When Yaw and I decided to start Pocket Tales before we had a programmer on board (we must be idiots right?) we knew hiring was going to be one of our biggest, most important challenges.

To be frank, it’s been a much bigger challenge that we expected, but a few months ago we made our first technical hire. Jeromy Darling joined our team just before Thanksgiving as our frontend developer. This particular hire came as a surprise for a couple reasons 1) He’s located in Minneapolis and we were sure we wanted someone from Indianapolis 2) He wasn’t referred to us and usually the best hires are referrals.

We’re ecstatic with the result, but it was a long road. Below are some details of our process which should help anyone out there trying to hire technical resources in Indianapolis:

Our Strategy

Hiring is important but we believed it was also something that could still be bootstrapped and done well with a lot of time and effort, something Yaw and I had plenty of. Our strategy was to offer a compelling position (livable salary, co-founder’s portion of equity, cool job, great company mission) and to blast it out to as many relevant friends and sites as we could.

Additionally, we knew were going to need to hire multiple skill sets to complete our application, so we posted 4 positions (Frontend Developer, Backend Developer, Graphics/UI Designer, Rich Internet Applications Developer); however, our intention was to only make one hire in the beginning and we were leaning towards hiring a Frontend or Backend Developer first.

What We Were Looking For

Here were the most important qualities we were looking for when we started our search. I put them in order of importance:

1. Experience building web applications
2. Unbridled enthusiasm for our idea
3. Available to work full-time
4. Ability to fill multiple technical roles (e.g. Can do both graphic design and frontend programming)
5. Desire to work for a startup
6. Located in Indianapolis
7. Able to serve as a technical lead

These qualities were required for all 4 of the open positions we posted.

Sources of Job Applicants

Below is a list of how applicants heard about our job openings. Most of these are sites where we posted the job ourselves; however, a few are job aggregator sites. In total we had 145 applicants and we invited 23 for phone interviews. We invited 2 people for second round interviews, although that number would likely have been higher if we decided to fill some of the other positions we posted.

Website (http://www.pockettales.com/)
35 total applicants
7 invited for phone interviews
It probably goes without saying that you should post your job openings on your website or your blog. Note: This “source” is a catch-all bucket for us. If someone contacted us and we didn’t know where they came from we put them down as “website.”

Craigslist (http://indianapolis.craigslist.org/)
34 total applicants (including Jeromy whom we hired)
5 invited for phone interviews
We only posted our position to the “Indianapolis” section of Craigslist. I wanted to post it to more cities but the Craiglist spam bots are aggressive and undoubtedly would have flagged and removed my multiple listings. As it turned out, my listings did get flagged the first time because our 4 job openings contained a lot of similar language. Despite the spam bots, you will get the most spam from Craiglist.

Startuply (http://startuply.com/)
23 total applicants
5 invited for phone interviews
Startuply is an amazing free website for posting jobs specifically at startups. We received a lot of quality applicants and the system is a breeze to use.

Purdue University (https://www.cco.purdue.edu/Employer/CCOExpress.shtml)
18 total applicants
1 invited for phone interview
Purdue gave us more applicants by far than any other school. It was disappointing though, how few applicants from any school, Purdue included, had relevant experience. I don’t mean “2 years at company X experience.” I mean, few applicants could show us any actual work they’ve done on personal projects. Also, very few applicants actually specialized in web development. Either Indiana schools aren’t teaching much web development, or those types of developers are already taken. It’s probably a little of both.

IUPUI School of Informatics (http://informatics.iupui.edu/careers/services/)
8 total applicants
0 invited for phone interview
Although we didn’t invite any IUPUI applicants for phone interviews, I would post on their career website again. They’re a great source of technical talent for Indiana. My former company, Cantaloupe.tv, hired their first two technical resources from IUPUI.

Indiana University School of Informatics (http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/careers/careerlink/)
5 total applicants
0 invited for phone interviews
We expected to receive more applicants from Bloomington. I’m not sure why we didn’t.

Miami University of Ohio (http://www.units.muohio.edu/careers/employers/)
5 total applicants
0 invited for phone interviews
For a job posting in Indianapolis, I was surprised how many responses we received from Miami.

Smaller Indiana Developer Group Pages (http://smallerindiana.com/groups)
4 total applicants
0 invited for phone interviews
Smaller Indiana has such a big, focused community that it’s a great idea to post your job there. They have a specific job board (See Indy Job Board below) but we also posted in the forums of as many of the groups we thought were relevant. I suspect a lot of our website applicants actually first heard about our job from Smaller Indiana.

Referrals (4 applicants)
4 total applicants
4 invited for phone interviews
This number is very skewed because we talked to a lot of referrals before we began posting our job openings. If I had began tracking referrals from the beginning I think this would be in the top 3 of total applicants and definitely the highest quality applicants.

Indy Job Board (http://indyjobboard.com/)
2 total applicants
0 invited for phone interviews
This is the official Smaller Indiana job board. It’s extremely easy to use and a very clean interface. It just needs more traffic.

Refresh Indy (http://www.refreshindy.com/
2 total applicants
1 invited for phone interview
Refresh Indy is a local community of web designers and developers. There are a lot of other local developer communities and meetups that I have since learned about that would be great places to post jobs.

Xemion (http://www.xemion.com/)
2 total applicants
0 invited for phone interviews
Xemion is a great site for hiring a firm. We thought we’d give it a try for a full-time hire though.

Ball State University (http://cms.bsu.edu/About/AdministrativeOffices/CareerCenter/Employers.aspx)
1 total applicant
0 phone interviews
Ball State was by far the biggest disappoint. I had heard a lot about their new media programs but we only received one response. Perhaps students just don’t use the career services site?

Indeed (http://www.indeed.com/jobs)
1 total applicant
0 invited for phone interviews
We did not post to the Indeed site, but I’ve since learned that Indeed is one of the biggest aggregators of job postings on the web, and one of the most popular among job searchers.

Smashing Jobs (http://jobs.smashingmagazine.com/)
1 total job applicant
0 invited for phone interviews
We did not post to Smashing Jobs so I assume it is a job aggregation site.

University of Cincinnati (http://www.uc.edu/career/)
0 total applicants
0 invited for phone interviews
The University of Cincinnati website is so terrible looking that I wouldn’t be surprised if students and employers generally just don’t use it.

To Be Continued…

I will provide more information about our interview process, questions we asked, number of no-shows etc. in a future post.