GSoC: the way to save money on head hunters

The company I work for pays quite big money to head hunter companies for searching top specialists available at various locations. It saves our management’s and developer’s time so the employees do not have to waste time on searching and interviewing so much people and can focus on business tasks solely. But I found lately that sometimes finding a talented graduate computer science student can cost as much as few months of his salary! For ever-growing company like ours, which employs more and more young people every month, these costs must be huge. Moreover, it seems to be quite good business since there are currently two main HR companies providing services for us. And there are new players about to join this market.

We all know Google for his innovative approches. Google Summer of Code seems to be quite philanthropic endeavor but in fact it is large-scale HR campaign. Again, thousands of students all around the world send applications for the program. Google gathers more and more data about soon-to-be-world’s best engineers. Without engaging much their own staff, they transfer the burden of filtering out best students to mentors for just $500. Google wins huge experts database and will contact the best of them in future on demand. Given that around 50% of GSoC participants succed with their projects, it’s like $5000 x 450 = $2 250 000 for updating their best IT HR database on the planet every year. Is it much? And they also win good fame, favor of authorities and those open source projects will payback Google anyway.

Now I look at my company, while it wastes so much money on searching for top coders. Instead of paying that much to HR head hunters, it could have mounted a similar contest within local academic world. A challenge that would help select best candidates, that could train them for such low costs, that could promote our products by making future experts aware of them. It could be a simple offer of $500 for anyone that completes one of dedicated internal projects.

Actually a few companies using IBM iSeries have mounted similar idea to select best students and teach them RPG, but there was no money prize involved and after all, the endeavour’s organization was bad. Our contacts within participating comapnies had little time to devote it to us so requirements for projects we had to develop arrived on the last minute. Eventually, some of participating students were invited for job interviews in that companies and many them got jobs.

It is a good start, but I think local companies should go further. GSoC is a good and quite cheap way to pick up some talents.