WP Engine Director of Development RC Johnson knows a thing or two about staffing an enterprise-level tech company. He built Bazaarvoice’s NYC office from nada to more than 60 employees, including two engineering teams. In the last year and a half, he’s grown the R&D team at WP Engine from 15 engineers to more than 50.
Johnson shared several pro recruiting tips during his SXSW Interactive panel, “We Hired a Dev! How Do I Get More and Keep Them?” Among them, he identified innovative ways to approach recruiting and, once you’ve secured new talent, how to keep them happy and working for you rather than looking for new opportunities.
We’ve picked our favorite tips from Johnson’s panel and included them for you here:
To recruit effectively, you’ve got to have a cohesive narrative about who you are and where you’re going.
The story that the recruiters were telling was, “We’re a hosting company.” The CTO, the founder of the company was saying, “We’re Software-as-a-Service.” When you’re talking to engineers and you say, “Come work for a hosting company! We’re going to try and find more ways to cram more copies of WordPress onto more servers.” That’s a different message than when you say you’re a Software-as-a-Service company. We’re going to find even more ways to be involved with these companies. We’re going to build analytics for them. Let’s help them sell their product. Let’s enable them to do that. That’s a vision that people can get excited about.
Don’t underestimate the power of a personal touch—or a breakfast taco.
Almost all of my recruiting starts with me grabbing coffee or a breakfast taco. I live in Austin. I can use breakfast tacos to recruit and it works really well! I’ll say, “Let’s grab a breakfast taco and a cup of coffee and let’s talk. What are you up to?” And we’ll cultivate that. I may continue to meet that person every couple of months for six months. And then I bump into them at some meetup here in town and that’s the moment they’re ready to jump!
You’re always going to need recruitment leads. Why not get them from the folks you just hired?
Day one, when they’re fresh and still thinking about the company they just left, just say, “Hey! Who do you want to work with again?” At some point in time, we may want to hire a client services director or an account manager. Maybe you worked with some people who did that and you thought they were great. Maybe you worked with some people and you didn’t think they were great. Put down the names of some of the people you’d like to work with again.
Keep your hires working for you by setting them up for success. One way to achieve that is to give your people the tools they need to do their jobs well.
I’ve always been at businesses where they don’t pay for the software that’s part of running the business. Run it on open source software. But when it comes to your machine, you get the best I can give you. You get the best designed tool. You’re getting Photoshop. Because those are the best tools for that particular job. And we’re going to pay for them because that makes a big difference in how productive you can be.
As important as it is that you hire the right person, it’s critical that you fire the wrong person.
If you have the wrong person on your team, even if they are producing something, they will drag down the team around them. They will set the bar different. They will hold people back. You have to let that person go. That is absolutely critical to retention. If you don’t fire that person, your top tier people will leave.
After the panel, we asked Johnson if there was any advice he didn’t get to share at the panel. He offered a helpful link to an article about avoiding burnout:
If I’d had more time I would have liked to have talked about avoiding burnout to help reduce attrition. Tom Tungz has a great article I was going to point folks to with a simple method for seeing where folks are and whether that’s ok or not.
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