Recruiting the Top 1 Percent (2007)

The danger is that if you then build a culture where everyone gets recruited out of school, everyone is swimming in the same pool with equally narrow skill sets and no one develops the required breadth. So you get "architects" who know their field really well but can barely write working code on a modern system.

This works great for the true elite who will learn this stuff on their own, of course. But even then recruiting from schools tends to incorrectly bias decisions on things like grades, which correlate at best weakly with hacking talent. You'll miss some of those targets who were slacking off in class working on their own projects.

Today's students, if they are really good, have much better opportunity than to work at Fog Creek. They are thinking of companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, LinkedIn, etc. that are actually innovating and working on some of the most interesting problems and applications. Not creating VNC "Remote Assistance" clones and help desk software.

Fog Creek does create very good software. But game changing? Or well known? Most people outside of software development wouldn't be able to name an actual Fog Creek product.

In September recruiting here at Western University, for example, a bunch of firms host their info sessions at a club, where it's open bar. But students are getting smarter here, and almost everyone looks for internships in third year. Thus, the companies have adapted and several have started recruiting second years. But more than that, firms like KPMG have started running summer programs, where they fly promising students down to Hollywood for an all expenses-paid vacation, to introduce them to the firm.

Let's see who's the first to offer to pay for tuition.

You could probably launch a business in almost every possible field in the world, charge 50% more than everyone else, not fix a thing about how you do business... except cloning a sales funnel like the one mentioned in this article,(overwhelming your "qualified" prospects with a pleasantly surprising "shock and awe" experience and you would crush the competition, and have prospects lining up around the block begging you to take their money!

It might cost you an extra buck or two upfront, but it will pay for itself in spades in the long run, and as the article points out, greatly minimize your risk by qualifying your prospects before investing in them, and instead spend the money on attracting the top 1% of customers!!!!

I guess the only real question is... This article is 5 years old, what's taking you so long to realize your customers just want to feel special and want an experience they can't resist sharing with everyone out there.

It truly amazes me that there is a guaranteed to work formula here, and yet so many companies spend their marketing dollars trying to attract everbody or the wrong-body instead of investing in the right people at the right time, and making bigger margins, delivering better services and experiences to better customers, who are very happy to pay premiums.

Too many summer internships (see big law, big finance, etc) fail to give employers the information they need to know if there's a fit, and, just as importantly, fail to give top students the information that THEY need to know if this is where they want to spend 70 hours a week for the next 1-3 years.

Also more than the offer, Fog Creek is not known to people who don't follow tech news, read Joel's articles etc. But everyone knows and uses a (insert a big co)'s product and that reputation definitely stands out.

One downside of taking lower paying jobs is that employers often decide that you really are worth the lower salary. Programmers can end up doing system administration and desktop work. Perhaps that's not too bad in moderation, but it's very easy to get sucked into an on-call mode. Then again there may be exceptional people who can program in their heads as if they had an office with a door they can close, while some administrative assistant is nagging about corrupted email.