There are millions of Web wannabes out there right now but you probably don't want to hire them, do you? You need people who already know what to do - not people who are going to learn on the job. I have piles and piles of CVs (resumés for US readers) from inexperienced but eager and smart candidates. I'm aware of entire companies made up of people who are thrilled to death to be in their first dotcom job. This is a bit scary. Management just doesn't know how to recognise and hire solid candidates and end up hiring only people who don't yet know what they're doing because promising wannabes are much easier to find. But when the mail server goes down they're in trouble because the systems guy installed Exchange with the book in one hand and his eager brain in the other hand and has no idea how to fix it without looking it up in the book. Chances are he'll just reinstall and hope for the best. A solid, experienced systems engineer has experienced those problems before and not only knows how to fix them but knows how to set things up right in the first place so those problems don't occur. Enthusiasm is not enough anymore for serious companies. Dotcom managers need people who have done it before in a big way and those candidates are harder to find and close.

Notice I used the word "close". Recruiting involves sales - you need to sell the position, your business model and your company to candidates - not simply tell them about the position you have open - and then close them on coming to work with you. Many times I interview candidates who already have written offers from other companies but are still exploring the job market - I have to sell these candidates on how great an opportunity I am offering and what a cool place to work we have.

Recruiting is hard work and very time consuming. And it's not just kissing a lot of toads that takes the time. The area most managers fall down in is follow-up. You need to call back recruiters and candidates promptly. You need to quickly get that bit of information to them that you promised. If you get a hot CV you need to get the candidate in immediately - not next week. Recently a friend who is a manager in a dotcom in heavy hiring mode said to me about a headhunter who had a great candidate: "the guy never returns calls when he says he will. He was supposed to get back to me about that candidate last week and never called so I guess we won't get him. I'm going to stop using that firm since they are unresponsive." Wake up. You're not in the power position here. Yeah they should call you back when they say they will but what are you going to do when they don't? Sack them? Don't use them anymore? Pretty soon you won't have any recruiters left to work with since they are all too busy to call back as conscientiously as they should. So swallow your pride and call them back. And keep calling them back until you get an answer. Recruiting the best dotcom candidates is war so start shooting from the bushes. Always try to get the candidate's phone number in the interview so you can call them back directly if necessary.

Most recruiters will swear to you that if you just give them an exclusive recruiting contract all your hiring will be a smooth, wonderful process. Here's the way they say hiring should work: sign with them exclusively at a high rate, give them a big check so they can mount an advertising campaign using your money and within a few days they will supply you with a neat set of two CVs for each position you want to fill. They will have kissed all the toads for you and will present you only with the best, most highly qualified candidates that they have thoroughly vetted. All you have to do is conduct one or two short interviews and your new hires will start on Monday.

It never works like that. It is a very rare recruiter who is able to attract enough candidates to be able to select only qualified candidates to send you. In the first place, no matter how much they swear otherwise, a recruiter is in the recruitment business and is, hopefully, expert in that business. They do not know about your business no matter how much they protest that they do. It would be a very rare recruiter who can tell a server-side Java programmer from a GUI Java programmer. No matter how much you stress you only want to see candidates who are experienced with Solaris, recruiters will send you candidates who only know NT and the other way around. So you're actually better off if you take the time to go through all the CVs to select a few to call in. My recruiter pals can argue for weeks about how I'm wrong on this point. They have to justify their service. Here's where part of the hard work comes in. Since recruiters can't do a good job sifting through CVs, you're going to have to do it yourself. And as any recruiter will tell you, that is very time consuming, but you'll find CVs from star programmers in the pile the recruiters throw away. And you'll throw away piles of CVs the recruiters will think are perfect for you. When I work with recruiters I ask them to send me almost all the CVs they get. I prefer to sort through them myself and feel I can sift through a pile of resumes fairly quickly.

You will then have to call and call and call those candidates to set up interviews. Many good candidates are already working and you'll need to cheerfully offer to meet with them at 7am or 9pm or on Saturday. Most of your selected candidates will be hard to reach or will have already accepted other positions. If you expect them to call you back promptly, as any good businessperson should, you're not going to have much action. You have to call recruiters and candidates back - over and over again if needed. You'll need to call in the evenings after you get home to reach some of them. This is part of the hard work I mentioned.

Selecting candidates to call for an interview from the piles of CVs I receive is the tricky part. Even when you do it well you still may have to conduct many, many interviews. My preference is to interview heavily since I find that CVs often poorly present some candidates. In a face-to-face meeting you can tell a lot about a candidate quickly, but it is a time consuming process. I've learned not to offer candidates coffee or other hot drinks at the start of an interview because many times you know in about two minutes that you are not interested in pursuing the person further. If you've just handed them a cup of hot coffee and encouraged them to "tell me about yourself" you could be there at least 30 minutes while the coffee cools and is drunk and you listen to an inappropriate candidate blathering on about their dead-end career and how they're planning on suing their previous employer.

Interviewing itself is an art and I'm not going to attempt to advise much on it in this article. But I can't resist blathering on a little. You need to interview in a non-confrontational manner. You need to attract the candidates as well as eliminate candidates. You've got to sell the opportunity. I've seen hiring managers grill candidates and try to intimidate them. Perhaps they are thinking they will uncover "weaknesses" extract candid responses or find out what level of stress a candidate can handle. Malarkey. You can't afford to scare off good candidates. I've seen managers put on a real tough personality in interviews acting like they are conducting a tough test to weed out the clowns. A candidate interview is not the time to act tough. It is a time to sell your proposition and you had better make it sound great.

I once worked with a manager who interviewed five candidates for a position. He was extremely rude, confrontational and intimidating with the candidates during the interviews telling me he only wanted the best and toughest candidates. He called the recruiter later to arrange subsequent interviews with the three candidates he liked best from the five we interviewed. All three candidates told the recruiter they weren't going back for a second interview - they had no need to work with difficult people. Their skills and experience are in demand. The manager ended up hiring one of the rejects who was hard up for work and willing to work with a pointy-haired boss. His experience was minimal. His subsequent performance was also minimal.

Determining if a person can do the job is the easy part. Trying to find out if they have a good work ethic and are someone you want to work with for 80 hours a week for the next couple of years is harder. Selling them on coming to work with you is the toughest part of the whole process.

Your best candidates are going to have many opportunities and will probably know it. Brilliant programmers working for low salaries with pizza and water balloon fights for benefits are a dotcom myth. They all want big options now (vesting yearly, if not monthly), big salaries, cool working conditions, free soda pop, interesting projects and relaxed working conditions where they can bring their dog to work with them. If they are not looking for these things and seem ready to settle for a low starting salary you've probably overestimated their capabilities or they have a serious personality issue.

Here's another part of the hard work: schedule your interviews immediately and as close together as possible so you can make offers promptly. If you conduct interviews for a position over a couple of weeks, your first candidates will be gone by the time you get around to calling them back. You have to interview hard and fast. You have to be ready to move fast. If you snooze, you lose.

You have to sell your employment opportunity. It's not enough to describe the job, the pay and the fact that everyone gets free whole-grain organic candy bars and daily back rubs. You need to talk up everything positive about your company and the job you are offering. You need to do this from the very first contact with the candidate. Play up every positive thing about your company. Training, working conditions, pay, benefits, short pay review periods, cool, well-qualified people who work there, stock option upsides, etc. Remember that a major motivating factor for programmers is the chance to learn and work with a new technology. Try to determine what turns the candidate on and try to sell them on your ability to involve them in such projects. In these times of dotcom spending pull-backs you need to sell recruits on the company's business model and funding situation. Nobody wants to be part of a failure. Amazon does not likely have trouble attracting prime talent - people feel they're doing cool things and are a success (at least until their recent stock value twitch).

One of the places I worked had an editorial team that was made up of about 25 good-looking young ladies - with only two scrawny, ears-sticking-out geek-techie dudes. Whenever I showed one of our male techie candidates around the office I would make sure to linger in that department and I would mention "you could end up working in this department - they happen to need a [insert candidates primary skill here] right now". Sleazy? You bet.

Decide up front that your recruiting effort is going to take up a bunch of every manager's time. It takes lots of time to do it right. Recruiting in one of the prime dotcom cities like San Francisco probably seems tough but imagine what it was like when I headed up the Internet department at Gateway 2000. It's a cool company and we had cool jobs but we were located in South Dakota, which is a very cool place in the winter but not cool in many other ways unless you are interested in soy bean farming, snowmobile racing or tractor pulls. Even though I started all my employment ads with "Contrary to popular opinion, South Dakota is not a square state and enjoys a warm, tropical climate." they didn't believe me. This is where I first learned how hard recruiting could be. I really had to work hard and sell hard to lure Internet developers to move to Sioux City (airport code for Sioux City: SUX).

So the message is that there are plenty of good candidates out there - you just have to work harder and more creatively than the next guy to get them. Good luck.