The company is in the midst of a significant ongoing internal reorganization of key roles in its product, engineering, strategy and sales teams, stealing a number of major players from one of its favorite poaching targets, Google, among other companies.

The brains behind the hiring and restructuring? It’s most likely CEO Dick Costolo and head of product Jack Dorsey, a source familiar with the matter tells me, having put the gears into motion months ago.

The series of hires, promotions and departures is in part an effort by Twitter to strengthen and grow out its organization, much in the same vein as its older, wizened — and, notably, publicly traded — Silicon Valley competitors, Google and Facebook.

But while it is one of Twitter’s most ambitious shuffling and hiring efforts yet, it isn’t occurring without disturbing a few existing players.

The Product Reorg

The thread started unraveling with VP of product Satya Patel’s departure, unearthed by TechCrunch on Wednesday. Satya wasn’t hired to be the head product honcho at Twitter. It just so happened he grew into the role.

Former VP of Product Satya Patel.

After longtime VP of product Jason Goldman left his position at Twitter at the end of 2010, Patel wasn’t on the original shortlist for the top spot. Twitter lobbied hard to get Sundar Pichai, Google’s man in charge of Chrome, to fill the position. When that didn’t pan out, Twitter went after another Googler, Neal Mohan, who leads the company’s display ad business. Again, Twitter struck out.

The search for a new product seer ran on far too long. Jack Dorsey ended up making a triumphant return to the company, assuming the role of head of product at Twitter, the very company he co-founded and was subsequently ousted from.

But Dorsey needed a point person to deal with the day-to-day. Just days before Dorsey’s return was announced, Patel was hired on as director of product management. He essentially became Dorsey’s deputy, handling both ad product as well as assuming an active manager role over the entire product department when Dorsey was tending to his other job, leading the micropayments start-up Square.

So when it was outed that Patel was leaving Twitter after what looked like a successful year-long stint, it seemed curious. Why would Twitter lose a good VP — one who hasn’t announced where he is headed next — if the company didn’t need to?

In essence, it’s all about the reorg. Instead of Patel acting as VP of product and overseeing all of its operations -– while still reporting to Dorsey –- my sources say the department was restructured into three separate roles: Consumer, growth and international, and revenue (or ads).

Two of those spots were filled. Othman Laraki scored a promotion as VP of growth and international product. Twitter also snagged Michael Sippey from SAY Media in January, who now acts as the current consumer product lead. That left the ads products position, essentially the same gig that Patel came on to handle in the first place. Patel was offered the job, and turned it down.

It’s not that he’s dodging a crappy job. Quite the opposite, actually; estimates peg Twitter’s ads business on track to surpass revenues of $1 billion come two years from now, according to Bloomberg. And CEO Costolo claims Twitter is actually figuring out mobile ads, a business that other tech industry titans — ahem, Facebook — can’t seem to wrap their minds around.

But taking the new-old position after the reorg would literally be one step back for Patel after a year of being in charge while Dorsey was tending to Square. But bucking claims of a recent Business Insider report, I’m told Dorsey is still spending a significant amount of time at Twitter. He remains the visionary in the head of product role, while the growth of the consumer and ads businesses necessitated promotions of key leaders Sippey and Laraki.

So when Patel turned down what essentially amounted to a lessened workload while two colleagues were being promoted, Twitter execs were willing to let him walk. Instead, Sippey and Laraki will continue to do the heavy lifting and pick up the ad product responsibilities. Right now, I hear the plan is to see how the two do in managing the three sections of product between themselves while reporting directly to Dorsey. (And if that doesn’t work out, there’s always another potential Google poaching raid to be done.)

Twitter, of course, had no comment on any of this upon my request, beyond a kind well-wishing to Patel in his future endeavours.

Natch, Patel didn’t respond to my request for comment, though I don’t imagine he’s entirely satisfied with the terms of his departure. For what it’s worth, a few of his former colleagues I spoke to had only glowing things to say about him.

Sales, Engineering and More Shake-ups

VP of Global Online Sales Richard Alfonsi

A source tells me that Twitter needed someone with massive scale experience to inhabit the role, and for that, my source says, there’s only one place to look: The Goog.

Think of him as taking the role of a Google-era Sheryl Sandberg, leading the very important charge of self-serve ads, which Twitter hopes will be its own AdWords, the lucrative service Sandberg ran and used to build Google’s advertising empire.

Alfonsi will report to Adam Bain, who will continue to act as president of global revenue leading the three-pronged division — brands and deals, online sales, and operations — managing a global staff of 120 employees in the U.S., the U.K., Japan and Ireland.

Further staffing up sales, Twitter circled back to the Google poaching pool for more international sales hires, snagging Shailesh Rao as its VP of international revenue and Stephen McIntyre as director of online sales and ops. McIntyre’s Google gig also involved working on the company’s self-serve ads team, most recently in Ireland. Twitter tapped Joel Lunenfeld, formerly of Moxie Interactive, to head up its brands division.

Though not recent, there’s another hire from 2010 to continue paying attention to: Former Pixar CFO Ali Rowghani, now Twitter’s CFO. Since Costolo was promoted to CEO from his former position as COO, Rowghani has silently and unofficially taken over many of Costolo’s former responsibilities, pulling strings in the background and making sure the trains run on time. And of course, when moving toward an eventual IPO, he’ll grow into an increasingly important figurehead for the company. (Think of how Facebook’s David Ebersman came into the spotlight over the past month.)

As Twitter continues to grow its monetization team, we should expect more hires in the coming months.

And then there’s the two key hires on the engineering front. Aside from rank-and-file general recruiting for valley engineering talent, Twitter poached Chris Fry directly from Salesforce in April to lead as a VP of engineering. Adam Messinger also signed up last November, snagged from Oracle to become VP of engineering infrastructure at Twitter.

Gabriel Stricker

Lastly, former VP of corporate strategy Elad Gil has stepped down from his prominent role and into a lesser one, though I’m told this is mostly a coincidence with the other major reorganizing occurring within the company. Gil’s new role will be an advisory position, which he says will ultimately give him more time to focus on a different interest: The start-up world. Gil was originally hired through Twitter acquiring his start-up Mixer Labs in late 2009.

Elad Gil, former VP of Strategy

“I am still spending time at the Twitter offices every week as an adviser to the company and its execs,” Gil told me in an email. He plans to take the next six months off before working on another start-up, as yet to be revealed.

The Dream Team?

In all, I’m told it’s a large undertaking set into motion months ago by top brass. Essentially, Costolo and Dorsey sat down to make a veritable list of all-star draft picks, and, over the course of the next six to eight months, moved forward in picking up all of the key hires.

Look at it this way: Slowly but surely, Twitter is trying to grow up. On its slow, steady, multi-year trudge toward IPO-hood, it is poaching seasoned employees from top spots at competing companies — with a particular penchant for Google, no doubt — to grow out and lead Twitter going forward.

In other words, the company is finally spreading its wings in key recruiting areas. But not, of course, without ruffling a few feathers in the process.

Foursquare head of talent Morgan Missen is leaving the location-based social start-up to form a Silicon Valley-based talent agency.

Missen’s new initiative — dubbed “Main” in a subtle nod to engineers — will focus on finding and growing engineering teams for Valley start-ups, as well as acting as an advocate for engineers who need guidance on negotiating equity and compensation plans.

“There’s no agency that focuses on this in particular,” Missen told me in an interview on Saturday. “The engineers we’ll work with are the people that don’t need help finding jobs, just help understanding the way to get the most out of their offers.”

The departure comes after Missen spent a year at the company as the point person responsible for engineering growth, expanding the three-year-old Foursquare from a handful of engineers to more than 100 current employees. Before her time at Foursquare, Missen was Twitter’s first talent-recruiting hire; she also spent three years at Google as a recruiting specialist for the company’s global business group.

The timing of Missen’s departure is interesting, if not suspect. Just a few weeks ago, Foursquare business development head Tristan Walker announced that he was leaving the company to join Andreessen Horowitz as an entrepreneur in residence; only months ago, company co-founder Naveen Selvadurai also left, on what Kara Swisher reported were “tense” terms.

Missen says her new move is something she has thought about for some time and has nothing to do with recent departures. “Anyone that knows me understands that this has been my long-term goal,” Missen said. “The three of us just happened to leave in 2012.”

Foursquare didn’t have much to add, save for well-wishes: “We’re grateful to Morgan for her help building out the San Francisco team over the last year, and we wish her luck in her next role,” a spokesperson told me.

Missen expects to fully launch her new venture, Main, within the next three to six months.

“At Twitter, The Future is You!” is described as an internal Hackweek project to “make the best/worst recruiting video of all time.” It does indeed manage to be both laugh-worthy and cringe-worthy. (Bonus: Watch Twitter CEO Dick Costolo try to keep a straight face.)

By the way, this isn’t Twitter’s first witty recruiting video, though one from two years ago was more “Rushmore” where this is more “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”

It is now the new year, and you are faced with the rather undesirable task of hiring a new VP. Upon reflection, you realize that the SpiderNet hiring process failed. Given the issues (laziness, lack of leadership ability) surrounding the VP you just fired, you realize that your process (or lack thereof) did not properly vet prospective job candidates.

So before you move on to hiring again, you take an inventory of the current process in order to better understand how to correct things in the future. Here’s what you find:

1. You identified the requirements of the position and developed a comprehensive job specification on your own. Since the position reported to you, you did not see the need to ask for other input.
2. You hired a search firm and saw a number of good candidates. You felt that the candidate pool was adequate, but not exceptional.
3. The interview meetings were always with you, your co-founder and one or two other people from the executive team. Everyone exchanged emails on the candidates after their meetings.
4. The search firm did the bulk of the reference checks, which significantly helped your schedule and time.

What mistakes do you think you made and how can you better go about interviewing future candidates?

I have often considered the ability to hire great people as being analogous to a batting average in baseball. A player who hits .300 is near the top of their game. While I have certainly had a much better than 30 percent success rate in my hiring overall, I’m not sure that I’ve topped 30 percent for truly exceptional hires. Hiring phenomenal employees, like hitting in baseball, is difficult. I must admit that only recently did I come to realize that there is a set of steps that a company can follow that will significantly increase the hit rate.

With respect to the SpiderNet situation, there were several mistakes made with the current process. First, there was no input from either the board or the other executives on the job specifications. It is particularly important to gain agreement on the position and have the interviewing team help develop the requirements. Second, there wasn’t a defined interview team and the results of the interviews felt a bit ad hoc. Having a defined interview team should be part of the process. Finally, the CEO left reference checking to the search firm, which was a huge error in judgment, and probably the biggest mistake of the entire process.

I took the liberty of asking Jeff Stump, our partner responsible for Executive Talent at Andreessen Horowitz, and he outlined the following steps that should be taken when hiring an executive:

1. Develop the candidate profile and expected qualifications
2. Lay out the compensation framework
3. Craft a set of questions to be used in the interview process
4. Identify your interview and recruiting methodology
5. Perform reference checks

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Candidate Profile and Qualifications: There should be a universal understanding of what the profile is and why the company is looking for this new hire. What is the charter of this hire over the next six months to one year? What does the company/hiring manager expect this person to deliver during this timeframe and what does success look like for this hire one year out?

The focus in this phase should be on developing a set of non-negotiable attributes as input to the interview process. Make sure to include input from anyone who is going to have a say in the interview process, including the Board and the management team. There does not need to be universal alignment, but this process will help identify any differences of opinion that can be addressed up front. This first step will drive consistency in the interview process and candidates will take notice.

Compensation and Reporting Framework: Determine the title, reporting structure and compensation of the position. Not doing this up front can often lead to misalignment late in the recruiting process.

Interview Questions: Once the profile and qualifications have been identified and agreed upon, develop a set of questions that are going to be used in the interview process. These can also be used by the search firm to screen candidates. Questions should be crafted to gauge motivation, fit and expectation.

During this phase, the hiring manager also should identify the interviewing team and start the selection of a search firm. In most cases, the company’s internal network will not be sufficient to identify the absolute best candidate and a search firm is recommended. There are exceptions to this, but in most cases, thinking that the company has enough contacts often results in a substantial delay.

Interview and Recruiting Methodology: High-level items to consider:

• Decide on the appropriate team members to be involved in the search process.
• Determine who is running point on the management team. Tasks may include interview coordination, candidate follow-up, feedback collection, reference coordination, compensation, negotiation, etc.
• Who from the board of directors will be involved?
• Define the sequence of interviews and meetings. Who needs to meet when and what is the strategy/objective during a first round vs. a second round of interviews? I also recommend spending a great deal of the first meeting on determining “fit.” Can you work with this person? Nothing else matters if you can’t check this box.
• Have the team interview for different attributes to create a better experience for the candidate and to avoid overlapping questions in the interview process.
• Define the feedback loop: What info gets captured and recorded and how/when is it shared?

Reference Checking: One of the most important — and overlooked — parts of the recruiting process is reference checking. When you make an offer to a candidate, you should feel as though you really know the person, warts and all. Reference checking is the best way to really understand what a candidate is like to work with.

Often your search firm will offer to do reference checks. While it is fine for them to do some investigation, do not leave all of it to them. You need to do a large part of the reference checking yourself. Compare notes with the search firm but handing it off to someone else is a huge mistake.

In general, you should do between 10 to 15 reference checks and they should have a 360-degree approach (i.e., 1/3 bosses, 1/3 peers, 1/3 subordinates). At least one-third of these queries should be backchannel references.

Finally, when you have settled on the final two candidates, you should have the finalists come in to present a 100-day plan with your executive team at your staff meeting. This will give you a very good sense of how the person responds to an assignment and the nature of their work.

Hiring takes planning and time, and the process is often ad hoc or simply non-existent. Don’t make hiring a batting average. Take the time, develop a clear process, and you will see much better results in your overall hit rate.

Peter Levine has been a lecturer at both MIT and Stanford business schools and CEO of Xensource. Prior to Xensource, Peter was EVP of Strategic and Platform Operations at Veritas Software where he helped grow the organization from no revenue to more than $1.5 billion, and from 20 employees to over 6,000.

The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance. 

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

In recent weeks, Apple has been looking to recruit senior-level executives with backgrounds in Web-based software, according to people familiar with the matter. It has approached at least one prominent Internet entrepreneur since at least earlier this year about a possible position, according to these people, who say the details of the possible job were unclear. The company has also discussed its needs with recruiters, one of the people said.

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One sure path to making money on the Internet is to find a business that people can get emotional about — that is, enough to type in their credit card number.

CaptainU, a start-up that serves the families of young athletes, may have found the most emotional business of all.

The San Francisco-based company has positioned itself between student athletes and the college teams that might recruit them, in much the same way that financial Web app Mint.com placed itself in between people building their financial goals and the banks and credit card companies seeking new clients.

But don’t call CaptainU a recruiting service — that might run it afoul of the NCAA.

CaptainU users sign up and then build a profile that includes the student athlete’s statistics, team affiliations, training camp attendances and GPA.

The site also provides templates for tracking statistics, displaying highlight videos and all the other ephemera college coaches might look for when recruiting.

But, according to co-founder Mike Farb, CaptainU’s real service — like Mint’s — is about helping users make decisions with more information.

Once they decide they want to play at the college level, “students really need a road map for what they should to do, to develop athletically and academically,” Farb said. “Today, most families just rely on high school coaches and other parents.”

What CaptainU provides, after analyzing all the data added to a profile, is a realistic set of goals and prescriptions for achievement.

Want to play lacrosse at Duke? CaptainU can tell you what GPA you should shoot for, whether or not you are on the right traveling lacrosse team, and which coach you should get in touch with.

Farb, like other founders wary of nailing down claims of early traction, wouldn’t share user numbers in detail. But he acknowledged that CaptainU currently had “hundreds of thousands of users.”

Users can sign up for a free “rookie” profile, or trade up for an expanded services profile, which runs between $20 and $40 per mont — pricey, but not when compared to something like a bag full of top-tier hockey equipment.

Farb said that he didn’t think the financial future for his bootstrapped company, which is looking to raise an A round of funding, was in paid user accounts.

“We can now connect families with videographers in every state, so that they can get highlight footage taken,” he said. “We want to provide the same connections for private coaches, camps, and anyone else who provides services for athletes families.”

The plan for CaptainU is to become a platform for all of these partners to connect and transact business with the start-up’s growing user base. CaptainU takes a small cut of each deal, and charges admission for trainers, camps and other service providers to be listed on the site.

This “platform play” isn’t new, but Farb said that growing the sales and marketing staff, which CaptainU organizes by sport, is the next step.

“After all, how many former college athletes do you know that end up in sales?,” he asked and then answered. “All of them.”

Here is the video of an interview I did with Farb:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111120/captainu-builds-the-mint-com-for-student-athletes/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110804/meet-ups-polish-up-their-acts/ http://allthingsd.com/20110804/meet-ups-polish-up-their-acts/#comments Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:00:22 +0000 Emily Glazer http://allthingsd.com/?p=106211 Technology meet-ups are taking on a professional sheen.

The local gatherings of techies, which are often free and open to newcomers, have long been a fertile field for schmoozing and hunting for investment capital. But as the latest technology boom has gathered steam, meet-ups have proliferated and taken on more importance in the industry.

Many meet-ups have left behind their humbler origins as bull sessions around pitchers of beer. For an increasing number of entrepreneurs, they are places to recruit employees, prospect for clients and keep abreast of the latest tech trends and tools. Some of the groups now have thousands of members — and even corporate sponsors.

The number of monthly events on Meetup.com, a service used mostly by techies to plan the confabs, had grown to more than 250,000 in May 2011 from less than 50,000 three years earlier.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110804/meet-ups-polish-up-their-acts/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110321/amd-hires-its-new-cio-away-from-hewlett-packard/ http://allthingsd.com/20110321/amd-hires-its-new-cio-away-from-hewlett-packard/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2011 23:20:21 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4212 Executives from Hewlett-Packard certainly seem to be in demand from other companies these days, and prospective poachers are clearly having better luck in their recruiting than others. On the same day that reports emerged that chipmaker Intel had unsuccessfully courted Todd Bradley, head of HP’s $41 billion personal systems group for a job that might have led to his being tapped as Paul Otellini’s successor, now we learn that Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices has hired its new CIO away from HP.

His name is Michael Wolfe. He’s 52 and has worked for HP for five years, most recently as VP for Information Technology. This will be his second go as a CIO. Before his stint at HP, he spent 24 years at Motorola’s Semiconductor Unit and was CIO during the period it was spun out to become Freescale Semiconductor.

His new boss, AMD’s interim CEO Thomas Seifert, had high praise. “Mike has effectively led IT transformations constantly focusing on reducing operating costs and significantly improving business innovation,” he said in a statement. “His considerable talent and experience will help AMD to continue strengthening our IT infrastructure and streamline our business based on our own products and platforms.”

This hiring is taking place against the backdrop of the complicated, difficult search for a new CEO at AMD following the surprise resignation of Dirk Meyer in January. COO Robert Rivet soon followed.

AMD shares haven’t moved much since then, and it has been the subject of recurring problematic buyout rumors. Today the shares closed at $8.55, unchanged from the prior session, and that’s up only a nickel from where it was at the start of the year. Shares fell five cents in after-hours trading. Investors seem to consider AMD a company in a holding pattern until there’s some resolution in the corner office.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110321/amd-hires-its-new-cio-away-from-hewlett-packard/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110317/outcast-agency-head-joins-facebook-as-tech-pr-lead/ http://allthingsd.com/20110317/outcast-agency-head-joins-facebook-as-tech-pr-lead/#comments Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:54:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41745

Caryn Marooney (pictured here), the co-founder of one of Silicon Valley’s premier tech communications firms, OutCast Agency, is joining Facebook to lead its tech public relations strategy.

Facebook said Marooney is joining the social networking giant in a newly created position as director of technology communications.

That means she will be in charge of outreach to the technical community, Facebook said, including “our product, platform, infrastructure, and technical recruiting communications–to reach developers, engineers, technology influencers and bloggers who write about our products and technology strategy.”

“Caryn’s experience extends beyond technology communications and I’m delighted that we’ll all have the opportunity to draw on her wisdom and insight,” said Facebook global communications chieftain Elliot Schrage.

Marooney has actually led the Facebook account for OutCast, which she and Margit Wennmachers built and sold to Next Fifteen Communications Group in 2005 for over $10 million.

Marooney said in an interview today that she felt the firm was in good hands with its current team of top managers.

“The opportunity at Facebook was too good to pass up,” she said. “It’s an exciting new challenge.”

Indeed, the social networking giant is preparing to go public within the next year and will need an even stronger PR team for that task.

Marooney follows Wennmachers to a company they served as outside communications advisers. Wennmachers joined the high-profile Andreessen Horowitz venture firm last year to work on marketing strategies with companies in which it invested.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110317/outcast-agency-head-joins-facebook-as-tech-pr-lead/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110228/talent-war-crunches-start-ups/ http://allthingsd.com/20110228/talent-war-crunches-start-ups/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:00:42 +0000 Pui-Wing Tam and Stu Woo http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=37062 Internet start-ups across Silicon Valley are struggling to compete for talent amid the investment frenzy gripping Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Zynga Inc., with many smaller companies beefing up pay and recruiting and wading into the private-company share market to keep pace with their larger rivals.

Online real-estate brokerage Redfin Corp. is feeling the fallout. The 200-person company, which is based in Seattle and has offices in San Francisco, typically hires new engineers fresh out of college, relying on competitive compensation and the allure of working at a profitable start-up.

Redfin said it has recently been up against salary-and-bonus offers of $100,000 to $150,000 a year for new college grads from social-gaming start-up Zynga, among others—far above the $80,000 or so a year Redfin would normally offer.

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