Winning the Engineering Talent War Online

In late 2009, I created a fictitious online persona similar to a Meebo JavaScript engineer. The fictitious engineer launched his own website, LinkedIn profile, and Facebook page, and over 18 months, received 237 emails from 180 recruiters and 195 companies.

With the flood of activity, I realized that I could finally answer some recruiting questions that had been gnawing at me. Through oodles of visual graphs and examples, this presentation will answer:

• How do the engineering recruiting practices vary across different types of recruiters and companies?
• What do the big guys get right?
• Are in-house or external recruiters better?
• If you're a start-up, what's the best recruiting strategy to win the talent war?
• Is talent moving north?
• If you're an engineer, what's the best way to position yourself online?
• What are the biggest surprises learned from this experiment?

This is not your typical best practices presentation or a veiled attempt to convince you that Meebo does everything best. This is my own personal side experiment that I initially conducted to find fantastic recruiters. However, I unexpectedly stumbled upon some great insights about the recruiting landscape that I'm more than willing to share with others.