There’s a nice little conversation on recruiting going on between Joel Spolsky (of “Joel on software” fame) and Heather and Gretchen, two strategic and blog savvy recruiters at Microsoft.

Gretchen leads with some of the challenges of working with hiring managers who don’t understand the challenges of technical recruiting.

“Hiring Managers (and I’m referring to Microsoft Hiring Managers … but I know this problem exists in other companies) not ‘getting’ the talent landscape. Not only do they not seem to understand that brilliant software engineers don’t grow on trees (you don’t, do you?) … but they can’t seem to get it through their heads that 1) Microsoft isn’t the only place hiring, 2) Working at a big company isn’t everyone’s dream, and 3) Redmond is not the first place people say they want to move when they wake up in the morning.�

Joel replies:

Recruiting has to be done at the Bill and Steve level, not at the Gretchen level… Want to solve Microsoft’s recruiting problem? Open a downtown development center in Pioneer Square and another one South of Market in San Francisco. Then split up the company into lots of small, well-funded startups and give people stock options in their own products, which actually have a fighting chance of growing. Then create some spinoffs with their own personality. Spin off X-Box so it feels more like a cool gaming startup rather than a big corporate “General Motors Trying to Sell Hip Things to an Appealing Demographic.â€? I’m sure there are a million other ideas, but none of the kind of decisions that would make Microsoft an even more attractive workplace are in the hands of the recruiting department or even the hiring managers. No wonder there’s so much frustration.

Years and years and years ago when I started this site I wrote that “a software company has to think of recruiting the right people as its number one problem.�. After five years of running Fog Creek I still think that way, which is why we set up Project Aardvark.

Going after high quality, passive talent is a problems near and dear to Jobster’s heart. I was pleased to see Heather wrote a nice post about her experiences using Jobster to publish jobs to her blog.