There’s been a lot written about Portland’s ability to lure talented folks from all over the country. Richard Florida is probably the best known author on this subject, and he’s given our fair city high marks in terms of its ability to attract these innovative people – he dubs them the Creative Class – to the shores of the Willamette River. Portland also happens to have relatively affordable housing, great public transit and delicious local food. These socio-geographical advantages make Portland a great place to start a company.

Along these lines, one of the great aspects of working at a startup (well, a funded startup anyway) is that you get to hire people you like to work with. But, this benefit is a double-edged sword: not only do these colleagues have to be a pleasure to work with in a high-pressure, results-oriented environment, they also need to be far more productive than the average worker. A startup is in the unique position of spending significant investor capital to build a product that competes with well-established firms (with a much lower cost of capital!). The only way that the formula works is if the employee population far out-produces larger companies: making the right decisions faster, anticipating market directions sooner, and executing on product development plans on time. There is not much margin for error and finding these kinds of people takes an extraordinary amount of searching.

Thus, the management team at Elemental spends a significant amount of time and money looking for world-class talent, while at the same time constantly evaluating the performance of our existing employee population. For new hires, we’ve recently hit on a good process strategy that has been quite effective with positions at certain levels:

1. Post a job on Craigslist (and hit up our personal networks). We usually get at least 50 resumes within a week.
2. Phone screen the top 10.
3. Bring in the top four candidates at the same time.
4. Have each of them give a 15-minute oral presentation to the interview team.
5. Rotate these candidates through four 45-minute individual interviews with the hiring team. At any point, a candidate may be determined not the best fit to meet with the other interviewers and the interview will be concluded.
6. With any luck, we hire one person out of the process. If not, we go back to step one and start over.

Using this method we’ve recently brought some terrific folks on board, helped in part by Portland’s drawing power to recruit from all over the country. Our VP of Marketing hire Andy Beach was the most visible, as covered by local Northwest blogs TechFlash and Silicon Forest, and we are thrilled to have Andy lending his expertise from years at Inlet Technologies and Last Exit. We’ve also picked up superstars from Microsoft, Insitu (now owned by Boeing), and recent graduates from institutions like the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, University of Oregon, Tufts, and Harvard Business School. These people are not only great to be around, they represent world-class talent. They are joining a strong core group of Elemental veterans, and the pieces of the puzzle are coming together to drive world-class execution.

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