We didn’t hire enough new team members in 2016: We brought on board 4 new people, but 4 people left us, so in total we’re still hovering at 20. True, even with 20 dedicated people one can have a blast, but there’s so much more we want to accomplish.
Luckily, when I checked our numbers 2 months ago (during our lowest season), it became clear that we can easily grow to 30 people out of our cashflow and without touching our bank buffer. We have so much work to do, recruiting is now one of my two major objectives in Q4 and Q1.
Why 28?
So why Mision 28 then, why not Mission 30? The problem with round numbers is that they sound like “give or take”. But I want everyone to understand that we definitely want to get to 28 quickly. We may keep hiring and maybe we end up with 32 people, but that’s just so longterm. Right now, 28 is the number, and it’s not give-or take, it’s the one single goal.
How to get there?
Even getting to 28 without sacrificing our high bar will be tough. Everyone’s hiring like crazy in Berlin, so what makes us confident that we can crack this nut?
To be honest, we’re not sure. But we’re doing everything now. We’ve increased our referral bonus to 5k€ internally, we’ve overhauled our careers site , we’re tech-blogging like crazy (even made it to the Hackernews frontpage), we’re cold-contacting people on LinkedIn, our Twitter job ads even target New York now, we’ll be overhauling the main website not just for customers but also for recruiting reasons, and of course we advertise heavily. We’ll even go as far as considering working with “virtual recruiter” platforms that charge up to 15% of a placement’s annual salary. Initial impressions were underwhelming, but yes we’re that desperate.
But we’ll not lower our bar, which requires applicants to send really strong applications to begin with, survive our screening call, convince us at an in-depth 2h interview, followed by 1-2 days of on-site paid trial work.
So, fingers crossed that our new efforts will get us there. Here’s the list of open positions by the way, and our external referral bonus is now 3000€!
