In our experience though there’s two considerations you need to take into account when thinking of expanding your team:

• In anticipation of capacity or growth. This strategy dictates that you’ll hire new employees before you actually need them, but you’re either expecting your business to grow in that direction (due to the pull by your existing customer base) or you’ve decided to branch out as part of an organic process.
• Already lacking capacity or skills. The difference being here that you are being more reactive and you only grow the team when you currently lack the added capacity, or additional skills.

The first approach is obviously less organic and more risky, as you are taking on new employees – and the overhead expenses associated with that – before you actually need them and you may end up not fully utilizing their capacity anyway. The alternative is to wait, grow your team more organically and tweak it as your business requirements. This more reactive approach though puts you at risk of missing the boat on an opportunity that comes along and passes before you can find a new team member (this is obviously compounded when you can’t find the right skills in the short term).

Both have their own advantages and risks; so we’ve tried to consider a balance between the two in our hiring in the past. Here’s two of our hiring stories to explain that strategy:

Matty, Core Development

In September 2010, we outsourced the development work of Diner’s reservation functionality to Matty. We considered this to be a non-integral feature and thus couldn’t prioritize the development capacity internally for this. We spec’d out the project and agreed on a timeline of about 4 weeks. At this stage, hiring Matty served two purposes: 1) we needed to get the development work done; and 2) we were considering adding another core developer to the team at some stage in future and had identified him as a possible candidate.

So, about 1 and a half weeks into that timeline, we heard that Foxinni would unfortunately be leaving us at the end of October. We had Jeff check the code that Matty had committed to our repository until that point and after Jeff gave his go-ahead in terms of the quality, we called Matty in for an interview to discuss full-time employment. Six weeks later he joined us full-time and has had a profound effect on the development team.

Michael, Support Ninja & Junior Development

Before Michael joined us full-time, he’d been a very active community member, regularly reporting and helping fix bugs, along with being an Affiliated Woo Worker and a firefighter! In April 2010, Michael started helping us out (more like, volunteering) on our support forum and by September 2010, we hired him to join our support team full-time.

The Woo Way

In both these instances, we managed to work with the team members in anticipation of needing their skills, and whilst the relationship was mutually beneficial, we didn’t have to commit to a full-time employment relationship before we actually needed to. So we solved the above problem of picking the time when to hire, by finding a balance straight down the middle.

This isn’t a viable solution in every given situation, but these are the best examples we have of how we’ve implemented this strategy to our benefit.

When a company is young, and the preferred method of funding the company is by bootstrapping it you are often forced into a corner and need to wait for the growth before employing. This is how we started out, but now that we are better established we’ve perfected the balance of scaling the team.

Meet the Woo Team

When do you generally decide to hire new people?

So this is the “job description” we’ve also posted over at Authentic Jobs:

WordPress / PHP / jQuery Developer

WooThemes is a fast-growing online startup that specializes in developing & releasing WordPress templates (soon to expand to other CMS platforms).

We are currently looking for a talented developer to join our small team and contribute some more awesomeness into our work.

Potential candidates will have:

• Advanced knowledge & experience of WordPress & PHP;
• Experience with jQuery and a willingness to improve one’s jQuery skills; and
• Basic knowledge of HTML / CSS.

In general we’re looking for a team-player who can add unique value & contributions to what we’re already doing at the moment. We’re a close-knit team and the dynamics & relationship within the team is one of our strong points and probably the biggest reason for our growth & success.

The successful candidate can be based anywhere in the world, but we’d prefer to hire someone within our timezone (GMT to GMT+2). If the successful candidate should be from Cape Town, South Africa, they would be required to work from our offices in Cape Town.

Job Perks: Work in a relaxed environment, with not many deadlines and client-imposed “requirements”. You will be able to experiment & explore, as we’re always open to explore new ideas.

Remuneration: Salary is negotiable and will be discussed with potential candidates.

How To Apply: E-mail us with your profile / bio, CV (if you have one) and links to relevant work.

So I’d like to take a quick few minutes to welcome Simon North to the WooTeam. Simon joins our support team (aka becomes a WooNinja), where he’ll be helping out our forum master, Tiago Noronha, with day-to-day customer support. Simon is initially joining us for 2 months and if everything runs smooth & dandy, he’ll join our team on a permanent basis.

This move allows Magnus to spend a bit more time developing themes, and at the same time should increase our resources available to improve our support offering even further. We believe that WOO2 will surely showcase a progression in our support resources and we’re sure that all of our customers will be very pleased indeed!

The exact hours you work are pretty flexible, you can work from home and earn good money, not to forget you receive a developer’s license to all our themes. All we require from you are some great html/css skills and sound wordpress knowledge, as well as a love for WooThemes. We request a minimum of 500 forum posts a month (exact terms available upon request).

Sound attractive? We are only accepting one Master Woo Ninja for now so if you think you have what we need get hold of us asap on info@woothemes.com.

So that is where you come in… We are looking for some skilled peeps to join us on the forum and help out other WooThemes users, as it is important to us to further increase the value from our support resoures. We need someone that is proficient in HTML, CSS, PHP (intermediate) & also WordPress, as those are the skills needed to answer 99% of the requests…

Details of the job:

Here’s all of the information with regards to the job as a Forum Ninja…

• We will pay you a negotiable fee for every post that you make on the forum;
• You can work on flexible time (i.e. whenever suits you), as long as all forum requests are answered within 12 hours;
• We will still offer help to the threads that you can’t answer;
• You will get a free Developer Subscription to all of our themes, to allow you to familiarize yourself with the themes’ inner workings (and you will be allowed to use these themes yourself).

How to apply:

So if you think you have what it takes, we’d love to hear from you… Drop us an e-mail on info [at] woothemes.com, with the subject line being “Forum Ninja” and include as much details about yourself and your skills.

We will respond to all e-mails / applications that we get!