You may know Dan Porter as the CEO of the free multiplayer gaming and chat platform, OMGPOP, which specializes in making social games, like Puppy World, for example. What you may not know is that, for the last year, Porter has been managing and curating a free, weekly newsletter called Inside Startups.
The mission of Inside Startups, Porter says, was to move people from larger companies and corporations into up-and-coming startups in an effort to galvanize the New York City startup scene. The conceit, too, is simple. If you’re looking for a job at a startup or know someone who does, simply sign up (for free) and Inside Startups will email you five great startup jobs available in New York City every Saturday. (Although cities like Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Atlanta are now included on Inside Startups’ website.)
Even for those not actively looking for jobs, the founder says, it’s a great way to stay on top of the startup scene in your city — and around the country.
As Porter says on Inside Startups:
I was having trouble finding great people to hire. Job boards were static and consisted of people looking for jobs, and recruiters were expensive. I wanted to find the best people, the people who already had jobs, and get in front of them in a low impact way. So the team set out to build a comprehensive mailing list of every person in New York City who worked or wanted to work for a startup. Then we signed up over 200 startups and began sending out our weekly email.
So, after sending out hundreds of jobs over the course of the last year and seeing its community grow to now include 5,000 subscribers, 250 hiring companies, and a 50/50 developer-to-business split in NYC, Inside Startups decided to launch a comprehensive analysis of the click-throughs in the postings it sent out in its newsletter in an effort to answer one of the biggest questions facing founders and startup teams looking to hire: “What are the attributes of a killer job posting?”
Last week, Porter and company produced a report based on its data that offers five tips to help startups be more effective in their hiring (and avoid common misconceptions and fallacies), because, after all, finding the right people can be the difference between life and death for a fledgling company.
For starters, Inside Startups found that the top three skill sets available that received the most click-throughs (in proportion to other types of jobs) were business/finance, communications/social media, and software/web development — in that order.
The company’s short-list of recommendations for startups when creating their job postings and going after new talent? Focus on press and traction over investors, keep it short, remember the interesting perks, sell the job more than the company, and stay away from using “ninjas” or “rockstars” to reduce the lame-ness factor.
For a longer look, check out the top five below:
