After more DotComs go belly up and those hundreds of Internet companies rumoured to be circling the drain start to gurgle, a whole bunch of only slightly tarnished development talent will come on the job market. This should make the hiring managers at the remaining not-yet-in-trouble DotComs grin with anticipation. But my guess is there are many more new DotComs with vast hiring plans and existing ones with wild expansion plans than there are going to be DotCom bustups. No DotCom feels like they are for real unless they have well over 100 employees. There is still a hell of a lot of staffing up to do. Of course there may well be a hell of a lot more DotCom deaths.
June 25, 2000
Recruiters in London are famous for being rapacious and the blood in the water and dying flurry of notorious online retailer Boo brought them out like sharks to a whale carcass. One clever recruiting company quickly zoomed to the pub where Boo staff do their London Pride and Bulmers Woodpecker Cider and put their company credit cards behind the bar to the tune of over £5,000 while they did on-the-spot interviews. Clever chaps. Those dispossessed developers went down the parched throats of the remaining talent-hungry DotComs without touching the sides.
As we all know, the free-spending DotCom "there is no tomorrow" days are over for most of us. Boo, DEN, Reel - the bigger they come the harder they fall. So there should be piles of leftover employables from these DotCom missteps. I'm sure there will be. But are there going to be enough of them to make a noticeable dent in the job market? So far, no. I've been in heavy hiring mode for about five years and feel there is a bigger pool of talent to draw on than ever. I have stacks of CVs on my desk and can get new stacks with only a few phone calls. The trick is finding the princes amongst all the toads and to do that you need to just wade in and start kissing. But in spite of the large pile of CVs I get each week I have yet to receive one from any of the recent London DotCom belly flops. Maybe things will get better as more entrepreneurs get body-slammed.
If you read the trade press at all you know there are still hundreds if not thousands of new DotComs loading themselves into the starting gates or just out. Although wiser, the VCs still seem to have huge war chests that are daily swelling even fatter with filthy lucre looking for a home where it can grow obscenely. IPO gold may still be buried at the end of the rainbow. Existing Internet businesses all seem to have wildly aggressive expansion plans. A couple of years ago the DotComs and associated Web development shops all seemed to be looking to expand by 20 or 30 new staff "by the end of the year". Now they all seem to be looking for a hundred or more new staff. Whole herds of DotComs are going to have to die to make this hungry tiger burp. This could, of course happen. Not a very pretty thought. Blood all over the place, DotCom execs jumping out windows, margin calls. Nightmare! If it gets that bad the hiring binges will probably die off also.
So what's the best way to benefit from this fallout? The smartest rats are likely to leave the sinking ships first, so start making recruiting calls before the big layoffs occur. I make it a practice to routinely suggest to people who I know are stars that they consider joining me in whatever my latest scheme is even if I think they are quite happy in their current stock option-laden job. You just never know. Crank this type of activity up a notch. When I was a young buck I used the same approach with women. You just never know. Fortunately I grew up and became more sensitive and caring.
Keep your ears open in the pub, read the trade press, work your old boys' network or whatever and think of reasons to call the stars you know are working for assblast.com or whatever, which is rumoured to be floundering, for a little chat. A whole bunch of stock options are under water right now so that glue isn't quite as sticky as it used to be. Happy hunting.
