Hakon Verespej's presentation at the Sourcing 7 rountable, October 2012. Focuses on his interest in recruiting coming from an engineering background and why great sourcing is so awesome.

1. S7 Roundtable
October, 2012
Hakon Verespej

2. Who am I?
MS, Computer Science
8 years as a software engineer
And now I’m interested in recruiting…

3. What Triggered the Interest?

4. What Triggered the Interest?

5. What Triggered the Interest?
Imagine a team of 3, called T1:
Performance of member 1 = 1
Performance of member 2 = 2
Performance of member 3 = 2
a=1
Performance(T1) = 1x1 + 1x2 + 1x2 = 5

6. What Triggered the Interest?
Now imagine another team, T2:
Performance of member 1 = 1
Performance of member 2 = 1
Performance of member 3 = 1
a=2
Performance(T2) = 2x1 + 2x1 + 2x1 = 6

7. What Triggered the Interest?
We want both top performers and a better a
Finding and hiring people who produce great
results and make a great team takes great skill
Great recruiters are amazing!

8. “…leaders of companies that go from good to
great start not with ‘where’ but with ‘who.’ They
start by getting the right people on the bus, the
wrong people off the bus, and the right people in
the right seats. And they stick with that
discipline—first the people, then the direction—
no matter how dire the circumstances.”
- Jim Collins, author Good to Great

9. What is recruiting?
Student’s view: Gatekeepers you have to
schmooze for a shot at the jobs you want
Engineer’s view: Gatekeepers shielding us from
the people we want on our team
These are myopic views and show an
embarrassing lack of knowledge

10. What is recruiting?
Fortunately, I’ve come to grips with reality!

11. “I am convinced that nothing we do is more
important than hiring and developing people. At
the end of the day you bet on people, not on
strategies.”
- Lawrence Bossidy, former COO of GE

12. What is recruiting?
A better question might be what isn’t recruiting?
Recruiting involves:
• Strategy
• Marketing
• Sales
• Research
• Detective work
• Psychology
• Empathy
• Negotiation
• Creativity
• Analytics

13. The most fun I’ve had this year
SourceCon - special thanks to Amybeth!
I had no idea any of this stuff was going on!
Sourcer = super smart and super passionate

14. I wonder…
Why isn’t there more collaboration and idea
sharing?
Anyone interested in a sourcing hackathon?

15. “You need to have a collaborative hiring
process.”
- Steve Jobs

16. Something useful
To find local javascript devs who participate in
local javascript meetups, go to Google and:
site:meetup.com inurl:members intitle:seattle intitle:javascript
You can email them right from meetup.com!

17. Something useful
Take it a step further and get an email whenever
someone new joins!
See http://www.google.com/alerts

18. Something useful
If you want to get really crazy, see
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
How about having an email with a LinkedIn
profile sent to your team’s email group every
time someone joins a Seattle javascript user
group?

19. Thanks!