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Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

blog.petesoder.com

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Re: Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

#11

Post by petesoder »

peterbell_nyc wrote: post #8

Great post. It's a real issue for many startups I talk to that wonder why they're having a hard time recruiting tech talent and haven't spent the time to build a brand and relationship with engineers. If you happen to have a consumer brand, that's great (Apple, Google, etc) but the most important thing is to create an engineering brand that tells the story of what kind of shop you're going to be to work for and why p…

If you can't explain in 60 seconds why an engineer should want to come and work at your company, you're dead.

Re: Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

#13

Post by clinejj »

This was big for me when I was applying for jobs earlier this year. Teams that had a blog, updated it reasonably often talking about their recent challenges they overcame or fun projects went a long ways in making me want to work with them. The careers page is nice, but talking don't really present the culture and specific work that gets done in a very good way.

There's a couple companies that come to mind that I feel like do a pretty good job with this - Tumblr (look at some of the intern reports from this summer and the rest of the staff blog), and Etsy's Code as Craft blog go a long ways in making their engineer teams attractive.

Re: Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

#14

Post by petesoder »

clinejj wrote: post #13

This was big for me when I was applying for jobs earlier this year. Teams that had a blog, updated it reasonably often talking about their recent challenges they overcame or fun projects went a long ways in making me want to work with them. The careers page is nice, but talking don't really present the culture and specific work that gets done in a very good way. There's a couple companies that come to mind that I fee…

I couldn't agree more. Engineers are loathe to enter into a traditional recruiting process (i.e. go in through the front door) when they have so many options out there.

It's far more attractive if they can 'window shop' and get a true sense for your team/culture/challenges without kicking off a gauntlet of interviews for them to learn the same stuff.

Obviously, interviews are still important for the hiring team, but it's time to make the overall process better (and more front-loaded with the company's engineering project info) for the engineer candidates.

Re: Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

#15

Post by godisdad »

Excellent post. I think the aversion engineers have toward PR for teams is unfortunate. A similar attitude toward prof. networking exists. Good team PR and good professional networking is predicated on mutual benefit.

Teams that are innovating, working on novel problems and dedicated to quality shouldn't be afraid to present themselves in a positive light. There's nothing sleazy about trying to attract and retain like-minded people.

Re: Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

#16

Post by petesoder »

godisdad wrote: post #15

Excellent post. I think the aversion engineers have toward PR for teams is unfortunate. A similar attitude toward prof. networking exists. Good team PR and good professional networking is predicated on mutual benefit. Teams that are innovating, working on novel problems and dedicated to quality shouldn't be afraid to present themselves in a positive light. There's nothing sleazy about trying to attract and retain lik…

Good comment, thanks. And appreciate the connection with professional networking.

As a young engineer, it was very hard for me to come to understand the value of building my network. I guess when there's so many horrible 'networking' events out there (just like 'bad' marketing), it takes some time for one to overcome an adverse knee-jerk reaction and really apprehend the value.

Re: Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

#17

Post by knes »

Great read. I was actually in the process of writing a blog post about the exactly the same thing. at Pusher (http://pusher.com/jobs) we are revamping all our jobs, about us, etc pages but also blogging more about our technical challenges and what we do as a team outside of work. Slowly but surely, we can see the increase in spontaneous applications and the quality.

Re: Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

#18

Post by jgrant27 »

There's something important missing from the post. Interviewing. Interviewing is a horrible experience for most engineers. It's often costly in time and in preparation. Keep this in mind if you're hoping to hire anyone that's not still green in their career. Provide honest insight into the process for candidates. Keep your engineers from getting into the usual pissing contest during the white-board "dance" and under-graduate level homework details that don't really tell you anything about someone but are often just an excuse to technically "haze" a candidate.

Re: Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

#19

Post by petesoder »

jgrant27 wrote: post #18

There's something important missing from the post. Interviewing. Interviewing is a horrible experience for most engineers. It's often costly in time and in preparation. Keep this in mind if you're hoping to hire anyone that's not still green in their career. Provide honest insight into the process for candidates. Keep your engineers from getting into the usual pissing contest during the white-board "dance" and under-…

yep - this is totally designed to be a more scalable lead-gen strategy (top of funnel).

Next post will be on effective interviewing by/of engineers. I find many companies don't tend to do that in a scalable way, either.

Re: Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

#20

Post by sjheinz »

Prudent advice. Building a reputation to attract great people to your team demands honesty about who you are and how you work together. This should not manifest itself as a list of buzzwords, but a genuine introspection about what kinds of talents and personalities will benefit your team in the long run. Clearly explaining to a candidate why you want them to join your team and what it is you value about everything they have to offer can be a powerful and persuasive conversation to convince any candidate to choose your team above all others.
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