magnify360 Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot about how recruiting has changed over the last 6 months, from the little things to the big things.

Everyone always looks to talent, and reads thousands of resumes to find “talent”. Just because people put down a list of things they’ve done in the past, doesn’t mean they’re talented. “Involved in a team that generated lots of positive ROI” generally means that the company’s profits increased when they laid off the poor bastard.

Then we looked for drive and teamwork, because we knew that raw talent wasn’t enough. So we invented great questions like “are you a good team player?” (hate to meet the person who said no), and “what’s your favorite team sport” (rugby, because most of the team has their head up the hooker’s ass).

Chris Lyman, Fonality’s CEO/Janitor talked about measuring caring in an interview…. with the obvious harassment suit repercussions…. His comments inspired me to think more about how to measure all of the “intangibles” in an interview process. Because my shareholders will tell you I’ve done a lot of trial and error in this realm.

Last week I had one the of the best interviews ever. This guy was coming in as a senior level technical developer / architect, and after a quick set of introductions, he began grilling me, the CEO & Founder, about the company, our technology roadmap, what our customers were saying, where our biggest challenges were, what we were going to do with the company, etc…

This guy CARES. He doesn’t care about making a good impression on me. He doesn’t care about laying roses where I walk or about his specific job description. He CARES about the company that he’s going to join, not politics, perks, and position.

He didn’t care about what part of the code he would be working on. He didn’t care about how many people he could manage. He didn’t care whether the sodas were free (they are), or if the foosball table is broken (it is), or…

Why? Because he CARES about where the company is headed. He cares to know what kinds of challenges the company is facing. He cares what kind of team he is joining. And in the end, he knows that being part of a company that he CARES ABOUT is more important than a title of CEO or Janitor.

After 30 minutes of his questions, I learned far more about him than if I had used that time to ask him about his favorite hobbies or which programming languages he knew. Most importantly, I knew that if I put the company (or whatever small part of the company) in his hands, he would always put the company first in making his decisions. Not what he felt like doing. Not what I wanted. But what was best for the company.

 

What a great week for all of us at magnify360! Last Tuesday we announced that magnify360 closed its first round of financing from MHS Capital as well as from some of the original investors behind successes, like BlueLithium (Yahoo!), Right Media and BetterPPC. Read the press release.

Congrats to the team!

A little history on magnify360. The Company was founded in 2004 by  Olivier Chaine. With the dedication of few of the original team members here, he bootstrapped the company to profitability within two short year, opened another office in Shanghai, China and attracted the likes of clients, including Citrix Systems, Intuit, Service Magic (IAC), HSBC Bank, Packet8, Continental Warranty and other industry leaders. Might I add, our very first clients are still with us today.

The financing will predominantly focus on recruiting—we are growing fast-fast-fast. All of our available positions are here. Take a look, polish your resume and send it on in.  We’re on the hunt for bright, creative and quick minds.

The media coverage of our announcement was tremendous. magnify360 was featured in:

DowJones VentureWire

VentureBeat (BIG thank you to Matt Marshall)

SoCalTech

The blog of Ben Kuo, voice of SoCalTech (Thank you Ben!)

The Smart Show (contributed by Fransisco Dao of the FastCompany blog)

TechCrunchIT (What an honor! Thank you Cameron!)

PaidContent

Pulse2.0

…and many many other fantastic & well-respected outlets. Thanks to everyone, who covered the announcement. All can be viewed on the News section of www.magnify360.com.

While all of this was going on, Olivier was flying around the country delivering speeches at the Online Marketing Summit Summer Tour…Seattle, Denver, Atlanta…not to mention meetings in San Fransisco and back here in LA and our exhibit this week at San Jose’s Search Engine Strategies conference.

In between flights on layovers and in between meetings in the car, he was on the phone taking interviews. You see…Olivier doesn’t sleep. He’s an optimization machine.