Thoughts from my journey

Totango was quoted today in the Wall Street Journal in an article about Steve Jobs:

“It’s not to that point of being annoying yet, but it might get there,” says Dominique Levin, vice president of marketing at Totango Inc., a software company based in Mountain View, Calif., and Tel Aviv. Her boss, CEO Guy Nirpaz, devoured all 656 pages of the book in three days, then bought copies for his employees—including Hebrew translations for employees in Israel—so they could discuss the book at company meetings.

“When they read it, they’ll see that you can do things differently, be more product focused,” says Mr. Nirpaz, 39 years old, whose company builds software that monitors customer relations. He also hopes employees will take a softer view of their own boss after reading the book, which portrays Mr. Jobs as a brilliant but mercurial leader.

“I’m a good guy, but I’m very demanding,” says Mr. Nirpaz. Once his employees have read the book, he adds, “they’ll see I’m a very nice manager compared to Steve Jobs.”

Ha ha … as I said, we are good guys and don’t take ourselves too seriously.

Check out the article on the WSJ website (at least for the next 7 days).

Come work for me! We are hiring!

– Coders, hackers and UI freaks (Israel)
– Community manager: aka social media ninja (Mountain View, CA)
– Sales development manager: aka front line warrior (Mountain View, CA)

Also hiring a sales manager and customer success manager (Mountain View, CA)

To apply email Jobs[at]TOTANGO[dot]com (pun intended)

The phrase in the title is not original, I admit. (The original discussion is about the future of internet marketing and advertising, see here)

Hiring great people and building great teams is not trivial. However, there is one very simple rule I follow about hiring  great talents: good people like to work with good people!

Also, talented people are looking for specific jobs, It is not just about the benefits, and in many cases it’s not about the benefits at all (although, I think that there should be an upside for all the hard work being put). People are looking for challenges they would like to tackle, either or both product challenges or technical challenges. Many people I like working with are passionate about what they do and consider themselves fortunate to have the opportunity to professionally do what they love, make meaning and grow personally.

Good people don’t look for jobs on a ‘first come first served basis’, they know what they would like to do next and identify a good opportunity when they see it. Usually they put their eyes on specific companies/roles/challenges they’d like to do.

The best sources for great talent are people you’ve worked with before and know already what they are capable of, the second best source for good candidates comes from references by friends and business colleagues. The worst (and most expensive!) source for recruitment is resumes from recruitment agencies (paid resumes). Very similar to web leads and traffic sources – organic is best, paid is worst.

There isn’t a single activity you do to build a pipeline of excellent candidate who will want to work for you. You should continuously spend your energy in helping the people you’d like to work with find you. This includes social networking online and offline. In addition, you should create value by blogging, sharing presentations, organizing working groups, etc. These all help other learn about what you do and how.

When analyzing our team at SaaSPulse (soon to be rebranded), I find:

• 30% – Had prior working history with
• 40% – Referred by our friends
• 30% – Through social activity

Together with Ori Lahav, founder and CTO of Outbrain we came up with term ‘Inbound Recruiting’. It simply works and helps you build great team.

And of course, If you find this the right point in your life to look for new challenges, I’ll be happy to talk!