But I don’t throw the old resumes out – sometimes I call the best candidates back even a year or so later and try to talk them into considering us again. Sometimes it works.

The trick is to interview continuously. Read every resume as soon as you get it. If you are interviewing all the time you get so you know good candidates when they appear. You get so you can sort through the resumes pretty quickly. I like meeting and talking to smart Internet geeks and I’ve kind of gotten to where I enjoy the recruiting process.

The commercial Internet’s been around for about five years now and has been an object of career desire for young people for almost as long. Graduates with a wild desire to do "something on the Internet" have been pouring out of school anxious to find some stock options somewhere and a bunch of them now have a year or two’s commercial work on their CV. There are rafts of sharp young code slingers just out of uni and if you pick carefully you can hire some real good ones. There are also lots of Java crunchers a year or two into a job they don’t like anymore and are ready for a change.

Not to belittle another pundit but I was amused a couple of years ago to read Nicholas Negroponte stating that China was training Java programmers at a rate of two million every year and we could expect the first load the next year. That’s a lot of Java programmers.

Obviously the big talent pools are in the big cities like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Austin, maybe London, right? It’s true but there are a huge number of experienced and talented Internet people all over the US and Europe anxious to get into the scene in a big way and a lot of them are prepared to move to do so. To get the best candidates from out of town in to see you, you may have to pay some heavy recruiting costs. You may need to be located in a cool place to live too.

I live in London and find it to be an absolute magnet for Internet talent. I work with Carlton - a strong, sexy brand in the UK involved in interactive TV development, which also helps gets candidates in the door. In general, I have very little trouble recruiting here but imagine how hard it was to recruit when I was head of the Internet department at Gateway 2000 in North Sioux City, South Dakota, Pop. 240. We paid huge amounts in candidate travel and courted job prospects with visits to the country club and lavish relocation packages.

We tried to do all our hiring in the summer. When candidates are sneaking off from their jobs for a couple of days to interview and visit beautiful Sioux City (airport code: SUX), it doesn’t do for them and their whole family to be stuck in motel in a blizzard for a week - even if the room does have a Jacuzzi and a waterbed. They might decide they don’t like the climate after all. Gateway was a great place to work but we had a few recruiting hurdles to overcome. Gateway has recently moved their offices to San Diego, which will certainly improve their recruiting efforts.

If your company is dependent on highly skilled Internet workers you might consider locating to a city where it is easy to recruit. If your company is in Paris, Virginia you might think about moving to DC, Boston, or at least Raleigh. If your company is in Paris, France you might think about moving it to London or Amsterdam. Don’t laugh. Since France is a couple of years behind the rest of the world in Internet development, talented French Internet workers are heading to London. There are piles of sharp Australian and New Zealand Internet developers in London and seemingly plenty more where those came from.