Month: October 2016

Why Executive Searches Fail & How To Recruit Better

Why Executive Searches Fail & How To Recruit Better

Recruiting is fundamentally about human relationships. And research shows that even the most profound and intimate of human relationships, marriage, many times fails. Unless you have a structured methodology to recruit and achieve 90% or better success rates, executive search is no different.

The truth is that there is an A+ player for every role in every company. In fact, the success of any CEO will be determined by his or her ability to recruit and hire well. And so, on the recommendation of a Board member or your investor, you’ve gone out and engaged a big brand executive recruitment firm to help you secure the right executive. And unbeknownst to you, this was the worst possible thing you could do.

Companies frequently repeat their mistakes and cycle through two or more wrong hires before the right candidate finally sticks. In fact, the stress of this tumult increases the likelihood that a company will embark on yet another doomed executive search or prolong the suffering with their existing search partner.

The skull-crushing pain, suffering and brain damage that comes along with making a bad hiring or search partner decision is often preceded by something like this:

  1. You are missing your KPI’s, MBO’s, performance metrics and your own expertise in making it better is limited.
  2. The Board is worried about continued deterioration in performance.
  3. The person doing the role right now is failing – the needs of the business have outgrown their personal growth curve. But he or she is a really nice person or you have a deep history with them and don’t want to betray the trust or loyalty they have shown you.
  4. You feel like no one really understands what it takes to be successful in the role or to help you achieve your mission.
  5. You’re missing a key player on your leadership team and it’s affecting your entire operation.
  6. You are not seizing market share the way that you would like. The market opportunity is getting away from you; you’re not penetrating deeply enough. There’s competition in your business. You’re frustrated.
  7. There was a saying, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM,” that you applied to hiring a big brand search firm. You now realize they have no clue about what you need. Worse, they don’t care.
  8. Your executive search partner was just the “deal” maker and a junior associate is running your search.
  9. The candidates you are meeting don’t meet your requirements. And you don’t have time to waste.
  10. You are getting candidates that are unemployed, available and convenient leftovers for the search firm to submit to you.
  11. The search firm is sending you candidates with horrible culture fit or candidates that don’t pass the airport test.
  12. Your team is overworked and your need for this hire is growing stronger, so you’re thinking about settling for a candidate that is “good enough.”
  13. The candidates’ experience set is not quite right or not the one you need. Yet your frustration with the process makes you really want to consider hiring them.
  14. What if you hire one of these candidates and they fail?
  15. You already made a bad hire in this role and they failed.
  16. What am I not seeing or what if the candidate is hiding something?

This hire is so important. You want to hire someone you LOVE for this role! You are spread so thin and the pressure you are putting on yourself is even greater than the pressure coming from your Board. You don’t want to fail. The Board is sending you resumes and making introductions to potential candidates. You feel obligated to meet those candidates and the feeling is awfully similar to being set up on a blind date by someone who has no idea what your wants and needs are. You thought throwing money at the problem and hiring a big brand search firm would make things better and it has only made things worse for you.

How To Make It Better

No progress can be made until the truth is spoken. Recruiting and hiring well is a leadership competency. And like different elements of leadership can be developed, cultivated and mastered, so too can your recruiting and selection prowess be mastered.

First, you must develop and invest in a smart plan, a process to evaluate the wide reaches of the market for top leaders and recruit the highest-caliber executive leader that is right for you.

In order to build the organization you envision, there are some things that you must do to create clarity. Clarity is power. Before you create absolute clarity around the criteria for your executive hire (more on this in another post), first you must create clarity around your ideal executive search partner. Choose a master level recruiter from whom you can learn.

Here’s how you can tell if you’ve found the right executive search partner:

  1. Big search firms build big, slow-moving companies and their process takes much longer to complete. Hire a firm that specializes in helping to build the kind of high-growth company you operate. You need a firm that works with as much intensity and efficiency as you do. A boutique firm is the way to go – one that is agile and nimble with a strong tactile sense of your needs.
  2. Full clarity on technical chops is just the minimum requirement for a recruiter. Technical chops are no guarantee of whether a candidate can work with the team, fit into the company culture, and stay motivated and engaged in the long term.
  3. Great recruiters understand the importance of your core values & organizational culture. They will add value by understanding a company’s cultural DNA. They should have the capability and competency to viably measure and assess candidates’ core values and deliver candidates who will fit and integrate into your team perfectly. They’ve mastered Core Fit Process.
  4. They have a proven methodology for achieving outstanding results. Choose an executive search firm engaged in only the highest level of executive recruiting – Level 3 Recruiting. Level 3 is about a refined selection process, precision extraction and securing top 1% of A+ executive leaders
  5. Look for a search partner who has been on the inside, building a company with his or her own hands. A search executive who has been on the inside, rapidly scaling up both an executive team and the functional teams that support them, will understand your needs and growing pains intuitively.

Marcus Aurelius said “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

Fear, greed and scarcity are all part of the same mindset and can break your leadership dreams. To grow a thriving leadership team and business, the opposite is needed. Exercise your abundance mindset and the bold confidence you need to achieve your mission.

This is Why You’re not Finding the Right Candidates When You Hire

This is Why You’re not Finding the Right Candidates When You Hire

The emergency call usually comes in when a botched executive search has escalated to a crisis situation. The search has typically been going on for nine months or longer as a big brand search firm cycled through subpar candidates who were unemployed, available and convenient leftovers from previous searches. Or the search firm was sending candidates with horrible culture fit who couldn’t pass the airport test. My team gets called in to rescue that search gone bad when the CEO has had enough and is ready to invest in another process to achieve a greater result.

Large firms are interested in going a mile wide and an inch deep. They are spread too thin and have many encumbrances and restrictions that keep them from pursuing the absolute best talent. Large firms also struggle to create the genuine relationships and meaningful engagement that a more nimble boutique firm is capable of. They will often have junior recruiters doing the heavy lifting. By doing this, big search firms operate a lower quality search and frequently fail to engage top candidates with the opportunity you created.

This happens because most recruiters still believe it’s acceptable to perform Level 2 Recruiting. Level 1 and Level 2 Recruiting consist of broadcasting openings and relying on a blunt, passive search process. Level 2 Recruiting relies specifically on referrals and networks to find candidates who are available and convenient.

There is a better way of recruiting – an elite, special forces approach – and that is Level 3 Recruiting. Level 3 is a refined selection process of precision extraction to secure the top 1{f7a32599756963b989bde631f1a44401cc789db6f847c3735c9e8f651be632a4} of A+ executive leaders. Each search for a leadership position must be conducted with a fierce drive to find the ideal candidate. This means caring deeply about not only finding the right person, but communicating with and listening to that person. It means presenting a powerful, irresistible argument to convince that candidate to leave his or her great job. Most top leaders are not between jobs, waiting for the phone to ring. They’re already engaged in something they find interesting. An elite headhunter capable of Level 3 Recruiting can get top candidates out of an existing state of mild happiness, assess their core competencies and core values to ensure culture fit, and then secure them in a fantastic new role – one where they are uniquely qualified to succeed.

Investor Spotlight: How to Best Support an Executive Search

Investor Spotlight: How to Best Support an Executive Search

As an investor and board member, you have a unique perspective that can help guide an executive search to success. You are more emotionally removed from the day-to-day pressures a CEO faces. This emotional distance puts you in a great place to uphold the mission, vision and prosperity of the organization while remaining a fiduciary to shareholders.

You might at times intuitively sense when a CEO is about to make a mistake. The right board mentorship and participation can help a startup founder avoid serious blunders. One of the worst mistakes a CEO can make is selecting a bad executive hire. Failed executive searches cost up to five times the annual salary. The wrong executive hire at a high-growth business costs significantly more than at a slower growth company. It can literally put your survival at stake when an executive leadership role is involved.

On the other hand, the positive impact of a successful executive search is a 1,000{f7a32599756963b989bde631f1a44401cc789db6f847c3735c9e8f651be632a4} ROI. The right executive hire earning a $350k total cash package will create a $3.5M+ increase in enterprise value in the next 12 months. When it comes to your important executive search, the costs add up to one conclusion: get it right the very first time, every time you secure a hire in a key leadership role.

To ensure a successful search and maximize ROI, here are three important steps to take:

1. Refocus on Strategic Priorities

The CEO of the company is facing enormous pressure. Either the company is in the midst of tremendous growth and the need for a functional leader will help keep the train from derailing; or, the team is overworked and performance numbers are suffering so a CEO might decide that something, anything must be done fast. He or she might settle for a candidate that is “good enough” just to alleviate some pressure. In this scenario, the CEO is so mired in the company’s current struggle that he or she has lost sight of longer-term strategic priorities. Double down and re-focus on your strategic priorities for the next six to twenty-four months.

2. Define Success Factors

After you’ve rallied your executive leadership around the mission and strategic priorities of the company, make sure you are also crystal clear on what the success factors are for the leader you need to place. What do they need to accomplish and what will success look like for them? How will they help drive the strategic priorities?

3. Core Fit Selection

Technical chops account for 20 percent of the reason why someone will succeed or fail at any company. A strong values fit accounts for 60 percent. Remember that what makes a candidate uniquely qualified to be successful at your organization is a combination of both core competencies (the basis for strong technical chops) and core values (the basis for strong culture fit). Core competencies allow a leader to be effective in a role, and core values alignment is what pushes leaders to achieve their purpose.

Everything bad that happens at a company is fundamentally a people problem, and so is everything that’s good. There is an A+ player for every executive role in every company. As an investor or board member, you have a broader perspective. You have a clearer view of what the values of the organization are and what core values a candidate must have in order to align with the mission of the company.

The utilization of venture capital is best applied towards the acquisition of the right human capital.

When to Hire an Executive Search Firm & How to Find the Best

When to Hire an Executive Search Firm & How to Find the Best

We see it play out every day: show us a promising startup that’s floundering, and we’ll show you an executive team that was built haphazardly or based on short-term thinking.

Building dynamic executive teams is the key to success—an insight that holds doubly true for companies in high-growth mode. Inside the tornado of rapid expansion, emerging businesses won’t survive or thrive without the right executive teams in place to nurture system-wide creativity and protect organizational values. That’s why top CEOs now report spending 30-50% of their time managing human talent.

So when is the right time to hire an executive search firm?

If you’re asking that question, the answer is probably: right now.

Typically, by the time executive search firms are brought on board, companies are already hurting. They’re missing one or more key members of the executive leadership team, stalled on a crucial search, or struggling with a string of bad fits. They’re losing market share or paying the high costs of lost opportunity. Their CEOs find themselves burdened with endless rounds of recruitment, instead of putting their energy where it counts—building the team.

This happens even with some of the most productive, people-savvy CEOs around. Chalk it up to the dynamics of growth. When a business is small, the personal contacts of the C-suite and Board may suffice to build out a strong executive team. Once the business is on a rapid growth trajectory, that’s unlikely to be true. It takes specific expertise to run a fast, agile, and rigorous search. It takes miles of networks. It takes deep wells of HR experience and intuition.

But once you know you need outside help, how do you find the executive search team that’s right for you?

Here are crucial issues to consider:

Find a search firm committed to learning your culture and core values. It’s not enough to understand the list of competencies you seek in a new executive. Each candidate a headhunter brings you should be vetted for the core value set your leadership team honors. They should share your cultural DNA. Otherwise, their presence is likely to cause turbulence at a point where you need to focus on fortification and growth. You need a strong core values match, to be sure and you can’t afford to think short term; sacrificing values fit over skills fit. Neither should your executive search firm.

Ask who will be leading the search. Remember the adage: Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan. The bigger the search firm, the more that people take credit for work of others and the longer your search will take. Make sure your search will be led directly by someone whose name is on the door. It’s that simple. That way the success or failure of your search will reflect directly on the firm you’ve brought on board. It’s the quickest and best way to ensure accountability—and to avoid having a crucial search languish for months on the desk of an overwhelmed associate.

Look for a search partner who has been on the inside, building a company with his or her own hands. A search executive who has been on the inside, rapidly scaling up both an executive team and the functional teams that support them, will understand your needs and growing pains intuitively. They’ll understand the pitfalls of recruitment from the inside out—and they’ll have mastered the art of the executive interview in a way that only happens when your own company is on the line. There is just no substitute for experience.

Look for a search partner who can be a full partner to you. A search firm will be your bridge to talent. It will represent your company to diverse circles of stakeholders, including investors and potential clients. You need to make this choice count on multiple levels. Look for someone with the energy to inspire top talent to join you. Look for someone with the gravitas to represent your firm and its mission in the fullest and most holistic way.

Here at Dave Partners we exist to help entrepreneurs conquer the world with what they are doing. More than just executive search, we build the teams and a real mission-based partnership with the companies that have the greatest opportunity to make the world a better place for us all.

This is our calling. It’s why we love what we do.

What You Need to Look for to Choose the Best Executive Search Partner

What You Need to Look for to Choose the Best Executive Search Partner

Are you giving a potential executive search partner the airport test for core values and culture fit? Be as thorough with your evaluation of a recruiter as you are with a candidate you might place on your team.

The most important consideration in choosing an executive search partner is the person who’s actually doing the work, not the brand of the company. What matters most for the execution of a strong executive search is the high quality work that’s being done to engage and excite top executive leaders about the opportunity to achieve greatness in a role and at your company. This engagement and excitement is often best created by a world-class executive search partner who is not encumbered by too many restrictions and/or has lost their hunger, drive or performance excellence.

Sometimes leaders choose to work with big brand executive search firms because of the sense of security this brings. If you choose this route, you’ll find that the heavyweight headhunter was just the “dealmaker” and a junior associate is now running your search. There are some administrative, research, logistic and scheduling tasks that can be passed to a junior recruiter, but you want the engagement and enthusiasm building to be done by the world class executive search partner that you hired. Too often big brand retained search firms will have underlings doing the heavy lifting. By doing this, big search firms operate a lower quality search and frequently fail to engage top candidates with the opportunity you created. They get stuck performing Level 2 Recruiting and compromise the quality of your results.

If you set standards for high performance in your leadership and business, you want the highest quality executive search through proven methodologies like Level 3 Recruiting and Core Fit Process.

As you evaluate potential search partners, here are some questions to ask yourself and your recruiters:

  • Do I have my culture and core values clearly defined?
  • Does the recruiter understand what my core values are? Have they taken the time to learn about me?
  • Does the recruiter have a structured process and proven methodology for assessing candidates’ core competencies and core values?
  • Who am I going to be working with directly during this search?
5 Awesome Brain Hacks for Making the Best of Every Situation

5 Awesome Brain Hacks for Making the Best of Every Situation

When life hands you lemons, be a lemonade maker. People who get stuck are the ones waiting for the perfect situation. The most effective people in the world are those who make the best of every situation.

If you feel inside that you are not enough, it becomes easy to think the solution is external. You might believe that the thing you are missing can be found in the right pair of shoes, the right mate, or the right job. You seek perfection outside of yourself to compensate for the imperfection inside.

When you become weary from your search for perfection you begin to feel sorry for yourself. But those who feel sorry for themselves won’t find the luck they’re looking for.

Lemonade makers create their own luck.

Lemonade makers have a better understanding of the big picture in life, instead of limiting themselves to a nearsighted perspective of personal survival. They lift themselves up. They look for silver linings. They find a way to win.

My good friend and coach, Dan Sullivan, said in a recent talk, “You have to have full consciousness to have luck.”

How do you achieve “a more full consciousness”? It starts with humility. Humility allows you to appreciate what you have in life and the cards you’ve been dealt. It primes the mind to be optimistic and seek the best outcome in any situation.

If your guiding question in life is, ‘How can I make the best of this?’ your brain will find all sorts of possibilities and prize-winning paths to a better outcome. Our brains are wired such that they cannot leave an unanswered question alone.

How do you become a lemonade maker? Here are five of my favorite brain hacks for making the best of every situation:

  1. Get your body moving! Feeling sorry for yourself is a low-energy state. Motion creates emotion. Get your heart rate pumping and force a smile on your face! Your mood will elevate, for sure.
  2. The problem is not the problem. How you react to the problem is the problem. Breathe. Meditate. Learn to change your brain chemistry from fear-based emotional triggers to calm, centered thinking focused on positive outcomes.
  3. Ask a better question. What are you grateful for right now? How can your smile, humor, and energy be weapons of mass production in your arsenal? Use these questions to push past your fear of failure. The brain is a liar and uses fear to keep you safe from saber-tooth tigers. Danger and fear are not the same. The chances of you getting eaten by a saber-tooth tiger are lower than you think.
  4. Excellence is more important than perfection. Appreciate and commit to seeking excellence. Excellence is an achievable standard.
  5. Be a contributor. Highly effective people are able to make an impact in the lives of others by sharing their knowledge and wisdom.

Now, how can you help me share this with as many people possible? If you think this can be useful to others, please share it with your network and recommend.

Are You Guilty of Committing the 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership?

Are You Guilty of Committing the 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership?

These are not the traditional ABCs of deadly sins (i.e., avarice, greed, lust). As humans and leaders, we know success and its opposite are complex parts of life, not cut-and-dried results of moral failure.

Exhibiting the following traits doesn’t make you a bad person. The fact that you are reading this means that you are a person who is actively working to become a better leader. Through a few silent behaviors, however, you may be contributing to an environment that stunts your organization’s promise.

As a C-suite executive leader, your colleagues take their cues from you. If you are mired in bad habits, you are closing yourself off to reality, misguiding your team, missing opportunities, and overall not enjoying your work. So use the following list as a checkpoint. If you commit these “sins” regularly, heed the words of Ice Cube himself and “check yourself before you wreck yourself.” It could be time to start shifting your perspective.

1. SELF- DOUBT

We grow up with a distorted sense of confidence: either we have too much or too little. In leadership, confidence is essential. Let’s compare the effects of confidence and doubt.

Confidence creates committed action, curiosity, creativity, cooperation and communication—all things CEOs must stand upon as the company’s rock. Confidence makes this possible because you have a healthy sense of your skills and experience, as well as your place among your team.

Doubt is distortion from which flows fear, anxiety, negativity, and isolation from the team. A company with ailing roots will never thrive.

Luckily, confidence can be inborn, and as discussed in my post on the fixed vs. growth mindset, it can be built. It is also your job to instill it in your employees. That’s what great leaders do—create certainty by putting aside nagging self-doubt in order to express positive clarity.

I don’t mean shooting positivity beams wildly in all directions. I mean setting achievable and challenging goals, praising what is going right, and giving honest feedback about what is not working. To remove self-doubt, remove the focus from yourself and tell your team how and why they are essential to the achievement of strategic outcomes.

2. AFFECTATION

Affectation is pretending to be someone you’re not. Masks are easy to see through because it’s obvious the person is focusing on the wrong things, like their appearance, over the team’s needs.

True leaders are genuine because they bring their own experience to the table. They meet experiences head-on, drawing conclusions and learning lessons they can share.

There will always be others who seem bigger, more successful, and with more presence than you. It’s great to take notes from highly successful executives, and put them into practice. If you’re copying verbatim from the big-name leadership gurus, you’re not leading…you’re following.

Nothing good comes from envy. Resources and inspiration are plentiful, and stillyou must be the one to interpret, to apply, to inspire, and to lead your unique organization.

3. ARROGANCE

Those dealing with self-doubt may think this isn’t their issue. And it is quite easy to swing to the extreme, especially when money, public image, and status are at stake. The key word to checking arrogance is respect—respect for other people’s tempo, boundaries, and knowledge.

Arrogance can lead you to believe you know better than the rest of the team, that you know better than everyone. If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. And if you’re talking more than you’re listening, you are blocking out valuable insights. Why even head an organization if you know how to do it all yourself? Leaders make work cohesive—not make work a vehicle for their egos.

4. MICROMANAGING

Micromanaging comes from a whole host of issues: arrogance of thinking that you can run an operation all by yourself, greed to flex your brain power and do every task yourself, and doubt in your team rolled into one. If you think you may be micro-managing, ask yourself about the last time you checked in with your employees. If you don’t ask them to define their own challenges and strategies for meeting them, you may want to give more trust.

5. ANGER

Anger should be rightful, not righteous. It is authentic to let yourself feel upset when things go awry. Blind, overwhelming anger is just emotion—pure force that controls you. Left unchecked, it wreaks havoc on your health and relationships. If your stress levels are through the roof, consider taking a step back and examining: Are you overly attached to winning at all costs? Is your self worth tied to some egocentric victory? Perhaps you fear criticism? The next time you feel gripped to take it out on your employees, go outside and take a few breaths. Take a vacation. Or consider yoga, meditation, coaching, and even therapy if your negative interactions at work outweigh the positive.

6. INDECISION

Leaders call the final shots on the best course of action for their organization. When you waffle between courses of action for too long, you may fall behind competition who is willing to take risks and roll with the consequences or miss out on market opportunity. Indecision and procrastination also waste the company’s time, lowering morale and progress—perhaps even revenue. You won’t grow if you’re not making some kind of progress every day.

7. SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS

Being a workaholic is a badge of commitment—long hours are often important to a company’s success, and executives should be the most passionate employees. But focusing too much on one thing, whether it’s immediate profits over culture, or hours rather than productivity, can lead to short-sightedness.

Conversely, taking time to learn about colleagues personal lives, celebrating progress, achievements, and recognizing the road ahead all contribute to loyalty, contentment, and working towards a common purpose. An enjoyable process focused on performance excellence makes results so much sweeter.

This is the greatest time in the history of the world to be a corporate leader. We’re all looking to conquer the world with what we are doing. We need good people to help us do it. People who want to achieve success for themselves and can help us do it as a team. Investing in our people, making culture our strategic advantage is the way to victory in our businesses and in our lives.

 

Self-driving car course launched for Silicon Valley engineers

Self-driving car course launched for Silicon Valley engineers

September 14, 2016

Silicon Valley is creating a one-year course in self-driving car technology to address a shortage of engineers.

Major tech companies across the sector are currently striving to be the first to introduce the technology to consumers. Google, Tesla, General Motors, Nissan and Uber are all rapidly hiring engineers to work on their projects.

Next year, a Lincoln sedan will be driving itself from Mountain View to San Francisco, using software developed by 250 or so students enrolled at education start-up Udacity, if all goes according to plan.

Udacity bought the Lincoln already equipped with the digital interface needed in autonomous vehicles; students will write the code.

Online education provider Udacity’s course, which costs $2,400 for three, 12-week terms, starts next month and was designed by company co-founder Sebastian Thrun, who launched Google’s driverless car programme.

Self-driving truck start-up Otto, recently acquired by Uber, car maker Mercedes-Benz and chip maker Nvidia contributed to Udacity’s curriculum.

“If you go through this curriculum you are on the bleeding edge of self-driving cars,” said Thrun. 

The aim of the programme is a faster path to employment, Thrun said, in a career that has an average salary of $138,000. Mercedes-Benz, Chinese ride-service Didi Chuxing and others agreed to consider Udacity graduates for job openings.

The employer pool is growing quickly. Research firm and venture capital database CB Insights has identified 33 corporations working on autonomous cars, including automakers GM and Volvo, internet giants Baidu and Google, and Silicon Valley tech firm Intel and start-up ride-service Lyft.

Some companies have already opened driverless vehicles to consumers. Uber has begun testing a driverless vehicle taxi service in the American city of Pittsburgh. It is currently looking to fill more than 50 positions there to help construct and maintain its self-driving fleet. The lesser known Nutonomy also launched a similar service in Singapore last month.

“I love people with MIT and Stanford degrees,” Thrun said. But “there are a lot of people who can’t make it to those institutions. There are entire generations of people who are equally smart and equally capable.

“Yet the idea that a certificate from an online training programme would secure a job in one of the most difficult emerging technologies strikes some recruiters as very unlikely.

A master’s degree in computer science from a leading university such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Stanford University is the usual, and still preferred, course.

“You’d be hard-pressed to say the Udacity candidate is going to be more qualified because they have some specific knowledge about self-driving cars, versus someone who has a rock-hard degree in computer science or data science,” said Dave Carvajal, chief executive of recruiting firm Dave Partners, which fills executive jobs at venture-backed technology companies.

Via: E&T Magazine

Silicon Valley online course to mint self-driving car engineers

Silicon Valley online course to mint self-driving car engineers

San Francisco, CA
Sep. 13, 2016

Silicon Valley is creating a crash course in self-driving car technology to address a shortage of engineers with help from a startup in a different field: online education.

Nearly every major tech company, car company and ride services company, it seems, is developing or partnering with developers of self-driving technology, from Google parent Alphabet Inc to Tesla Motors, General Motors Corp and Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL], creating an insatiable demand for the people teaching the machines to think.

In about a year’s time, a Lincoln sedan will be driving itself from Mountain View to San Francisco, using software developed by 250 or so students enrolled at education start-up Udacity, if all goes according to plan.

Udacity bought the Lincoln already equipped with the digital interface needed in autonomous vehicles; students will write the code.

Udacity’s course, which costs $2,400 for three, 12-week terms, starts next month and was designed by company co-founder Sebastian Thrun, who launched Google’s driverless car program.

Self-driving truck startup Otto, recently acquired by Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL], automaker Mercedes-Benz and chip maker Nvidia Corp contributed to Udacity’s curriculum.

“If you go through this curriculum you are on the bleeding edge of self-driving cars,” said Thrun.

FAST-TRACK TO JOBS?

The aim of the program is a faster path to employment, Thrun said, in a career that has an average salary of $138,000. Mercedes-Benz, Chinese ride-service Didi Chuxing and others agreed to consider Udacity graduates for job openings.

The employer pool is growing quickly. Research firm and venture capital database CB Insights has identified 33 corporations working on autonomous cars, including auto makers GM and Volvo [VOLVO.UL], internet giants Baidu and Google, and Silicon Valley companies tech firm Intel and startup ride-service Lyft.

GM for one is hiring dozens of engineers in the area, and Uber is looking to fill more than 50 positions in Pittsburgh, where the company is building a fleet of self-driving cars, according to jobs website Glassdoor.

“I love people with MIT and Stanford degrees,” Thrun said. But “there are a lot of people who can’t make it to those institutions. There are entire generations of people who are equally smart and equally capable.”

Yet the idea that a certificate from an online training program would secure a job in one of the most difficult emerging technologies strikes some recruiters as very unlikely.

A master’s degree in computer science from a leading university such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Stanford University is the usual, and still preferred, course.

“You’d be hard-pressed to say the Udacity candidate is going to be more qualified because they have some specific knowledge about self-driving cars, versus someone who has a rock-hard degree in computer science or data science,” said Dave Carvajal, chief executive of recruiting firm Dave Partners, which fills executive jobs at venture-backed tech companies.

With a scarcity of talent in the workforce, companies have been recruiting directly from universities with strong programs in data science, robotics and machine learning. Carnegie Mellon University suffered an exodus of staff last year after Uber hired away 40 faculty and researchers for its Advanced Technologies Center.

Startups, too, are sparring to build autonomous vehicle staff. Varden Labs, a company of fewer than 15 people working on self-driving car technology, is “hiring aggressively” although the field is “very competitive,” said co-founder Alex Rodrigues.

Technology companies frequently bemoan their struggle to hire qualified engineers, but the challenge is more pronounced in autonomous vehicles, which combines complex technologies such as machine learning and computer vision, and applies them to cars. Startups in particular are struggling to hire against powerhouses such as Apple Inc and Google, say recruiters.

“The startups will have to get by with one, two, three or four people who can do it,” said Dan Portillo, talent partner at venture firm Greylock Partners.

But a small team may be enough for startup success. GM in March purchased Cruise Automation, a three-year-old autonomous vehicle startup with about 40 employees, for about $1 billion. Uber last month agreed to buy Otto, which is less than a year old, in a deal valued at $680 million.

“Early hires are making unbelievable amounts of money in a few short years,” Rodrigues said.

(Reporting by Heather Somerville. Editing by Peter Henderson, Bill Rigby and Andrew Hay)

Via: Reuters