Attracting Talent

The little startup that is semi grown-up now is having an interesting problem. When you finally learn from your mistakes (underestimating the people\effort required, focusing too much on the future, hiring cheaper employees, etc..) how do you attract new talent. We are no longer a startup that can offer a true sense of ownership, nor are we a large company with lots of money to play with the latest toys and also though I still find web development challenging we are essentially building decade old technologies (no Web 2.0 here). We simply have a lot of hard problems that require talented people who enjoy bringing a bit of order to some chaos. Those engineers and managers we want to hire, don't seem to find us an interesting challenge so we are left with salary being our only leverage. Though money is nice it isn't the be all end all especially when hiring roles that would pay good money regardless. So we are almost in a catch-22. Do we hire people less qualified than what we wanted (essentially against what our hard earned lessons taught us) or do we wait forever and continue to screw things up in the meantime.

I guess this has all been a lesson to do things right the first time around. It is a hell of a lot harder fixing a company than it is to set it out on the right foot.

And the kicker to the whole thing is, how do you attract this talent\provide offers that won't end up pissing off those employees that took you a long way in the first place.

Next time around I am taking Joel on Software's advice and hiring the most talented people I can find and to hell with what others think. I would rather have 5 amazing people than 15 average people.