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Why I learned to "make things" by Noah of 37signals. Two years ago this week, I started working at 37signals.

Why I learned to "make things" by Noah of 37signals

I couldn’t make a web app to find my way out of a paper bag. When I started working here, my technical skills were in tools like Excel, R, and Matlab, and I could muddle my way through SQL queries. I had the basic technical skills that are needed to do analytics for a company like 37signals: just enough to acquire, clean, and analyze data from a variety of common sources. At the time I started here, I knew what Ruby and Rails were, but had absolutely no experience with them – I couldn’t tell Ruby from Python or Fortran. I’d never heard of git, Capistrano, Redis, or Chef, and even once I figured out what they were I didn’t think I’d ever use them – those were the tools of “makers”, and I wasn’t a maker, I was an analyst.

I was wrong. Six or seven weeks after I started, I made my first git commit: “Add Clicky tracking to Basecamp marketing site”. No romance here It was faster. It all starts with a step. Social Recruiting. I'm giving the keynote talk at the Social Recruiting Summit in NYC on Monday.

Social Recruiting

I've been working on my presentation over the past few days and some themes are worth talking about. 1) Since we started Union Square Ventures in 2003/2004, we have only been involved with one retained search. Our portfolio companies have certainly used search firms, but our use of them has been extremely rare. We prefer to source candidates ourselves using our networks, and increasingly our social networks. 2) We sourced both of our junior investment professionals, Andrew Parker and Eric Friedman, with blog posts at USV.com. 3) We have sourced countless senior hires for our portfolio companies off of this blog and USV.com. 4) Many of our companies have internal recruiters and we work hand in hand with them, sourcing talent, vetting talent, and closing the sale. 5) LinkedIn is a terrific place to find talent and to find references. 7) Hunting for talent is necessary but not always sufficient.

MBA Mondays: Best Hiring Practices. Hiring is a process and should be treated as such.

MBA Mondays: Best Hiring Practices

It is serious business. The first step is building a hiring roadmap which should lay out the hiring plan over time by job type. This should be built into your operating plan and budget. You want to be very strategic about how you invest your scarce resources into hiring and think carefully about when you need to add resources. Once you have done that, you want to have a system for opening up these positions for hire. The first step in opening up a position for hiring is to define the position you are looking for.

The manager who is directly responsible for the person being hired should draft the job spec and it should be signed off on by the CEO and whomever is in charge of HR (which could be the CEO in a small company). Your company should have a jobs page. There are web-based solutions to get your open positions onto your jobs page, track the candidates through the hiring process, and provide workflow for your hiring team. COLOSSAL CUE ADVENTURE.