Former Twitter recruiter Morgan Missen is joining Foursquare today as Head of Talent for Foursquare West.
Missen (née Missentzis) was the first Technical Recruiter at Twitter, responsible for all backend engineering hires. Prior to that position she was a Google Technical Recruiter for three years. Missen’s Foursquare hire is important because it solidifies the check-in service’s ongoing San Francisco expansion; Foursquare is also closing in on an office in SOMA and is planning on leasing space for between 30-50 additional engineers.
Foursquare SF’s team of ten now has three non technical employees –VP of Mobile Partnerships Holger LeUdorf, VP of Business Development Tristan Walker and Missen — with the seven remaining being engineers.
Missen, who consulted and worked on her side project Main.is in between Twitter and Foursquare gigs, will be focusing on recruiting at Foursquare in addition to human resources and development. She will be operating under Foursquare General Manager Evan Cohen and recruiting 100% of the positions at the West Coast branch.
Right now Foursquare shares the historic Chronicle Building with Square, but its team is rapidly outgrowing the small space. Their move out of the Chronicle Building is imminent, and should be completed in about a month’s time. Foursquare SF eventually wants to grow to 100 people (the entire Foursquare team, SF + NY, is now at 60).
The demand for skilled recruiters like Missentzis in Silicon Valley and SF is high as everyone and their mother is hiring. On what she thought about the talent rush Morgan told me, “It’s an exciting time and I’m fortunate to be at Foursquare,” which she holds has the strongest team and is the best engineering job in SF. Also, it had angel investor Ashton Kutcher call her personally to seal the deal.
Foursquare has somewhere around nine million users and just hit 3 million checkins, with $21.4 million in funding from Kutcher, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Rick Webb and others.
I'm starting to become convinced that people put my name in articles just to improve their SEO or hoping I'll tweet it.—
ashton kutcher (@aplusk) May 12, 2011
Foursquare is a geographical location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. Users share their location with friends by “checking in” via a smartphone app or by text message. Points are awarded for checking in at various venues. Users can connect their Foursquare accounts to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, which can update when a check in is registered. By checking in a certain number of times, or in different locations, users can collect virtual badges. In addition, users...
Morgan Missen is Head of Talent at foursquare in San Francisco. Previously Morgan was the first employee recruiter at Twitter and spent several years at Google as a talent specialist for global engineering teams and its corporate strategy group. She has also done contingency recruitment for Silicon Valley based Fortune 500 companies including Yahoo!, Oracle, EA and Cisco Systems; and advised early stage startups on recruiting and hiring.
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
