[consulting] Encourage people to post jobs on groups

Fri May 25 22:29:49 UTC 2007

I personally think being lax on rules around job postings and offering
multiple outlets for finding people is a good thing. Recruiting people to
fill technical positions in any field tends to be hard work, and finding
good Drupal programmers who can work as members of a team is an art, not a
science. The Drupal project benefits from having an ecology of development
firms ready to implement sophisticated solutions, and the more ways there
are for people to talk to one another about employment, the better.

Trellon has recently been looking to hire developers. We posted
announcements here, the jobs board, craigslist, and a few social networking
sites we like. We received about 80 responses for the 4 positions we
advertised. 

The responses we received broke down into 4 categories:

- 20 were from consulting firms outside the US offering to do work for
little or no money.

- 15 were from independent consultants, a couple of whom charged higher
rates than what we charge our clients (which was interesting, considering
most of them had no contributions to Drupal).

- 25 of them were PHP developers with experience in other FOSS CMS systems
and our sector.

- 20 of them were Drupal developers with experience ranging everywhere from
1 month of theming to members of the Drupal security team.

By advertising everywhere and talking to everyone we could, we were able to
be fairly selective and find people who were not just good programmers but
also a good organizational fit (and we really do love all the new people
coming on board). We also found a lot of people with very specific
competencies we can pull in when working on larger jobs.

We did the same thing about a year ago without advertising in so many places
and the results were vastly different. We received about 20 responses from
people with little or no experience in Drupal and had to train people from
within. It takes about 6 months to get someone productive (by my obsessive
standards) when all they know is PHP, and not everyone decides they like
Drupal, so there is actually a risk factor involved in training people.

If I had to say what needs to happen it would be nothing. Let people post
RFPs, job announcements, contracts, bounties, freelance offerings, etc. in
any of the places they already do. Every time a connection is made between a
developer, firm or a client, it directly benefits the Drupal project because
some party is getting a problem solved. The more paths there are to making
connections between people in the community, the better.

Thank you,
Michael Haggerty
Managing Partner
Trellon, LLC
http://www.trellon.com
(p) 301-577-6162
(c) 240-643-6561
(f) 413-691-9114
(aim) haggerty321

> -----Original Message-----
> From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:consulting-bounces at drupal.org]
> On Behalf Of Earnest Berry III
> Sent: Friday, May 25, 2007 9:45 AM
> To: 'A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers'
> Subject: Re: [consulting] Encourage people to post jobs on groups
> 
> Yeah, I think it falls into 3 categories though:
> 1. those who need a quick job done (20-40 hours). Perhaps one time or from
> time-to-time.
> 2. those looking for a FT person (employee).
> 3. those with large RFP's looking for a team and/or company to take on a
> project.
> 
> The main issue is that those who post in any of those categories seem not
> to
> be able to ever target the audience they are looking for. E.g. a large RFP
> will get a bid from a 1-2 man team (when its really a 6-7 man job), or
> someone trying to get a FT person will get responses from people/companies
> offering hourly consulting or some time of remote/part-time work.
> 
> Whatever job-posting solution comes out of all this, there needs to be
> some
> good definitions of the different categories, and ways for people to post
> and filter on those categories.
> 
> IMHO
> 
> - E
> -----Original Message-----
> From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:consulting-bounces at drupal.org]
> On Behalf Of Sean Effel
> Sent: Friday, May 25, 2007 9:30 AM
> To: A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers
> Subject: Re: [consulting] Encourage people to post jobs on groups
> 
> On 5/25/07 7:04 AM, dries.buytaert at gmail.com hollered:
> 
> >
> > On 25 May 2007, at 12:40, Fabio Varesano wrote:
> >>
> >> Maybe the reason could be having the job listing displayed in a well
> >> organized table which can be searched for some parameters.
> >
> > Yep, if that is considered a big win (and it might well be), we
> > should nuke the jobs forum, and give more visibility to the jobs group.
> >
> > --
> > Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/
> 
> 
> Here is an additional thought, though half-baked.  Its possible to take
> the
> job postings offsite and leave that arena to people and orgs who already
> manage that content well.
> 
> There are a number of decently established "find a job" type of websites
> for
> developers, one I have had success with is rentacoder.com (just an
> example,
> not a definitive).  Maybe part of our Drupal community should colonize a
> category within a site like this, and send our job postings there.  The
> advantage is that its a place many people already approach with finding
> and
> offering all varieties of work, not just Drupal.  I am sure that there are
> ways to cross post and aggregate listings from outside channels.
> 
> Sean Effel
> 
> http://www.drupaltherapy.com
> 
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