Call them rockstars, tell the world
by Ian Ybarra
Here’s a surefire way to let your recruits know how excited you are about them being on your team…call them rockstars and tell hundreds of thousands of people!
Meebo is a Silicon Valley startup that allows you to sign on to all your instant messaging accounts at once…all through a single webpage. And one of the first things you see when you log in is a little chatbox-looking-window with the latest from the Meebo company blog. Here’s what I — and a bunch of other people — saw today (almost like it’s straight out of Recruit Or Die, Chapter 2).
If you read the whole post you’ll see that besides making the current interns feel special, it actually does several great things for future Meebo recruiting.
1. Shows that Meebo appreciates recruits as people, for all the cool stuff they do outside of work, too
After 3 weeks backpacking around South America, Matt just joined us for some heavy C/C++ lifting. He’s originally from Maui and spent part of his college sophomore year in China. As a result he can speak Mandarin now, involuntarily suffused with some Spanish words.
2. Shows future prospects what the current interns are really doing on the job
He’s having fun implementing the features he’s heard everyone request over the last year and has his hands in Python and JavaScript.
she’s joining us this summer to help us build out our customer care system. Lost password? No problem! What’s the #4 user request for the week? She’s got it covered
3. Shows some of what they’re looking for in new recruits
Mila found us on Castro street as Jian was heading out the front door one night and asked us if we had any summer intern opportunities. We were floored by her initiative…
AJ is a hero amongst us. If you’ve ever walked down Castro Street and wondered why the lights were still on around 3:30am… it’s probably AJ. AJ has managed to juggle a busy academic life (Symbolic Systems at Stanford), a pretty rigorous cycling addiction, and answering every single user email from the past year.
4. Starts next year’s recruiting NOW by inviting all interns in the Bay Area over for lunch
Our interns are hosting the next lunch 2.0 on July 25th. If you are an intern around the Bay Area, please stop by! There will be free lunch and four square for all!
Meebo recruiting is definitely rocking. They’re sure to lure at least a few interns from area companies over for lunch — and those interns will likely be ones with the skills they want (Doesn’t every company in Silicon Valley do software development?!) and perhaps a passion for Meebo’s product (let’s see, where might they have seen the invitation?…while using meebo).
And this all started from the company simply telling the world about their people, their “most important asset”…something every company should be doing anyway.