Use the crisis for hiring precious gems to fuel the growth of your SMB or start-up

Shortly after summer we started looking for an extra web developer for Promex.be.
I used my twitter network (thanks @timgeyssens for spreading the word), ran a banner campaign and even wasted 1.000 EUR on a job listing (at vacature.com) to no effect.

My business partner @besharp did a few preliminary interviews, but these candidates did not fulfill the skills we required.

Then some American wbankers burned their greedy fingers badly on three letter acronyms. The underestimated risk, linked to those financial product failures somehow contaminated the entire world economy. Now the press feeds us stories of lay-offs on a daily basis (including their own staff reductions). However this gloomy climate creates opportunities for smaller, but growing companies. In 1O years of being an entrepreneur, I never faced such a dense pool of talented people (pro)-actively looking for jobs.

These are truly great times to hire! We are now able to attract those professionals, who usually got hired by well established brands and ‘prestigious’ employers. These classic employers now suffer from short term objectives and their lack of long term development will cripple them even more, when this crisis will be over again. 

Hopefully we get to share our Promex passion and show them it does not take a multinational with a HR department to get job satisfaction. Through the VDAB database we got a fantastic response in January, which resulted in me wanting to hire each candidate. I almost forgot we are not growing that fast either But since I like ‘diamond in the rough’ and two of these software engineers were officially looking for a job, we used a Flemish government subsidy plan (IBO) to hire both of them last month. I was pleasantly surprised it took no longer than half a day of paper work to benefit from the support either. I can only recommend the personal follow-up by our local VDAB consultant .

Insert picture of Bert & Dieter unwrapping their new office tools: laptops, screens, stands, keyboards, mouse…

Welcome to Bert & Dieter, we’re happy to have you on board!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.