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12 The PCB Design Magazine • May 2017 It's all about who you know. And you'd bet- ter know that! I would be surprised if anyone reading this doesn't know this one major principle of hiring: Whether you're hiring or looking for a job, nothing happens unless you know the right person. In my experience at Intercept Technology, the best way to find new staff is by asking cur- rent staff for recommendations. This tends to be a successful approach because someone already on staff doesn't want to make himself look bad, so we can be fairly confident in whoever he recommends. This also helps morale and team- building because a new hire who can be intro- duced to the team by someone who knows and respects that person creates instant credibility among the entire team. When this doesn't pan out, the next best thing is to return to the stack of resumes sent in when we were not hiring. So many people in the EDA industry know one another that very often we will have resumes submitted from people we already know, former custom- ers, even people who evaluated our software whose management selected the bigger soft- ware vendor just to cover their own backs in the face of the designers' clear choice for our soft- ware. So, when one such valuable contact has inquired with us, we keep their information on file. A lot of times these people have moved on into new positions by the time we make con- tact, but it always makes sense to start with the top picks. The next option is to contact anyone we know who we would love to have the job. It is a sad fact that if you are already employed, you are more desirable as a candidate because no questions have to be asked about why you are not employed. This is a cold, unfair fact for those of us hard-working folks who have been laid off. But I have experience hiring people who were "laid off," only to find that they were actu- by Abby Monaco INTERCEPT TECHNOLOGY The Hiring Game FEATURE COLUMN: SOFTWARE BYTES