(This article was originally written in March 2005.)

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software wrote a good article on how every company claims that they hire the top 1-2% of talent, but that what they are actually hiring is the top 1-2% of the available candidates, and that the pool of candidates may actually be pretty poor. More recently, he's also noted that putting a job posting up on Monster or Craigslist tends to generate a large pile of unqualified candidates and that finding talent in that pile is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Joel's company makes packaged software rather than offering consulting services, but we're both trying to hire smart technical people in a field where smart technical people are always hard to find. Ignoring myself, our company is made up as follows:

• 4 people worked with me at a prior company
• 2 approached us with unsolicited resumes
• 1 was a "friend of a friend"
• 1 found us via a classified ad on Monster (out of roughly 300 resumes)
• 1 is a co-op student
• 1 is a relative

Past postings on Monster or in local newspapers have had similarly poor results: over five years, we've received hundreds of resumes in response to our ads, made three hires, and fired two of the three.

Because a bad hire can destroy an entire client for us, each hire is a very labor-intensive process. Given our poor success with the classifieds approach, we now cultivate a standing list of "people we'd like to hire" broken down by skill set. At any given moment, we should have a list of project managers, a list of software architects, a list of developers, a list of quality directors, etc. It takes a lot of effort to maintain those lists and maintain close contact with the people on them, but it seems to be much more successful than the "advertise and hope" method.

Taking a cue from the NFL, we also believe that we build with the draft, so we've boosted our college recruiting. Fortunately, the Philadelphia region has some excellent schools like Drexel University, Penn State, Temple, Villanova, etc. Two of our three most-recent hires were recent college graduates, and we intend to continue building talent from the graduate ranks. As Joel pointed out in his first article, the really talented people tend to stay out of the unemployment ranks once they've entered the workforce and gained some recognition.

If you're a software developer, project manager, quality director, or soon-to-graduate college student in a technical field and you think you might be a good fit for us visit our recruiting web page.