My Self-Proclaimed Top 5 Recruiting Blog Posts of 2013

Meghan Maher

December 17, 2013

As this was my first full year at OpenView, I wanted to reflect on the forty blogs that I wrote. If you haven’t been avidly following my work, have no fear, for I have chosen my top five recruiting blog posts for you to enjoy:

1) Could A “Recruiting Surge” Be Exactly What Your Company Needs? 11/4/13

Summary: In this post I explain what a recruiting surge is and the benefits it could bring to an expansion-stage company.

Why I like it: This is my favorite post of the year because it ties in a portfolio company. But not only that, it told a portfolio success story and doubled as promotion for their second surge. Also, this post won me the Blog Hog for most viewed post of the week!

2) Internship Programs: Learning from Condé Nast’s Mistakes 10/28/13

Summary: This post chronicles the demise of the highly sought-after Conde Nast internship program. It also discusses the need to pay your interns a fair wage.

Why I like it: This was one of my only “newsjacking” posts, where I wrote my opinion on a current event. This was also perfect, because it was a subject that I already had a lot of experience with (keep going down the list to find out why!).

3) Hey Managers! Want Your Millennial Employees To Stick Around? 5/17/13

Summary: This post offers three tips to retain Millennial employees, who have the reputation of being “job hoppy”:

Train them
Set clear expectations
Nurture growth potential

Why I like it: Millenials in the work force have become a hot topic. Most of the time I don’t entirely agree with the criticism we get (in fact, I responded to some of the standard comments in a post last year). It was nice to write a piece that offers a solution for Millennials in the work force, instead of placing blame on them.

4) Women In Tech: 4 Tips to Stay Balanced in a “Flexible” Working Environment 11/18/13

Summary: In this post, I summarized the answers our Women in Tech panelists gave to the question: “How do you prevent a flexible culture from becoming a 24/7/365 culture?” Then added my own answer, resulting in four tips.

Why I like it: Women in Tech gave some interesting perspective from three successful women with very different backgrounds. It was a great exercise to take their advice and use it in a blog post.

5) Tech Recruiting 101: How to Interview Engineers Even if You Know Next to Nothing About Software Development 7/31/13

Summary: This post offers three tips for non-technical recruiters to interview software engineers:

Don’t ask leading questions
Own up to your lack of knowledge
Ask for help

Why I like it: I feel that this was one of my more valuable posts. Hiring software engineers is something that needs to be done at expansion stage companies, and recruiters don’t typically have technical backgrounds.

Honorable mentions:

One of my initiatives this year was creating, implementing, and managing our firm’s university recruiting and internship program. Here is a link to the first blog I wrote about that.

I also won our office’s illustrious Blog Hog three times this year (for those of you not in the know, the Blog Hog is our award for the writer of the post that gets the most views in a week). My award-winning posts were:

What were some of your favorite recruiting posts this year? Let me know in the comments section below!