Business in Vancouver's "How I did it" feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, Steve Cadigan talks about how he left a top HR post at PMC-Sierra in Vancouver for the white-hot job market of Silicon Valley. As vice-president of talent at LinkedIn, he increased the company's workforce 700% during a period of "hyper-growth" between 2009 and 2012 – while competing with the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter for the best and brightest.
"From 2004 to 2008 I lived in Burnaby and Vancouver for a couple years. I was the vice-president of HR for PMC-Sierra out in Burnaby."
"I wound up leaving the Vancouver area, and it was a heartbreaking experience. That's the place I've loved living more than anywhere I've ever lived. But the opportunities at the point I was at in my career were really narrow.
"That's what led me to say, 'you know what, the hottest job market on the planet is in Silicon Valley, I'm going to head over there.'"
"[When I started at LinkedIn] in 2009, we were coming out of this huge ugly recession … It was a very cautious business climate.
"We started to say, 'In Silicon Valley it's always hiring time, it's never gone flat.' Even though the economy took a big hit in 2008, we were still in a very challenging market to hire engineers in particular. The DNA of success in Silicon Valley is the quality of your engineering team."
"But no one had heard of us. Facebook was hiring like crazy and [it was] in this big war with Google. Google was giving million-dollar retention bonuses."
"We really needed to be pretty clear about our brand as an employer. Why does someone want to come here when they could go across the street, probably make more money and work for a much more well-known brand?"
"We said, 'Let's take that value prop for members – transforming your career, finding your dream job – and say, that's going to be the value prop for our culture. You come and work on our team, it will transform your career. You will make a contribution, you'll feel more valued, you'll be able to innovate and create and grow.'"
"We went from 400 [employees] to 1,000 in a year, then we went from 1,000 to 2,000, and last year we went from 2,000 to 3,500."
"The whole company had to get behind scaling the business at the pace we were doing. You had to get every single employee involved in this. You had to get hiring managers to dedicate days during the week to just recruit.
"You create experiences on the web so that when someone is checking you out, they're pulled in to a rich experience that's highly personalized. And then, you try to personalize the recruiting experience as much as possible.
"Because of the hyper-competitive nature of recruiting in Silicon Valley … we were tweaking and adjusting daily. We would be looking at things like, we identified 10 people to hire last week, but it took us on average eight days to generate an offer. Why did it take us eight days to generate an offer? You look at every step of the recruiting process.
"I left [LinkedIn] at the end of last year. Now I am focused on [helping] other organizations as an adviser." •
