I was prompted by a comment on a recent blog post about recruiting top engineers to formalize a simple suggestion I’ve made to startups over the years: if you have the money to use recruiters, offer a $10K referral bonus to anyone who helps you make a hire. That’s what we are doing at Shopximity.

The reason is simple. If a company is willing to pay $20+K to a recruiter for a great hire, why shouldn’t it be willing to split that bounty with someone else who gives them a great lead? It’s less about the actual dollars and more about the fairness of it. I’ve had people tell me they wouldn’t take the money. That’s cool. I can make a donation on their behalf or give it to a startup organization or a movement such as #RubyRiot.

The rules are simple:

1. No spamming. Any referral must come with clear reasons why you think the person would be great at a ground-floor startup. Please, respect our time.
2. Whoever refers a person first wins unless the quality of referral varies substantially, e.g., just mentioning someone you don’t know vs. mentioning a friend and offering an introduction. Within reason, the later but stronger referral would win.
3. The usual recruiting fee restrictions apply.
4. Yes, you can refer yourself.

Because of the strength of our founding team and our investors, we are going after some wonderfully tough problems. Here are the types of talent we are looking for:

• From a culture standpoint, we want curious, high-energy, hands-on, know how to ship, agile everything engineers who take pride in their work and in making customers happy. People who see technology as a tool, not an end. These are the kind of people who know that a problem must be fixed twice: the first time to make it go away and the second time to make sure this type of problem never reaches production again. The best of them know how to have fun after work.
• From a platform standpoint, we touch iOS, Android, Web and mobile Web (HTML5 + AJAX), Java + Python and/or Ruby. Hadoop and NoSQL work is guaranteed as is cloud deployment.
• From a development process standpoint, we aim to be extremely agile with short iterations and very small integration batch sizes (continuous integration for sure with the goal of continuous deployment). This makes for the most satisfying, high-velocity environment to write code in.
• From an experience standpoint, we are looking for both experienced senior/architect-level engineers who have “done it before” and rockstar junior engineers that can do it because they don’t know it couldn’t be done.
• We are good mentors–check us out. It really matters to us that the people on our team have fun while developing in their careers so that they can do whatever they want (get promoted, start a company) next time around.

Here are some tips:

• You don’t need to send a resume or get someone interested in working with Shopximity before referring them. Sometimes, the best thing to do is simply to identify someone truly great and let us take it from there. Shopximity is doing some pretty amazing things and so far everyone we’ve reached out to has been interested in being considered for our team.
• Don’t worry about specific job titles–those are fairy flexible based on the candidates’ career goals and experience. Just point us to great people.
• Mess with your competition: if your competitor has some great people on their team, tell us and we’ll recruit them away.

Let’s get going. Follow me @simeons and send me an email at sim at shopximity dot com if you have someone for us.