the way they did? What human need or behavior did they have in mind when creating a particular interface? You can test their technical chops through a coding test, but understanding their creative thought process when designing a product is equally important. You could also ask serious candidates to “redesign” your product to make it more user-friendly.

Attracting top technology talent will always be a challenge, but these three tech mavericks will be the hardest to hire next year. If you’re a Silicon Valley tech company, they are also the most important hires to grow your business. So find the right candidates and then offer them the moon if it that’s what it takes to get them on board.

Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of BrightEdge, a leading enterprise SEO platform. Prior to founding BrightEdge, Jim was at Salesforce.com, where he led a core part of the platform products team that delivered the industry’s first cloud computing platform. At Aether Systems, Jim ran the product management team responsible for the product strategy, roadmap, and delivery of the innovative Scoutware line of wireless products. At Mercator Software (now IBM), Jim directed the development of Mercator Integration Broker, an industry leading enterprise software product, generating over $100M in revenue.

Top photo: Office building in Silicon Valley/Shutterstock

Job transitions can feel like a frustrating, dizzying progression of prospects that do not go anywhere.

Glassdoor has locked up $20 million in new financing to make the job-hunting process more transparent. This career and jobs community provides a range of services such as job search, personalized job listings, company reviews, interview advice, and salary comparisons. Glassdoor strives to distinguish itself by offering “employee generated content,” which can give users insider insight into what it could be like to work at a particular company.

The platform contains information on more than 220,000 companies in 190 countries. With 14 million registered users and more than 13 million monthly unique visitors, the site’s traffic has exploded in the past year, with 40% of the traffic coming from abroad. The company claims that a new user is added every two seconds.

This growth is partly attributable to the release of Inside Connections earlier this year, a tool that lets users leverage their Facebook network into a source for career development. The JobScope technology provides job seekers with a comprehensive look at each listing and the company behind it. Glassdoor can also be used by businesses to recruit, market, and manage their brands.

Competitors include Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder, and SimplyHired.

This round was led by DAG Ventures, with participation from Benchmark Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Battery Ventures. This brings the total investment in Glassdoor to $42.2 million. The company is based in Sausalito, Calif. Read more on VentureBeat.

LinkedIn has released a new list of the most desirable companies to work for, and the technology sector is clearly favored, with Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook sitting at the top.

The rankings are based on the “actual actions of over 175 million professionals on LinkedIn,” according to LinkedIn senior manager Michael Li. He writes:

We cross-referenced our data with thousands of survey responses to pinpoint the specific activities that best indicate familiarity and interest in working for a company: connecting with employees, viewing employee profiles, visiting Company and Career Pages, and following companies. After crunching this data and normalizing for things like company size, we developed our top 100 global list. We then applied LinkedIn profile data to rank the most sought-after employers among professionals in five countries and four job functions.

Of the top 100, 21 companies were labeled as “technology and software” providers, the highest of any category. “Retail and consumer” businesses had 20 companies, “professional services” had 16, and “oil and energy” had 10.

Notably, major brands were listed frequently, but half of the top 100 have fewer than 7,000 employees.

Here’s the top 50:

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Microsoft
4. Facebook
5. Unilever
6. General Electric
7. Pepsico
8. P&G
9. McKinsey & Company
10. The Coca-Cola Company
11. The Walt Disney Company
12. Nike
13. Salesforce.com
14. Twitter
15. Shell
16. Nestle
17. BCG
18. Ogilvy & Mather
19. Expedia
20. Accenture
21. Pfizer
22. Johnson & Johnson
23. L’Oreal
24. Adidas
25. Amazon
26. Bain & Company
27. Roche
28. Diageo
29. Burberry
30. Chevron
31. Razorfish
32. BP
33. Starbucks
34. Warner Bros.
35. Electronic Arts
36. Samsung
37. HP
38. Total
39. Netflix
40. Red Bull
41. Groupon
42. Zynga
43. ExxonMobil
44. ThoughtWorks
45. Bechtel
46. VMware
47. LVMH
48. Kraft Foods
49. Red Hat
50. Oliver Wyman

For more data behind this list, here’s an infographic from LinkedIn:

“Umm, a lot, and a lot?”

“Wrong answer.”

“Oh.” But several interviews – including the one I had with Larry Page – focused on how I would fit into the culture. Larry had a rule of thumb that we always followed: “Don’t hire anyone you don’t want to have lunch with.”

How do you interview for cultural fit? Social psychology has taught us a great deal about how we view other people. For example, you will rate someone as smarter if they resemble you (either physically or mentally). This means that as you interview people, you are more likely to hire people who are like you. Ironically, even people who know this research are subject to it – unlike those lucky denizens of Lake Wobegon, we are not all above average.

So, generally speaking, you are going to hire clones of yourself. This is often justified as “cultural fit” – you agree on many things, so the new person will fit right in with your company. Great!

But here be dragons. Lots of research spanning psychology, artificial intelligence, economics, and history demonstrates that diverse teams achieve better outcomes. The converse is also true. If you build a team that looks alike, thinks alike, and wears the same shoes, you will get group-think and generate only one answer. You then have to hope it’s the right one.

In short: Hiring your clone is a recipe for disaster. I’d like to propose some simple actions you can take to avoid that pitfall.

Here it is, pure and simple: Don’t hire a clone. In fact, hire people who annoy you. That’s correct; you should hire people who annoy you.

Diverse people bring diverse perspectives, which generates some amount of disagreement. Your hires need to fit into the culture but should rub you the wrong way a bit. That indicates they aren’t the same as you.

To do so, you are looking for someone not at all like you. But the job description you wrote probably described … you. So, throw out the job descriptions. Forget the nicely worded “skills and competencies”. Don’t assess the simple stuff. Instead, focus on key, deep elements of the culture.

We have carefully built a culture at my startup that is (not surprisingly) much like Google’s. We are a meritocracy; hierarchy isn’t important. In fact, one of my interview questions is a fairly simple logic question. There are a few different answers to it, and after you get one (or more) of them, I ask the question that matters more: “Why do you think I ask this question, and is it a good question?”

What’s the right answer? I don’t know, but I care about your opinion. I don’t want a sycophantic answer of “yes.” I want a reasoned perspective, even if the answer is “no.” In our culture, agreeing with me simply to agree with the boss is a black mark. A reasoned disagreement would be culturally appropriate and a bit annoying. Of course, I think it’s a good question, or I wouldn’t ask it. But that doesn’t mean you should think it’s useful.

This is what I mean by assessing the deep stuff and not the surface stuff. I don’t care if you get the surface (logic) question right – well, I care, but most people get it right – I really care though if you have a thoughtful answer to the “why and “whether” questions.  The thoughtful answers tell me you don’t assume I’m right simply because I’m the CEO.

Sharing lunch creates an easy place for introverts (i.e. engineers) to talk to other people about what they are working on and to get wildly divergent ideas from whomever happens to be sitting next to them.  It’s not about the food, but about the conversation.

When employees talk, they mostly talk about work, which undoubtedly turns into a free form brainstorm of sorts. A lot of good ideas have come from brainstorms where nobody knew they were brainstorming. And, of course, it amplifies the value of hiring people who annoy you, since lunch is a great place for people to hear other people’s annoying viewpoints.

And yet, I hear you asking, doesn’t this violate Larry’s axiom not to hire someone you wouldn’t have lunch with? Don’t annoying people constitute those you don’t want to eat with?

Perhaps. There is likely a limit to how much annoyance you can handle in your culture. Too annoying and the person becomes a hindrance. It’s a balancing act.

But I can tell you that I enjoy the repartee that flows around our lunch tables every day, with so many differences – nationalities, gender, race, sexual orientation, politics – and all feeling welcome to share their perspective.

So close the browser and go find some resumes of people who you are convinced you won’t like. Hire them. You’ll thank me in the end.

Douglas Merrill is CEO and founder of ZestFinance, which uses big data technology to improve underwriting quality for lenders. He was previously CIO and VP of Engineering at Google.

[Top image credit: Dmitriy Shironosov/Shutterstock]

Espiritu seems happy about the move, if we can take her most recent tweet seriously:

Someone please pinch me. Just to make sure I'm currently not in a state of dream. #overthemoon

—
Anne Espiritu (@Anne_Espiritu) July 29, 2012

Espiritu has not yet updated any of her social media accounts. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ still show her as employed by Google, where she has worked since 2005 on projects including “proactive consumer media outreach for Google’s new social platform, Google+.”

Source: LinkedIn

Anne Espiritu

Espiritu also worked with Google Maps and various local initiatives for Google, which probably accounts for at least part of the Mayer connection. Mayer was most recently VP for maps, local, and location services at Google.

The obvious question: Does Yahoo really need help in the PR department?

OK, that was a stupid question.

Let me re-phrase: Does Yahoo need help getting its message out more than it needs help actually creating something cool? That’s perhaps a better question.

But it’s one that Mayer will have some time — and more than one hire — to answer.

Image credit: Eric Broder Van Dyke / Shutterstock.com

The hiring process is difficult. It takes some money and a whole lot of your most valuable resource — time. But it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do as CEO. The ability to bring good people on board is perhaps the single most important factor in determining whether your business will succeed or fail.

That said, here are three rules I try to keep in mind throughout the process:

1. Salaries Aren’t the Sole Driving Force

Hiring great tech talent is hard. Hiring great tech talent on a limited budget is harder. Several of our employees left comfortable jobs with big-name companies such as Boeing and Accenture to come on board. What you can’t match in salary you need to make up in other facets of the job.

Think about what you can offer in terms of a compensation package. One advantage you have as a startup is flexibility; you don’t have layers of corporate bureaucracy to work through. Maybe that means you decide to let your employees bring a pet to work or keep nontraditional hours.

In my experience, a fun work environment translates into happy, productive employees.

2. Be Specific in Your Job Description

Declare what you’re looking for in a candidate up front. It will save you bundles of time down the road and help attract the right person.

Be honest about what you expect from them. The boundaries surrounding job roles often blur when startups are growing, so make it clear that 40-hour weeks might not be the norm and that employees might be expected to wear many hats.

3. Weed Out Early

The startup life isn’t for most people, and that’s OK. If you find that an employee is struggling with the role or the lifestyle, have an open and honest conversation early on. It will pay dividends down the road and potentially save you from having to fill an empty spot without notice.

One tactic I employ from time to time is group interviewing. Some people might think it is too intense, and I used to be one of them. But when you get down to business, it’s an incredible way to see not just how people perform under pressure and in unfamiliar territory, but also how they interact with others.

In the end, you know your company better than anyone else – trust your instinct and hire away.

Cole Harper is cofounder and CEO of SceneTap, an app and website that provides real-time information on the nightlife scene. He has hired 17 amazing employees to date and hopes to add many more as the company continues to grow.

[Top image credit: Loskutnikov/Shutterstock]