Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

http://blog.petesoder.com/blog/2013/09/23/why-engineering-pr-is-not-crazy-talk/

by petesoder • 13 years ago

35 25 13 years ago

blog.petesoder.com

This is a good writeup.

In general, this type of mindset is important, especially for company founders. It's not so much "PR" or "sales" or "marketing", but more about understanding what's important to the target audience, and explaining why what you're offering is a good fit for what they want.

VCs, business partners, employees, customers...they all have a different perspective on the world, and it's hard to be successful in business if you're unable to get your message across.

petesoder9• 13 years ago

Thanks. It's been a ton of fun learning to teach story-telling to engineers/CTOs. Every good developer cares about an interesting engineering challenge, but nailing the quick story around it can be slightly challenging sometimes.

danmccorm• 13 years ago

Great post. I think this isn't discussed enough (which just benefits those companies who have nailed it). This ties into one of my prime lessons of tech management: always be recruiting. To do that well, you have to start with an awesome idea/company and then hone your message to get the best people working with you.

petesoder9• 13 years ago

Yeah - great point. Recruiting is so hard these days that most people don't get enough leads in the top of the funnel in order to really see enough quality candidates get through the screening process.

Establishing an engineering story (and telling it well) allows you to add more interested engineers to the top of the funnel. It's a longer term strategy, but I think it's required based on present market dynamics.

m1try• 13 years ago

Cool post! I'm actually doing my own business on the pain described in the original post. Keep up the good work.

WhitneyLand• 13 years ago

It sounds like like you're trying to encourage more meaningful connections between engineers and recruiters. That's a good thing, but the term PR is a turn off even used as an analogy.

Even if engineers are the mark rather than the intended audience, those roles often overlap so your message should appeal to both.

That said I think your content is on the right track. Maybe title it something like “here’s how to encourage more meaningful connections between engineers and recruiters”...

petesoder9• 13 years ago

Good feedback, thank you.

Although I'm not sure it's about creating meaningful connections between engineers and "recruiters," Although I guess it depends who the recruiter is in the company. Sometimes it's the CTO or engineering manager - but sometimes the initial story-telling (aka company pitch) is delegated to a traditional recruiter (which normally isn't as effective with engineers).

I'd prefer to see traditional recruiters go the way of the Tyrannosaurus.

If you want to hire the best team as an engineering manager it's typically best not to delegate the job to someone else.

peterbell_nyc• 13 years ago

Great post. It's a real issue for many startups I talk to that wonder why they're having a hard time recruiting tech talent and haven't spent the time to build a brand and relationship with engineers. If you happen to have a consumer brand, that's great (Apple, Google, etc) but the most important thing is to create an engineering brand that tells the story of what kind of shop you're going to be to work for and why people should work for you instead of one of a huge number of other startups.

petesoder9• 13 years ago

If you can't explain in 60 seconds why an engineer should want to come and work at your company, you're dead.

girishrao• 13 years ago

Good stuff. Fully agree with the last point -- having the CTO or engineering lead build the story and reach out to potential hires makes a huge difference.

adamjlev• 13 years ago

Pete, great advice here.

I definitely will push for this hard as I grow the team at makespace.com

Few examples of successful engineering PR: New Relic, Stripe, Uber. Of course, solving interesting problems is appealing in it self

clinejj• 13 years ago

This was big for me when I was applying for jobs earlier this year. Teams that had a blog, updated it reasonably often talking about their recent challenges they overcame or fun projects went a long ways in making me want to work with them. The careers page is nice, but talking don't really present the culture and specific work that gets done in a very good way.

There's a couple companies that come to mind that I feel like do a pretty good job with this - Tumblr (look at some of the intern reports from this summer and the rest of the staff blog), and Etsy's Code as Craft blog go a long ways in making their engineer teams attractive.

petesoder9• 13 years ago

I couldn't agree more. Engineers are loathe to enter into a traditional recruiting process (i.e. go in through the front door) when they have so many options out there.

It's far more attractive if they can 'window shop' and get a true sense for your team/culture/challenges without kicking off a gauntlet of interviews for them to learn the same stuff.

Obviously, interviews are still important for the hiring team, but it's time to make the overall process better (and more front-loaded with the company's engineering project info) for the engineer candidates.

godisdad• 13 years ago

Excellent post. I think the aversion engineers have toward PR for teams is unfortunate. A similar attitude toward prof. networking exists. Good team PR and good professional networking is predicated on mutual benefit.

Teams that are innovating, working on novel problems and dedicated to quality shouldn't be afraid to present themselves in a positive light. There's nothing sleazy about trying to attract and retain like-minded people.

petesoder9• 13 years ago

Good comment, thanks. And appreciate the connection with professional networking.

As a young engineer, it was very hard for me to come to understand the value of building my network. I guess when there's so many horrible 'networking' events out there (just like 'bad' marketing), it takes some time for one to overcome an adverse knee-jerk reaction and really apprehend the value.

knes• 13 years ago

Great read. I was actually in the process of writing a blog post about the exactly the same thing. at Pusher (http://pusher.com/jobs) we are revamping all our jobs, about us, etc pages but also blogging more about our technical challenges and what we do as a team outside of work. Slowly but surely, we can see the increase in spontaneous applications and the quality.

jgrant27• 13 years ago

There's something important missing from the post. Interviewing. Interviewing is a horrible experience for most engineers. It's often costly in time and in preparation. Keep this in mind if you're hoping to hire anyone that's not still green in their career. Provide honest insight into the process for candidates. Keep your engineers from getting into the usual pissing contest during the white-board "dance" and under-graduate level homework details that don't really tell you anything about someone but are often just an excuse to technically "haze" a candidate.

petesoder9• 13 years ago

yep - this is totally designed to be a more scalable lead-gen strategy (top of funnel).

Next post will be on effective interviewing by/of engineers. I find many companies don't tend to do that in a scalable way, either.

sjheinz• 13 years ago

Prudent advice. Building a reputation to attract great people to your team demands honesty about who you are and how you work together. This should not manifest itself as a list of buzzwords, but a genuine introspection about what kinds of talents and personalities will benefit your team in the long run. Clearly explaining to a candidate why you want them to join your team and what it is you value about everything they have to offer can be a powerful and persuasive conversation to convince any candidate to choose your team above all others.

gergles• 13 years ago

Step 2 is really the unique part here -- what you need to do is to figure out who you want before you can figure out how to communicate with them. The oldest adage in the book about speechcraft is "know your audience" but it really applies to any sort of communication, even 1:1 ping-type emails. Can't emphasize enough how much you need to introspect within your org to figure out who you're looking for if you have any chance of convincing someone that they are who you're looking for.

petesoder9• 13 years ago

It's very true. Many times orgs write generic, catch-all engineering job specs. Or they say they're looking for any 'good' engineer.

They think this is a good idea since it seems to apply to the broadest number of candidates. But it totally backfires - no one gets excited about the role since it's not targeted at anyone.

thejulielogan2• 13 years ago

misleading title, though it is a nice little bow to wrap around the idea.

petesoder9• 13 years ago

Curious, why misleading?

thejulielogan2• 13 years ago

Public Relations for your Engineering Team suggests working on getting them out in front of the product, not just hiding behind it.

You touched on it, "Engineers are no longer the loner geeks, working in dimly lit rooms, hacking away" but didn't realize the potential of that statement. Instead you used the idea to jump into a different topic; using the Tenants of PR to hire Engineers.

gabestein• 13 years ago

I think Pete is right on. Content marketing as a by-product of engineering, especially open-source engineering, is only going to become a bigger part of recruiting. Just look at GitHub. Super engineer-driven company, incredible content marketing generated by their engineers that helps them find folks.

Why PR for Your Engineering Team is not Crazy Talk

Related Stories