[LRUG] What do people want to do with their career?

[Chris Parsons]

On 22 Mar 2012, at 06:47, Anthony Green wrote:

> I'm continually disappointed by the quality of the recruitment offerings. All of which pretty much reduce the posting "to we want a code monkey of type Foo with skills x, y and z"
> 
> I always admired Eden and Chris Parson's holistic belief when taking on staff. For BBC Future Media, the security of our income model means there's occasionally room for individuals who share those same values to try and emulate Chris' approach.
> 
> Is it economic uncertainty that means companies don't follow the Eden way or just a lack of maturity in our industry?

Well, Eden closed :) mostly through taking on too much fixed cost and (with hindsight) not having a London presence...

However, even if I'd known we'd shut I wouldn't have compromised my recruitment approach - as an agency (and indeed any co) it's your absolute lifeblood.

My main approach was to try to take on nice people who were passionate about 'doing it right' even if they didn't know how to do it right yet, and then spend time training them on the languages and tools. I only ever hired a couple of people as Rubyists - most were PHP or Java people when I took them on. I could never have afforded to take those who were already total experts - I only took on more senior staff after we were a certain size.

I'm not in a position to hire now on my own behalf, but when asked by others for advice, I still recommend taking this sort of long term approach to people. If you want to be all short term with people, hire contractors.

Chris

--
Chris Parsons
chris.p at rsons.org
http://twitter.com/chrismdp
http://pa.rsons.org




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