Hiring without Recruiters

Recruiters, like any service provider, have their pluses and minuses. If you're really busy, recruiters can be a great asset in pre-screening candidates for you and only sending you those candidates who are the best fit for your open positions in product management or any other area of the organization.

That said, recruiters are also very costly. A typical recruiter fee is in the neighborhood of 20% of the hire's annual salary, which for a product manager can range from $15,000 to $30,000. That's a lot of money for a small company to spend on a single hire, where a fee of that size is equivalent to some pretty serious hardware, or a chunk of health benefits, or a few cross-country sales trips. There have been times in the past where the candidates a recruiter brought me are the exact same candidates I found and contacted myself.

Whether or not you work with recruiters for some of your hires, I have some suggestions for putting in a little extra effort on your part and attracting great candidates without recruiters. All my methods work regardless of the state of the economy.

Start with a great job description: You need to have something that is short and easy to read that captures your position perfectly. Your job description should include:
1. An introduction that describes the company's mission in simple language - the elevator pitch.
2. Responsibilities of this position: 3-8 bullet points
3. Requirements of this position: 3-8 bullet points
4. Any company benefits
5. Possibly some legal language, for example, about equal rights employment, depending on your company
A word about style: My writing style tends to be very formal, but I find myself drawn to job descriptions that contain something cheeky or a little irreverant -- it makes me think that company will be a fun place to work.

When you're done, review your job description with the best writer you know to make sure it's compelling, gramatically consistent, and free of typos. Do a final blessing with your HR department to ensure any boilerplate language (like the company overview and benefits) is standard.
Post everywhere: There are tons of great free or cheap resources out there for finding highly-qualified product managers:
- Your own corporate website: The easiest place to start and a great place to capture potential candidates who have heard about your company.
- University Career Centers: In the Bay Area, there are some amazing universities to draw candidates from, like Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara, and many others. Most universities have some kind of online job board through the career center where companies can post listings at a minimal cost or even free.
- University Job Fairs: Same as above but you get to meet candidates face-to-face. Usually a fairly time-consuming (if not all-day) exercise; leave this to your HR department if you have one.
- Yahoo Groups: Search for Product Management groups and other job boards. But please post with caution; do not post a job description on a board that shuns such postings.
- Job Boards of Product Management Organizations: There are tons of product management organization out there. Many have job boards where companies can post for free or a small fee.
- LinkedIn: Another good place to post a job description at a nominal cost.
- Stanford BASES: This is an excellent but little-known option for startups, in my opinion. I found a great job here once, so I also recommend it for job hunters as well.
- Craigslist: Not a free but a super cheap option that can yield some terrific results. With all the job boards out there, I find this seems to be the one the best candidates actually use.
Filter: When the resumes start coming in, you need to filter, filter, filter. When you post broadly, you're going to get a lot of resumes from a lot of people all over the world. Even people who don't live in the same country where the job is located will throw their resume in the mix. Eventually you'll probably get good enough at scanning resumes that you can hit delete as a filtering mechanism.
Proactively search: Now that your job description is out there, you can start search for candidates. Again, there are lots of ways to proactively find great candidates:
1. Job Boards: Believe it or not, you can find some really solid resuems on popular job boards like HotJobs, Monster, JobFox, and the ilk. You do need to sign up for an account which typically costs a few hundred dollars for a few months of searching. In the Bay Area, Craigslist is free and usually has some decent resumes too.
2. LinkedIn: On LinkedIn, you can browse profiles of great candidates. This is a super way to source candidates because you can find people exactly in your space who do exactly what you're looking for. If you're not shy, you can usually hunt down their email address and cold-email or even cold-call them if you're able to find their place of work. If you're not up for cold-calling, try emailing them first.
3. Employee Referral Programs sadly usually do not produce the results that people hope or expect them to. If a colleague is going to refer someone, chances are they will, even without an incentive. And if they're not going to refer someone, they probably won't, even with an incentive. But be sure to let everyone you talk to in your company know you're looking, and you'll probably end up turning up a good candidate along the way.

All of this does take a little extra effort, but if you follow these steps you should have some great resumes to review. You can then decide if the effort is worth it to you, or if you want to continue working with a recruiter instead!