It’s no secret that the demand for qualified software engineers these days extends far beyond Silicon Valley. As companies across the USA attempt to recruit the best and brightest to their teams, the competition surrounding engineering staffing has become fierce. Here’s one of our favorite recruitment tips for engineering staffing.
What is an Elevator Pitch?
For the uninitiated, an elevator pitch is a short, concise sales pitch outlining the benefits of something in the time it takes to travel via elevator. At some point in our professional lives, everyone needs to sell themselves, their products, or their services to another person. A brief elevator pitch summarizing key benefits or ideas is useful to everyone, from fortune 500 executives to amateur comic book artists.
The elevator pitch is used across a number of industries and typically involves pitching an idea to an executive as quickly as possible to someone who may not be fully invested in listening – picture a Hollywood director talking to the head of a major studio or a journalist talking to the editor of their newspaper or website. The logic behind the idea is simple – you never know when you will have two minutes alone with a shot caller with the power to make your dream project a reality, so be prepared with a quick pitch.
To bring this back to engineering staffing, job candidates often develop personal versions of the elevator pitch highlighting their most important resume details to sell themselves to companies. We feel that companies, and recruitment firms, should be doing the same thing to sell themselves to engineers.
Using the elevator pitch when staffing engineers
The power dynamics may be different from the traditional elevator pitch used in business, but the objective is the same. You need to be able to quickly and convincingly convince engineering candidates that your open position is perfect for them.
Skilled software engineers are constantly being wooed by all sorts of interesting companies. To have any chance of landing the best candidates, it is important that you can establish how you are a better fit than other companies. A persuasive elevator pitch is a great way to do that.
Even if you don’t use the pitch when recruiting, it can still come in handy. You never know when engineering staffing will come up in conversation – a concise, one-minute pitch highlighting your company’s strengths is a great thing to have in your back pocket.