Transatlantic Cable: Let the great job hunt begin!

There's a big hunt going on in Silicon Valley, with big rewards for success. The hunt is for people to fill the thousands of highly-paid jobs at the thousands of Internet and IT companies which are expanding, and the rewards can be huge for the right person. The fact of the matter is that there are more jobs out there than there are people to fill them - and companies are being forced to use some unusual tactics to land the best candidates...

Some companies, for example, have found that finder's fees can help persuade their employees to recruit their friends. I've heard of cases where companies are offering as much as $10,000 if one of their existing employees can persuade a friend to come aboard. There are also stock options and signing bonuses which often run to tens of thousands of dollars.

But what keeps people around isn't money - it's a challenge and the working environment. "People don't leave a job for money," says Andree Bryan, senior technical recruiter at Looksmart. "The way to retain people is the same way that you are going to attract them - to be a company that's doing sexy technology and that's providing training. People like to be rewarded based on effort, so bonuses are what can make the difference. That tends to retain people, especially if they are performance-based."

Show me the stock options

But many people out here aren't just after cash - they want a chunk of the company. In fact, many are prepared to forgo a big salary to get stock options, particularly in companies that are still in a pre-IPO phase. It's pretty much accepted that stock options will be part of the standard package, and much of the haggling that goes on over job offers is over how many shares an employee can have. While stock options are primarily used in the UK as a way to persuade employees to stay around, here they are part of the package that is used to attract new staff, and almost everybody expects to get them.

Of course, stock options also encourage people to hang around: there's always the feeling that if you stay at the company, the shares will continue to rise, making you even more money - that is, assuming that the value of Internet stocks continues to climb...

To seek, to find

A job market like this encourages people to try alternative means to find the people they're after. Like, for instance, the mystery start-up which decided that the best way to find a vice president of engineering was to advertise on a number of lampposts in San Francisco's South Park, right in the middle of the South of Market area (Soma). It posted an ad next to the usual fly-posters for garage sales and people with vans who can move things. This area is where anybody who is anybody in the multimedia industry has their HQ - Wired magazine is just down the road, and there are more start-ups around here than there are baseball caps in the nearby Giants stadium.

The company described itself as a "cool, pre-launch, solidly financed Soma start-up", but didn't explain why it had decided to advertise on a lamppost instead of the usual locations. Well, it's probably a bit late to apply now - the company has yet to respond to my email requests for more information, so it's a safe bet to assume it has filled the position. No doubt, there is someone sitting in an office near South Park counting their signing bonus and calculating how quickly their stock options are going to make them a millionaire...