A few days ago, after reading yet another article on the critical importance of only hiring the best people — yet being unable to offer any concrete suggestions on how to do this, save slavishly repeating the “best people” homily — I posted the following

https://twitter.com/davecheney/status/479126596545036288

I find twitter to be a hopeless medium for communication. I am continually frustrated with its requirement to summarise a thought into its most abridged form, so please read that tweet in the light of a half baked thought forced through an uncooperative medium.

Groupthink

Despite the brevity of that tweet, it did contain several mistakes.

The first mistake, is I should have not said that this should be the only way that companies hire.

What I think many missed in that short message was my suggestion to send your staff to a conference to meet more people, which brings me to my second mistake. If I had more space in the tweet I would have said

If they are tapped out, send them to a conference, or a meetup, or to visit another company, or on training, or encourage them to give a brown bag lunch, or give them the time to contribute to an open source project.

The key in that message is your staff are your most important resource. If you want to lean on them to provide you with the best people, then you should invest in them and their careers.

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