SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Where some see a queue of engineers
awaiting private commuter shuttles, one San Francisco startup sees an
opportunity to lure talent from top Silicon Valley tech firms.
Software
company Bigcommerce has spent the last two weeks trying to recruit
talent from San Francisco’s numerous techie shuttle stops and says it’s
since seen more traffic to its career website.
Bigcommerce
executives say they want to poach employees from Google, Facebook and
other tech giants, The San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday (http://bit.ly/1lHElt6 ).
They
come bearing a clever hashtag (#poached), poached egg sandwiches and a
$40 million Series C round of funding raised from former AOL chief Steve
Case’s venture capital firm.
"Are you interested in changing the
world of e-commerce?" recruiter Steve Donnelly recently asked some men
waiting for the Facebook bus. They declined.
Bigcommerce, based in
Austin, Texas, is not the first firm to try to poach people from the
bus stops. Roku tried to hire Google employees in Saratoga, Calif., who
were waiting for a shuttle.
The company is opening a San Francisco
office and needs to hire more than 40 engineers and product developers.
Since starting its recruiting campaign at the bus stops, company
officials said traffic to its career site has increased by 54 percent
and application volume has grown by 150 percent.
Meanwhile, the
shuttles have grown controversial in the last year, with some residents
who see them as a symbol of neighborhood gentrification protesting their
use of municipal bus stops for $1 per stop each day.
Bigcommerce
plans to keep the effort up until it fills all of its San Francisco
slots, West Stringfellow, the company’s chief product officer told the
Chronicle. He said he came up with the idea at a previous job when he
commuted within the city, passing shuttle stops on the way.
"Every
day, I would just see all this top talent hanging out on the sidewalk,"
he said. "I thought, if I ever have to build a team really fast, I’ll
just go hit those folks right where they’re standing."
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