Shooting for stars
Getting tough for companies to find good designers
These days, without an online presence your business might as well not exist. That’s a good thing for Myplanet Digital, because demand for the Toronto startup’s creation of “meaningful user experiences for web and mobile devices” has tripled every year since its launch in 2009, says co- founder Dustin Walper. High- profile jobs for Canada’s Royal Conservatory of Music and Carnegie Hall Corp. in the United States attracted business from a range of companies and government departments in both countries. Myplanet employs slightly less than 40 people — a mix of graphic designers, developers and sales people — and Mr. Walper projects that will balloon to nearly 100 by the end of 2012. “In our business revenues are really closely tied to how many people we have able to deliver services,” he says. It is because recruiting in the tech field can be challenging that Myplanet launched a fellowship program last year to attract students in their final years of undergraduate programs. It offers 10 paid hours a week of mentorship, self- directed learning and hands- on experience with the hope of creating a pipeline of new hires well- versed in the company culture. In a conversation with the Financial Post’s Christine Dobby, Mr. Walper explains the genesis of the program.
Q What prompted you to start the fellowship program?
A It’s really difficult right now to get really talented people in technology and interactive design because we are competing with Google and Microsoft for the same talent. As a young company, a smaller company, we don’t have the deep pockets that Google has. So we have to get pretty scrappy about it — how we do recruiting and how we hire the best people. That’s the main thing. Also we’re really committed to education over the long run for people on our team.
Q Were you finding it difficult to recruit in general?
A I think everybody’s finding it hard right now. Every technology company you talk to will say finding good developers, designers, is incredibly difficult at the moment. The talent market is crazy hot and will be for many years in my opinion. So it was partly borne of that experience.
Certainly we hire people in a lot of different ways. We hire people from existing companies, hire them right out of school, hire them as co- op students etc. But because we’re growing so quickly we needed to think about something we could do that during the next couple of years would continue to grow in stature and really separate us from other companies in our space.
Q When you think about a typical “fellowship” program, it’s usually something you associate with a long- established company or academic institution. It’s interesting to see a young company offering it.
A Well it’s sort of funny too, because it was a little bit intentional. When we called it a fellowship program, we found that professors took notice. We found really good traction with
some non- traditional programs, programs that other people haven’t really discovered yet.
Q Do you expect to hire any of the students?
A Absolutely. We’ve given out a number of offers already and ideally most of the students will join us full time. However, typically what we do in the first couple of months, the first two to three months of the program, we’re sort of evaluating them very closely as to whether we want to give them a full- time offer and by the time it’s late November or December, when they’d be looking at career opportunities through the traditional recruiting cycle, we’d be giving them offers if we felt they were really suited to the company.
Q How did you get the idea to do this specifically?
A I was having coffee with Ramy Nassar — who organizes TEDX Waterloo and does a lot of work with us — and we started thinking about the idea of paying students to learn. We ran through the numbers and found out it’s actually a really cost- effective way to do recruiting.
Ten hours a week for eight students, over the course of a school year isn’t actually that expensive considering the value they get out of it and the opportunity for them to actually have meaningful interaction with our company. It means actually coming into our office, working with the best people, getting a sense of what our culture is like. So, it’s way, way better in my mind than the usual recruiting cycle.
I don’t think it’s going to be any cheaper than doing other types of recruiting — I just think it’s more effective. I think we are able to attract the best people this way and that’s what I’m more concerned about. So for similar cost, better outcomes.