Guest Speaker: Recruiting the Top 1 Percent
There's a better way to find and hire the very best employees.
Published May 2007
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEI keep hearing people say that they only hire the top 1 percent of job seekers. At my company, Fog Creek Software, I want to hire the top 1 percent, too. We're doubling in size each year, and we're always in the market for great software developers. In our field, the top 1 percent of the work force can easily be 10 times as productive as the average developer. The best developers invent new products, figure out shortcuts that save months of work, and, when there are no shortcuts, plow through coding tasks like a monster truck at a tea party.
From a recruiting perspective, the problem is that the people I consider to be in the top 1 percent in my field barely ever apply for jobs at all. That's because they already have jobs. Stimulating jobs. Jobs where their employers pay them lots of money and do whatever it takes to keep them happy. If these pros switch jobs, chances are the offer came through networking, not because they submitted a resumé somewhere or trolled a job site like Monster (NASDAQ:MNST). Many of the best developers I know took a summer internship on a whim and then stayed on. They have applied for only one or two jobs in their lives.
A lot of companies think they're hiring the top 1 percent because they get 100 resumés for every open position. They're kidding themselves. When you fill an opening, think about what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don't give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job. There's a floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online, even though many of them are qualified for virtually none of these positions. So if the top 1 percent never apply for jobs, how can you recruit them? My theory is that the best way is to find them before they realize there is a job market--back when they're still in college.
Ah, college. Most kids wait until their last year to worry about finding their first job. And they are not that inventive. At more prestigious schools, the kids tend to feel that they are in such demand that they don't bother reaching out to employers. They simply go to on-campus recruiting events to see what's there. At Fog Creek, I've had a lot of success recruiting college students. In fact, I hired more than half of my developers as college interns, then recruited them for full-time work.
Before I go any further, I need to clarify that these are paid internships. Although unpaid internships for school credit are common in other fields from fashion to music, we pay $750 a week, plus free housing, free lunch, free subway passes, relocation expenses, and various other benefits. Every time I talk about internships, somebody inevitably gets confused and thinks I'm taking advantage of slave labor. You there, young whippersnapper: Get me a frosty cold orange juice, hand-squeezed, and make it snappy!
That's not how it goes. The annual routine starts in September, when I begin tracking down the best future software developers in the country. I send a personalized letter to every promising computer science major that I can find. Last year I sent 300 letters to fill six intern positions. Not e-mail. My letters are printed on a real piece of Fog Creek letterhead, which I sign myself in actual ink. Apparently this is rare enough that it gets kids' attention. I also call professors and former interns at schools such as Stanford, Duke, Dartmouth, and the University of Illinois to ask them for recommendations. Finally, I write an article for my blog, which gets about a million unique visitors per month, that's especially relevant to students. At the end of the article, I solicit internship applications.
Eventually, we get hundreds of applications for these internships, and they're good candidates because they represent the whole population, not just the job-seeking population. We call the most promising candidates for a phone interview. It's a three-part conversation. First, I ask the candidates to tell me about themselves and their classes. Then I pose a software development challenge. For example, how would you implement a Web-based clone of PowerPoint (NASDAQ:MSFT)? This gives me a feel for how smart they are, and if they know the basics of software development. Finally, I ask the candidates to interview me for the last 15 minutes of the call. They can ask about the company or living in New York City--whatever they want. If they pass the phone interview, Fog Creek flies them out to New York City to be interviewed in person.
