Challenge for $ 500. How a startup programmer was looking for

Many companies do not at all strive to improve or change something in their attitude to hiring employees: the principle of a good administrator works: “do not touch”, laziness, confidence in the grandfather’s HR practices (underline the right thing).

In general, the search for developers is a rather complicated topic, partly due to the abundance of conflicting information. Only on Habré in the HR hub the reader who is interested in the question will find a lot of things about everything.

In this post I will not make any heartbreaking conclusions, I just want to increase the level of entropy to talk about how a small but very multinational startup finds good developers, what comes out of it and what doesn't.
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Creative search

So, the company is growing, the amount of work doubles every Monday, the developers are required, if possible the most wonderful and excellent. This is a real problem: finding a junior or middle-hand coder is easy, and with the sensible developers in the market (conditional) trouble.

Proven large employers are in an advantageous position: many talented programmers want to get a job at Microsoft, for example. It's not even about salary, which in a startup can easily be at the same level or higher - just a lot of people know about MS (including good) things, but nobody knows anything about the company “Elusive Joe Ltd.” .

Decision

Being in such a situation, one of my familiar director of a small (about 10 personnel) company decided to make the search for good programmers a separate mini-project:

1. everyone is offered a simple task in C ;
2. a programmer who sends a good solution gets $ 500, just like that;
3. The most delicious is the referral system: send the task to a talented developer and earn $ 500 with him (this is how the thing spreads, the manager sent it to me);
4. and only after that, if the programmer and the firm have mutual sympathy, negotiations on employment begin.

It turned out quite a viable system: the gingerbread in the form of half a thousand dollars in 20 minutes of work is a bit more than I usually get in 20 minutes of work (it's bad to be me); The “viral” distribution system also turns out to work.

Debriefing

What happens in the bottom line: no need to read a resume; reduced load on the personnel department, because Talking about work begins with the guys who have the necessary skills. In the minus we write down the prize fund (in this case, about $ 25K).

Subjectively, I like it much more than the “cold” mailing list list from LinkedIn. Maybe I just love to solve problems.

Discussion and links

If you are interested in some things, ask in the comments, I will try to find out. In Russian, the administration of the company does not speak, so invite to discuss will not work; I promise to broadcast information verbatim.

You can earn knowledge of C in beer on the contest page (the referral system works only through mail, this is not a referral link).

Most importantly: do you think this method of finding employees has a future?