The following guest post is by West Stringfellow, chief product officer of Bigcommerce, a company that sells cloud-based e-commerce software.
Every morning in San Francisco, rain or shine, some of the best and brightest minds in the country line up to begin their migration south to work. These commuters work for the world’s best companies, many of which are more difficult to get into than Harvard. Yet they’re willing to spend 460-580 hours per year (19-24 full days) sitting on a bus getting to and from work. And when they get to work, they work harder than most. Best of all, they stand street-side every morning, practically advertising their brilliance and availability.
So when we decided to scale our engineering and product teams by 40+ people, San Francisco was the obvious choice. Frankly, it’s the only place I can think of where the best talent in the world lines up street-side every day.
We settled on a somewhat unconventional recruiting approach. We put up tents right next to the waiting areas where
The results were spectacular. Not only did we build a pipeline of candidates that will fill our office, but in three days we created a Silicon Valley news story that attracted positive attention our brand and our new presence in San Francisco. During the campaign we interacted with 1,200 candidates and gave away more than 450 poached egg sandwiches and 500 cups of coffee.
Tuesday evening, the eve of the first day of our recruiting campaign, we saw a 150% increase in applications. During the week of the event, 94% of visitors to the website from the Bay Area were new to the site. Overall, we received more than 5,000 social shares (“likes”, retweets and comments) that created a total of 30 million potential views across Facebook, Twitter and
We’re pretty happy with the results. Here’s what we learned:
- Metrics matter: In San Francisco, everyone has a startup. And all startups need talent. But not every startup is growing at 100%+ from a strong base, or has $75 million in venture capital backing. As we shouted our pitches to passersby, people grabbed onto metrics about our business, growth, funding and customers. People might speed up as I shouted, “new startup,” but when I said “$75 million,” their pace usually slowed down. Way down.
- Mission matters too: A lot of prospects would walk by and ignore our outreach, even our metrics. But sometimes they’d get intrigued by our mission: to create the world’s best online platform for commerce. Engineers like solving big problems. Luckily we have plenty of those.
- Googlers need coffee, form nice lines and appreciate privacy. You could tell a Googler because they would sneak up behind you and eavesdrop on your conversation, capture the information and then dart towards the line or bus. We had one Google candidate who was interested but concerned about his privacy. So he called his girlfriend to come visit us and get more information on his behalf.
- Facebookers win the “hippest” bus crew and the hardest to crack. They were armed with home-brewed or locally-sourced java, wear wonderfully soundproof headphones and were on a mission to get on the bus. They were, frankly, not very excited about our approach. Come on, Facebook! We were just being social but, you know, in the real-world way.
- eBay commuters were very keen to talk to us. There is natural alignment between the company’s mission and our own. There’s also the fact that eBay and PayPal don’t feed their employees and these bus riders face the longest commute of anyone we met on the street. To these commuters, the presence of coffee and poached eggs may have seemed like a gourmet delight at the beginning of a heinous commute.
- Offer recruits what they want. We learned a lot about the right and wrong ways to approach candidates from different companies. Googlers need privacy, Facebookers prefer the soft sell, eBay employees like food. We’re working to build our San Francisco office to cater to candidate needs: strong mission, free food, flexible hours and no commute.
- We weren’t the only ones giving the street-side hustle. One ambitious real estate agent cruised the spots where we set up to pitch new office spaces in San Francisco, Sydney and Austin for our growing team. And I was approached by a friendly gentlemen who is apparently a purveyor of ‘killer sh*t’. Let me know if you are interested in either—we weren’t.
- You need to react quickly. When we realized that our street-side recruiting campaign was a raging success, we quickly put together a happy hour a week later and headed back out to the bus stops with invitations. When a blazing opportunity presents itself, you need to seize it! Our happy-hour brought in 50 attendees and we made three offers to candidates that attended.
In the days following the campaign, we made offers to 13 San Francisco employees. Ten accepted. Social media was largely supportive and at least 40 people reached out to compliment our strategy. Many support keeping talent in San Francisco where they can contribute to the local economy. We also caught some flack. eBay and PayPal execs who are friends of mine had some pointed questions about our bold strategy.
But isn’t that why we all love watching the businesses in San Francisco? Because they can push the boundaries just a little bit?
