I'm confused.
Are you suggesting it's a good idea to post job ads?
or a good idea to discuss the best places to post job ads?
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Dylan Jay
Technical Solutions Manager
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On 01/02/2011, at 12:28 PM, Andrew Dowling wrote:
Hi all,
I’ve been sifting through the SB archives for advice on the best way
to locate early-stage talent for start-ups in Sydney. The group
guidelines are pretty clear that this is outside the scope of the SB
group postings, and I think this makes sense – keeping the signal to
noise ratio high is really important.
Having said that, the general recommendations on how to find the right
sort of person for an early-stage start-up (adventurers, generalists
with specialist skills, risk-takers, happy to take a start-up salary
in exchange for some upside) still seem a bit lacking. Posting a role
like this on whirlpool or gumtree, for example (or even worse seek)
will hit a big audience, but most of that audience will not the sort
of person a start-up is looking for. My experiences using Seek in
this regard have been worse than terrible. The right talent might be
there, but it gets drowned out in all the noise.
It strikes me that Silicon Beach could really fill a big gap here.
Looking at the profiles of many people on the list, it seems they can
be divided into one of three types:
1. A large proportion of “wannabe” entrepreneurs looking to find an
opportunity (and I mean that in a totally positive way)
2. A bunch are entrepreneurs in the middle of the crazy fun of
launching their own thing (like me)
3. Established entrepreneurs/VCs/etc who have been around the start-up
block a few times and who are looking to put back into the local
start-
up community and help it grow.
I’m sure there are many other groups in there but this seems like a
reasonable simplification. One thing they all have in common is (quite
obviously) their interest in start-ups ... the sort of audience self-
selection that all the other job-posting forums lack.
Using this breakdown, it would seem to me that the first two groups
are likely to actively WANT to be able to read posts about early-stage
positions, while the latter would like to avoid them like the plague.
The following post from late last year contained a few perspectives on
this issue from both sides of the fence:
http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia/browse_thread/thread/a508543b13a29288/80d3d59b250ab207?lnk=gst&q=benchmark#80d3d59b250ab207
As Marko commented in this post, one of the goals of SB is to help
foster the local entrepreneurial community, and posting open positions
would appear to be in line with this. Elias said in reply that he
doesn’t want to hurt other start-ups in the recruitment area, but I
would have thought we’re talking about something quite specialized
here … open positions at early stage start-ups for people looking to
take a chance and get in at the ground floor of something with great
potential. I’d imagine the numbers would be very small.
(Note that I am ONLY talking about very early-stage positions here,
those key founding employees which will make or break a start-up. When
your start-up is established and just needs to build out the team as
it grows, I think you’re unlikely to find the sort of people you’re
looking for in the first group I’ve listed above.)
I’d be interested to hear what everyone thinks, but I’d definitely
vote for something like a Silicon Beach sub-group specifically devoted
to this sort of thing. That way it could be opt-in only, to avoid
spamming those who didn’t want to be notified of positions like this.
We could also establish guidelines that prevented people posting
later-
stage positions (particularly large numbers of them) that should
really belong on somewhere like Seek.
Apologies about the long post – this is quite a nuanced issue so
seemed to warrant some discussion. It’s also quite close to my heart
given the stage my business is at!
Comments? Very interested to hear what everyone thinks….
Cheers,
Andrew.
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