Category: Hiring

Hiring Moz Startups Team

Some Thoughts on Firing Employees

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This past week, I read a terrific Quora thread on firing. The depth and breadth of answers shows the wide range of opinions and practices on the subject, and it made me think about the topic for this blog. Companies are rarely transparent about how and why they let people go, so hopefully we can be an exception here, at…
Hiring Startups Team

When Brilliant Minds Become Brilliant Jerks

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The NYTimes Bits Blog has a worthwhile read from last week entitled “What Do You Do With the Brilliant Jerks?” I’d encourage startup founders and team members to take 8 minutes and read it thoroughly. On its face, the article didn’t strike me as especially controversial, but the comments(and some of the responses on social media) tell a different story.…
Hiring Team

Interview Questions and Interview Strategy

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s struck me of late that many smart companies with reputations for giving tough interviews are weirdly anti-strategic in their approach to interview questions. Chatting with folks from across our organization (and a few others) who’ve done their fair share of interviewing with Google, Amazon, Boeing, the US State Department, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’m struck by what seems like a…
Hiring Startups Team

The Uncomfortable Challenge of Topgrading Your Startup’s Team

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
If things go well at your startup, there will inevitably be a point where the business is growing ahead of the team’s abilities. Engineers will find themselves facing architectural, scaling, and complexity issues they’ve never dealt with before. Marketers will discover their historical strengths dwarfed by the quantity and complexity of different customer acquisition channels and the huge challenges of…
Hiring Moz

Keeping Amazing People on the Team

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Many of my posts on this blog are intended to be broad in scope and provide an opinion, data or experience about startup/marketing paths. This one might not fit that pattern as well. Rather than describing my thoughts or collected advice from experience on startup talent retention, I’m going to instead channel feedback from our employees themselves on what keeps…
Hiring Startups

Why Cash Bonuses Make No Sense in Startups

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s tough competing for candidates with the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. In the past 6 months, we’ve lost bids for half a dozen or so engineers to these companies, and more than a few mentioned the additional cash bonuses as one of the reasons they were motivated to choose these companies over us. Despite this, I’m holding…
Hiring Startups

Hacking the Character Litmus Test

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I had coffee with SEOmoz’s new recruiter, Sierra, recently. She’s amazing, and she has to be. The people who make up our team over the next 3 years will determine whether we can become a truly remarkable company, or just a mediocre one. In terms of which current Mozzers will impact that most intensely, Sierra’s pretty close to the top.…

Keep up with SparkToro®