Job Op: Technical Recruiter

Technical Recruiter (San Francisco, CA) – Hourly employee (W2) position

Vettanna (www.vettanna.com)— We are a premier Technology Recruiting/Staffing company headquartered in San Francisco, CA. We work with a select group of high tech companies looking to hire or augment their technical teams with very smart and talented professionals who will fit their team dynamics. We have a 15 year track record of happy clients and happy team members.

We are looking for an experienced recruiter to fine tune and lead our recruiting.

Job Description:

In this position you will responsible building and maintaining relationships with both our end client managers (and their lieutenants) and the highest caliber candidates in the technology industry. We are looking for someone who has solid experience with sourcing, assessing and delivering technology candidates in the Bay Area marketplace. This is a fast paced position calling on energetic and effective communication traits. This position includes use of the telephone and internet, as well as provides customer service and candidate follow-up. Personable, outgoing individual with strong work ethic who enjoys working with a team to attain a common goal.

Responsibilities:

• Build a pipeline of qualified candidates for the Recruiting Team
• You will be doing the sourcing yourself
• Fine tune or develop processes, procedures and tools to build out the infrastructure of the recruiting department (and ensure they are linked to the requirements of our key clients)
• Create blog content aimed at both hiring managers and job candidates
• Conduct all interviews & reference checks
• Use online tool to initiate background checks
• Use or modify existing job descriptions and create new job descriptions when necessary
• Weekly meetings with your manager
• Meet or exceed quarterly recruiting goals

Key Attributes:

• Building Relationships – Cultivates an active network of relationships inside and outside the organization.
• Relates well to candidates.
• Ethics/Acting with Integrity – Demonstrates principled leadership and sound business ethics. Builds trust with others through credibility and keeping commitments. Shows consistency between personal and professional values.
• Customer Service – Demonstrates high regard for customer service. Creates win/win solutions. Motivated to work well with others.

Requirements:

• Bachelors Degree or equivalent experience
• 2-3 years minimum Technical Recruiting experience
• 1-2 years of previous sales experience
• Intermediate to expert-level Internet search capabilities
• Demonstrated ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously and work in a fast-paced environment with focus on results
• Strong self-direction and attention to detail
• Excellent communication skills – written and verbal

Compensation:

• Hourly employment with transition to salaried employment based upon performance.
• We pay healthcare (Medical and Vision).
• Vettanna is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer and values the strength diversity brings to the workplace.

How to Apply

To be considered for this position, please:

1. Email your resume to: fsj2@vettanna.com
2. Use subject:  ”Job Op: Technical Recruiter”
3. In your email body include 1-3 sentences about the #1 thing that makes a recruiter effective

Thank you! We look forward to hearing from you.

 

Job Op: Ruby On Rails Contractor

Title: Ruby On Rails Contract Engineer

Project: Online Micro lending

This is a contract (1099). Email resume to: fs010@vettanna.com with subject: RUBY by Friday 8/27/10.

Primary Job Responsibilities:

• Design and development of the system
• Work with the development team members and product manager to define, estimate and plan the product roadmap
• Close collaboration with development team members, product manager and quality engineers
• Be a highly productive programmer on the team

Qualifications – MUST HAVES: (If you don’t have these, please don’t submit your resume)

• 5+  years of experience developing software, primarily with languages such as Ruby, Java,  Python
• 5+ years of experience of web development
• At least 2 years of experience writing Ruby on Rails application
• Experience with agile development processes.
  Deep understanding of and experience applying object-oriented design and development principles
• Experience developing data-driven applications using an industry standard RDBMS ( SQL Server, MySQL, etc.)
• Thorough understanding of internet technologies and protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, SMTP, etc.)
• Strong database architecture and SQL programming skills
• Experience with systems administration and/or application server plus
• Strong communications skills
• Problem Solver
• Interested in how technology solves business problems

 

Job Op – ASAP: Crisis Management Lead

Title: Principal Technical Duty Officer. (Also called: NOC Lead; Crisis Mgmt Lead; Availability Lead; Site Reliability Lead.)

Location:  Onsite at client’s location in San Jose, CA

Summary: Looking for a commander who directs crisis resources in triaging and solving site issues.  Must be technically savvy as well as having excellent communication and mgmt skills.

This is a 3 month contract (1099) to hire (w2) with a high salary upon conversion.  We must have your resume by 8am PST Monday 7/12/10 to be considered for this position. Email resume to: fs010@vettanna.com

Primary Job Responsibilities:

Our well known client is looking for a Principal Technical Duty Officer with a passion for solving complex and interesting problems. The highly motivated individual needs to be an independent and initiative seeking individual.

• Candidate needs to manage client’s services very effectively to support high-volume and business critical applications.
• Candidate would need to work in a shift model and handle multiple customer impacting issues on the client’s Site.
• Candidate should be a leader on complex site incidents and drive issues to restoration.
• Proactive efforts to prevent site incidents from occuring.
• Independently implement and build tools and test major features and capabilities, as well as work jointly with other team members on complex features and complex site issues.
• Provide technical leadership and do technical hands on scripting, tooling, automation for continuous improvement and site restoration.
• Solid Unix systems administration and network adminstration experience is a must.
• Work with Architecture,Engineering,and Operations teams to develop innovative solutions to attain high availability scalability and reliability.
• Apply technical & domain expertise to solving day to day challenges.

Job Requirements:

• Excellent analysis, design, and problem-solving skills.
• Willing to work both day and night shifts.
• Proven crisis management leadership ability working with cross functional teams and executive management
• Effective communication skills are a must.
• Candidate should have excellent crisis management and incident management skills.
• Candidate should be very effective in working under stressful situations when the systems and components are in an unstable state.
• Good experience building highly-automated infrastructure.
• Proven results-oriented engineer in a high-velocity and dynamic environment is a must.
• Experience with Virtualization, open source software is a plus.
• Advanced knowledge of operating system internals, file system structures, and machine architectures in a UNIX/Linux environment.
• Excellent knowledge of Networking, Unix, Windows, Load balancers, Mail, DNS, TCP/IP and SAN technologies.
• Advanced level scripting is a plus.
• Working knowledge of relational databases (Oracle preferred), Apache, HTTP/HTML, XML, XSLT is a plus.
• Demonstrated leadership in technologies that are core to large and distributed systems like cloud computing, web services, multi-tier serving architectures etc.

Basic Qualifications:

Bachelors Degree or Equivalent. Computer Science Degree is preferrable.

 

Jenn’s In The News

In the spirit of shameless self promotion…check out the new article about moi at The Glass Hammer .

I got placed in the “extraordinary life” section, how cool is that!?

Please go check it out and remember…leave comments…good ones !
Thanks
Jenn

 

Job Op: Test Engineer in San Jose, CA

Cool opportunity for an awesome and friendly test engineer.

Position: Sr QA Engineer
Skills:

• SOAP/REST testing experience (This is a must.  If you don’t have this experience, this isn’t the job for you.)
• Performance Testing expertise
• Tools Programming and Development

Experience: 5-7 years QA experience.

Job Number: V-TS-FS-010
Location: On-site in San Jose, CA, USA  (Sorry, there is no relocation package for this position)
Status: Permanent employee, full time
Start Date: The sooner the better!

Tasty Tidbit: This client is working on some really useful, green technology.  You could test a game but you could make a difference here!

Nice Little Nugget: The boss you will have at this site is awesome and comes highly recommended by his former team (yes, also a client). Nice person, well organized, great attention to detail, Vettanna trained and like 99.9% of QA Managers, over worked!  Do a great job for this boss and word will get around. (No, it’s not me!)

Candidates Must Be:

• Inquisitive and persistent – likes to ask questions and research answers
• Able to come up to speed quickly and handle multiple tasks in a fast-paced environment
• Able to display excellent written and verbal communication skills
• A quick learner who takes direction well. We value people willing to learn a method and not try to do things their own way.
• Team Player – enjoys working in a friendly, productive manner, as a team with engineers and other team members

Next Steps:

1. Click on the RSS link or “request email” on the right so you can be updated about new blog posts, including job ops with Vettanna and our friends and clients. (This is optional, of course. Let me be clear that following this step has no bearing on getting the job – we’d just love to see you back here again!)
2. email your resume to fs010@vettanna.com
   Subject:  “V-TS-FS-010 from Vettanna Blog”
   Include 1:  Salary requirement
   Include 2: How did you find this job op?  (twitter, linkedIn group name, ewomen, craigslist, search engine)
   Clue:  Following directions counts

Good Luck, mighty testers!  The rest is up to you.

Jenn

 

Timid Testers – Afraid to Talk to Engineers

This typically isn’t a problem with US born testers, but we’ve been asked by several clients to coach their testers in how to talk to engineers. Here’s the scoop:

Tips For Talking To Engineers

• Engineers are people too - just regular dudes (usually really smart, regular dudes, but dudes just the same)
• Engineers (usually) like to talk about what they’ve been working on
• Smart engineers want to help you find the bugs in their stuff.  If you find them, the end result is a good product, a proud engineer and happy management.  Happy management = happy team!
• DON’T expect good help when an engineer is focused on something else. Set a time for the chat and give them a moment to transition their brain from problem solving to being sociable.
• DON’T expect good help when an engineer is stressed out, highly caffeinated and working feverishly on a deadline. Timing is everything!

Verbal Template For Talking To Engineers

So, for the verbally challenged, we bon vivant testers, kindly offer you this guide to getting started:

1. The Prelude:  Begin with a casual conversation opener to break the ice.  Starting with questions tends to feel like you are demanding and puts the engineer on the defensive. Not the best place for our buds!  Try:
   • “Hi, how was your weekend?” They answer and then you say “I’ve got a few questions about ___, do you have 5 minutes?” (yes, set an exact time you expect to require their full, undivided attention. It helps them prioritize or
   • “Got anything cool planned for this weekend?” (again asking the secondary question listed above) or
   • “Hi, I have a few questions about the ___ feature (or Spec), do you have a few minutes?” or “….can I buy you a cup of coffee?” (Yes, you buy it!)

   
   

2. The Guts:  Now, this is the part of the conversation where you actually ask your questions.  Hint: Be sure to look at the engineer first to make sure that you have their attention.  What questions should you ask?
   • See the Top 6 Questions To Ask Engineers or try
   • “Could you tell me more about ____?”
   • “I’m assuming this___, is that correct?”

   
   
   Of course, there’s tons more stuff you could say, ask or talk about.  This should get you started. Once you have a couple of successful interactions under your belt, you may get wild and try going “off book” (without a script or template, talking extemporaneously)!
   
   

3. The Closing: You are now ready to wrap up the conversation.  Here’s a few ideas that will help draw the conversation to a close.
   • “Is there anything else I should know?”
   • “Wow, this was great information!”
   • “Is there anything you need from me?” (cuz it’s good to be a “giver” not just a “taker”)

   
   

4. The End: You only have one thing to say and you must say it everytime an engineer helps you:  “Thank you”.

Hope this helps get you started.

Got tips for timid testers?

We’d love to hear it!

Test on mighty tester, test on!
Jenn

Image purchased from istockphoto.

 

Top 6 Questions To Ask Engineers

When testers and engineers work as a team, your bug hunting can be more focused and effective.  Here’s six questions that can help you get some very meaty response from engineers and set you on your way to finding some lovely, beastly bugs.

• “Anything in particular that you’d like me to focus on?”

• “Where do you think this feature is likely to fail?”

• “What’s the worst thing that could go wrong?”

• “What part of this feature are you nervous about?”

• “Did anything from the Spec change once you started implementing?”

• “If I only had 5 minutes to test, what should I focus on?”

Love that “5 minute” question and pray that you actually get more than 5 minutes in real life!!

How about you?

Got any great questions for engineers that have resulted in cool bugs?

Test on, mighty testers, test on!

Jenn

Image purchased from istockphoto.

 

5 Key Traits of An Excellent Tester

And by excellent I mean, productive, professional and effective.

An excellent tester:

• Concentrates on finding the Priority 1 and 2 bugs (Vettanna trained testers typically find 5 times more than the average tester).

• Communicates clearly and doesn’t play “bug badminton”.
  
  “What is bug badminton?”
  
  You know it, it happens everyday in your company and the cost is frightening.
  
  A tester finds a bug — the engineer can’t reproduce it so they send it back — sometimes over and over again. (You can do the math of x minutes of an engineers hourly rate plus y minutes of a testers hourly rate…but it’s more than that! It’s also the cost of what the tester is not off finding and what the engineer is not off fixing while they spend the time to bat this bug back and forth).

• Colors outside the lines. Some testers just run test cases (and technically, that’s good) but excellent testers engage their brain. They question the software and the test case and they think like “joe user” thinks – not just how the Requirements Document and Specification Writers think.

• Knows the process so they can come up to speed quickly and concentrate on finding cool, evil bugs.

• Finally, excellent testers make their manager’s job easier.
  
  What? How do they do that?
  
  They know how and what to communicate (clearly, concisely and completely) about what they are planning to test and what they have and have not tested.
  
  They also think of their job (and QA) as a business system – what are the inputs we need to do an excellent job and what our the outputs out “clients” (other team members) need to do an excellent job. This minimizes the manager’s job of handling skirmishes from other team members and management!
  
  Ahhh, that’s a relief for any manager!

Your thoughts?

What else sets an excellent tester apart from the pack?

Test on, mighty testers, test on!

Jenn

Image purchased from istockphoto.

 

Losing A Hero

I just learned that our “server dude”, Rob Stewart-Douglas, passed away recently. Rob has taken care of Vettanna’s servers for at least 10 years.  He’s always there to answer a question or do what it takes to support us or our clients (no matter where in the world he was!).  So, when he didn’t return my calls or emails, I thought it very odd. So, I googled him, hoping to find a blog entry saying he was having a grand time in some exotic locale.  But instead, I found his obituary.

This wasn’t the answer I was expecting. I wanted to hear that he was on some new adventure in yet another foreign land. I wanted to hear he’d been hanging out with his son, having a grand time.  No one expects a vital, 38 year old man to, well…leave.

You’ll forgive us if our site has hiccups in the coming weeks as we transition the tasks that Rob handled so seemlessly and invisibly. The Try Testing section of our site will be down while we work things out.

Rob, you are well missed.

j.

Image purchased from istockphoto.