The challenge for Zillow.com to find top talent continues! The Seattle business community is flourishing and new start-ups and established organizations alike are increasing their workforce to scale to the emerging growth. Not to mention, Washington unemployment rates are at the lowest they have been since 1999. It is an exciting time in the recruitment community; watching business innovation, new product releases and subsequently what hiring strategies companies are creating to attract the right people. It feels like the climate of a hot housing market; companies are more aggressive, creative and decisive, as they are offering jobs to candidates who are in multiple offer scenarios and bidding wars.
People ask, “why is it so difficult to find technical talent when you are sitting on a high-tech hot-bed?” Zillow’s desire for top-tier candidates isn’t unlike other companies. The challenge for us is finding the niche skills and people who are genuinely fired up for building a consumer-centric Web site. Our team is motivated to recruit and refer great people they know; we have built the majority of our core team (close to 80%), through employees and extended network. We’ve also tried some creative approaches to finding technical talent via teaming up with other local start-ups.
Right now, we urgently need to scale our technical team. On the development side, we really value a classic Computer Science background and the ability to work through complex algorithms, data structures with an overall understanding of human computer interaction (HCI). We are using Java and SQL and seek expertise there; however, several of our people have backgrounds in C++ and C# and easily made the transition because they had the right fundamentals. On the database side, we are ideally looking for people who have worked with online processing and large data sets with high transaction volume using SQL. These two areas aren’t our only needs, just ones that are highest-priority; in fact, we have 30+ openings in all areas. If you know someone who may be a fit for Zillow, please send ‘em our way!