Two weekends ago was held the 1st edition of Rejoignez Une Startup (“Join a Startup”), a startup recruiting event which aimed to attract top-level engineering talent to interest them in working for startups. More than 40 startups – including Capitaine Train (just raised $1.4M), VoitureLib (just raised $2M – here’s an interview with the founder on the future of car rentals), BlaBlaCar (speaking at Dublin Web Summit), Withings (has three devices in the top 20 connected devices of the Apple Store), and Allmyapps. In total, the startups were offering more than 140 jobs & had an attendee list of over 500 developers.
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The event was held on a barge in the Seine, featured an open bar, and was generally packed. Startups like Work4Labs, who recently raised $11M for their Facebook recruitment platform, had a giant sign listing the languages they were looking for, while startup MyBlee had two distracting women preparing crepes for job candidates. I met mobile developers (iOS and Android), back- & front-end web developers, dev ops guys, designers & more. At the end of the day, though, it’s all about whether or not there was good talent, so I sent out messages to all the participating startups to see what their impressions were, and what they had been hoping to get out of the event.
Mobile and Web and Dev Ops Oh My!
The variety of developers looked for were vast: iOS & Android, php & python, .Net & django, C++ & Web Designers. Startups were looking for anything from 1 to 4 full-time developer/designer posts to fill, usually with differing profiles for each post. That being said, of the 50-100 candidates that responding startups met, they only considered following up with half a dozen of them, at most. A few startups have already employed a candidate or two, and some feel confident that they will hire someone soon.
Despite the small number of potential hires, however, all of the startups were unanimous about one thing: they would certainly pay to attend the event again. The fact is – hiring is hard – and at the very least, these startups got to get their name in front of 500 developers, regardless of whether they hire them or not.
Can’t wait until May ’13! Why not January?
Rejoignez Une Startup has said that they plan to host the next edition around May 2013, lining up the event around the start and end of the school year. Personally, I think there’d be an interest to host another edition sooner, around January 2013. What do you all think? Would you attend a January edition? Would your startup pay to get in front of this group? Comment Below!