A startup e-commerce company called Bigcommerce took a bold approach to hiring techies for its new San Francisco office, using breakfast sandwiches and coffee to help with their recruiting efforts.
With a need for 40 engineers and product developers in quick order, Bigcommerce staked out the shuttle bus stops of major technology companies to poach their talent.
Hopping on shuttle buses is the standard routine in Silicon Valley for employees of Google, Facebook, Adobe and LinkedIn, among others. Bigcommerce executives in March started showing up at bus stops across the city, pitching the virtues of their company.
They hired temporary workers to join them and hand out 400 poached egg sandwiches and 500 cups of coffee to initiate conversation with the potential employees, branding everything using the hashtag #poached.
Later, they added #parched – a happy hour invitation, with drinks, music and a raffle for Google Glass.
According to media reports in SFGate, Mashable and San Jose Mercury News, this brazen ploy brought results within a couple weeks.
More than 1,000 potential candidates were approached at the bus stops, with six job offers made. Two engineers were hired as a result.
Bigcommerce pledged to keep up the effort until they had 40 new hires within 60 days.
The San Francisco expansion came about after a $40 million initial round of funding headed up by former AOL founder, Steve Case. Bigcommerce also has offices in Austin, Texas and Sydney.
The poaching scheme popped into West Stringfellow’s head as he commuted to work at a previous job, traveling from Noe Valley to Market Street. He saw the lines of people at those shuttle bus stops, all across the city.
Stringfellow is the new chief product officer for Bigcommerce. He has worked for for PayPal and Amazon.
Ron Pragides, the company’s vice president of engineering, once worked for Twitter and Salesforce.
Roku reportedly tried this poaching thing last year on Google’s shuttle passengers in Saratoga. Bigcommerce went big with it and scored big. After the campaign, traffic to the company’s career site increased by 54 percent and job applications increased by 150 percent.
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