How do you attract high quality employees when you are a small company? This is the question we face all the time. As a small growing company, how can we stand out to attract the best talent? As with all small businesses, we face many challenges in doing business - attracting good people with limited resources is just one of those challenges, mostly because people believe that employment with a small business equals the following things: lack of stability, lower salary, uncertainty, risk, job ambiguity and poor benefits. How can we overcome these perceptions and hire good, quality people who will share our mission and help us meet our objectives? First, it is helpful to understand what the company does and what we see as our customers' problem space.

Elluminates Software focuses on enterprise architecture, systems engineering and business analytics to help our customers be more informed, more prepared and able to meet their most pressing challenges, and therefore build systems that make a difference.

So what does that mean for our employees? Our mission for our employees is to:

- offer a positive, productive and collaborative work environment; and,
- allow each employee to grow, learn and excel at what they do; and,
- provide a place where integrity, honesty and the highest craftsmanship are paramount.

Let's focus on some of those negative perceptions people have of small businesses.

Lack of stability - Job stability seems to be a concern with everyone in today's economy, whether the job is with a small or a large company. Elluminates Software has been around since 2003. Since our founding, we have had a steady stream of ever larger and more complex projects and have many more projects pending. Also, our strategy is to go after positions that focus on the company's core strengths. Our strategy is not to try to fill positions that might make us money but aren't related to our core business. By using this strategy we hope that we can continually use that person's expertise in other projects around the company.

Lower salary - Our compensation strategy is to hire at market level, so we are never out of the competition's range. We benchmark our salaries against other companies and make sure we are offering a competitive salary. We also have a bonus structure for performance and new business opportunities.

Poor benefits - When I started working for Elluminates Software, the company only offered a 401(k) plan. Now I don't think you could tell our benefits summary from a large company's. We have a full benefits offering including health insurance, long- and short-term disability insurance, life insurance and flexible spending accounts. Not to mention an employee referral bonus plan, tuition reimbursement, paid time-off and flexible working arrangements.

Job ambiguity - Our strategy is to hire well and keep our employees motivated and focused. Employees in small businesses often have to play more than one role. For a technical person, this often means managing people or projects. They may not want to do this or have any experience doing this. It's important to communicate this to a prospective employee, as well as communicate what the company will do to help them be successful in that role. Also, it's important to us to keep our employees interested in their work. Research shows that most people's job satisfaction is tied to the interest they have in their work, not salary or benefits.

On the flip side, there are some negative aspects to working in a large company. How can you stand out in a large company? How can you achieve job satisfaction in a large company, where you can be just another faceless employee? There are some extremely appealing aspects to working at a small business. You can actually affect change. You can play a key role in daily operations. You are a vital part of the team. At Elluminates Software you are not just another employee.

In information sharing, relationships in the data, both obvious and not, are representations of real world associations and are a key to solving and preventing crime.

In our experience, sometimes the data is rich enough to support traditional entity resolution or entity correlation and sometimes it is not. This often leads the agency to restrict what data is available in the system or accept compromises in the application. Products and solutions currently available in the industry are continuing to improve; yet, in law enforcement and intelligence analysis, there will always be data that is simply not rich enough to be significant in any algorithm.

Pocket litter, a partial phone number, or a street name can be that missing piece of information that generates the lead that breaks a case; even if it is not statistically significant from an algorithm point of view. Applying technologies with the concept that "these are other records to consider" in addition to the traditional "these are the matches" means the difference between catching a criminal and a cold case.

Focusing on only the positive matches leads to a system design that increases risks of not sufficiently handling missed matches and false positives. Typically, a system is designed to automatically associate records that are above the "yes" threshold and ignore records below the "no" threshold. They may flag items that fall in between the thresholds for further evaluation. As data quality varies and the number of records increases, either the operators are overwhelmed with records to manually resolve or the number of false positives and missed matches decrease the confidence in the result sets. Once a user is not sure why he is seeing some records and not seeing others, the confidence in the system is lost.

The difficulty in tuning these systems to support increases as the system supports users with different needs. Points of entry checks require high accuracy with minimal user interaction time while serial crimes and terror investigations need to follow every lead, no matter how unlikely.

Designing a system to allow the user to see both confident matches and other records for consideration based on their operational needs means a single system can provide increased value across the organization.

Responsibility is a complex topic that can involve authority, trust, and the non-repudiation of actions. It's complex because it tends to both enable action but also stymie it when it is used with a critical and non-constructive eye. At Elluminates Software, we believe that it is our responsibility to provide what customers expect out of our products and services and to meet the high-standards we set internally for ourselves professionally and ethically.

This means that, when we have done amazing work, we want to share it with our customers and make sure they can take advantage of it. It also means that we don't allow for our employees to do the blame game, and we encourage each and everyone to take responsibility if things fall short. Hopefully and happily, that doesn't happen very often, but the policy stands for who we are.

Business, like much of life, is about relationships and ultimately you want to have a relationship with those you trust. The companies we all buy from again and again offer their implicit promise to be a responsible partner in and stand behind what they are offering, be it car, furniture, software, or complex services. Part of the "purchase price" is more than the components or the engineering, it's the trust that if something goes wrong or needs improvement the other side of the transaction will come through for you. It's why our customers, which range from multi-billion dollar companies to consumers and governments, work with us over and over again.

We have always aimed to offer high-end capabilities at a reasonable price. We hope that if you are considering working with us, either as a customer or an employee or partner, you also value our philosophy of responsibility built-in to all we do.

Just like sports can level the playing field across class, education and wealth, lack of employee investment can level the field between small and large businesses. While training and benefits, as well as industry competitive pay, are typical discussion points when interviewing for a new job, often a prospective employee overlooks the work environment they might be coming into.

Our consulting work takes us to many types of business and government workspaces, both in the US and Europe, and we are exposed to what seems to be a rather uniform design decision, where aiming at the minimum workspace layout (that is, cubes, open floor plans, high noise environments, and lack of employee freedom to foster creativity) seems to be standard.

We aren't workspace experts, but we appreciate those who are. In fact, one of our favorite books, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister called Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, includes chapters on team jelling, group chemistry, brain time versus body time, flow time, "teamicide," and workspace theory. The major point we always come away with is that the current corporate environment being pushed on employees at most companies probably costs the companies more money in lost productivity than they save by not providing things like more private workspaces or natural light for employees to work by.

Most of our experience shows us that companies try to treat complex, bio-chemical systems (that is, people) like they won't notice the environment in which they work. And in fact, most knowledge workers seem to accept that this is what having a job means. Unfortunately, in the business of software and systems, interruption, be it in noise or having an environment so non-stimulating as to cause an almost comatose state, is the technical equivalent of product death.

Since software and system design is a creative and logical process that has to occur just right inside someone's head to be successful, having an employee out of that mental sweet-spot means we ultimately, as a group, would likely receive a less than stellar performance. Since we are the type of company where we expect everyone to count, we just can't afford to do what everyone else is doing.

As such, every knowledge worker in our workspace has access to a light-filled, enclosed office where they can hopefully reach the perfect creative-logical mindset. We hope that those incredibly talented knowledge workers who want to produce their best work will consider coming to work with us as we grow and continue to value not only our employees, but the spaces in which they work.

Note: This posting was updated on 11-09-2009

A big difference for web technology startups that provide services that may have to scale to millions of users versus companies that provide consulting services is that the thought process for designing has to be radically different or you can easily end up failing to solve your customers' problems.

We have firsthand experience in anticipating these kinds of problems as our business straddles both enterprise customers in the Fortune 500 and government worlds to web technology products. In the enterprise world, our focus has to be on technologies that have clear support models and enough market penetration to assure our customers that there will be a long term availability of engineers over years or decades. Rarely do enterprise customers want to be the only ones able to support a given technology. They only want to pick winners with a broad appeal, ironically, especially when their competitors pick them.

This contrasts with the web technology world where we have the ability to select products on the cutting edge and build in-house support if needed. That doesn't mean you want to pick technologies that the IT market is moving away from, but it does mean you can look at a wider range of technologies, many at the beginning of their life cycle. We have to make an analysis on the likelihood that a technology will be supportable either in-house or externally and if the benefits outweigh the costs if we foresee doing most of the support. We can also look at the Open Source world to see what engineers are interested in working on, even when they aren't necessarily being paid. This helps us understand the trends in the technology space in a transparent way and offers a way to contribute back where we feel we can help mature a technology.

Because one of the luxuries of the enterprise market is that you can generally predict the number of active users, picking technologies is more a matter of finding existing solution architectures we have experience with, which may come with a set of components already tested at the active user count we care about. This makes designing systems more about historical knowledge of components and their associated architectures than about pushing the bleeding edge. In fact, years ago I mentioned to a colleague that, generally, in the government space, "boring was good." What I meant was that it's a market in which to use tried and true systems.

However, with a web technology product, you may not know if you have built a product with a small community of users or a huge user base until you launch and get things moving forward. As such, if you try to apply the enterprise model for a web technology product, there is a chance your architecture will hit a massive breaking point. Twitter hit this because they had a growth curve that blew past their architecture (though in this example, their architecture probably did not have the standard enterprise Java/.NET and Oracle model).

One of consequences of thinking about enterprise versus web scale systems is that you have to trade certainty versus scalability. With web scale systems, our experience as of date has been that you have to throw out key concepts in the enterprise realm such as counting on data to rarely have duplicate information and letting components disambiguate data without us having to program software to manage the process.

We also have had to remove the idea that we can be certain when data will be available at the latest value, whereas, in the enterprise world, we typically design systems that have strict control on what data looks like at any moment in time and if something changes under the covers, the components will tell us. Instead, in the web scale architectures, we have to manage data more closely.

If you are a consulting company or a web technology company (or a company like us that works in both spaces), it will makes sense to think in advance about what skills and technologies you will need if want to be successful in your space and not look for one size fits all choices when it comes to your staff or your technologies.