Selling sizzle
Qwest uses its cachet to lure employees.
 The employee ranks at Qwest exploded 400% last year, landing the upstart carrier at the top of the Network World 200 list of companies that are adding employees the fastest.
How do you find and hire 5,800 employees in this tight job market?
To hear Joe Weiner tell it, you simply throw open the doors. People relish the opportunity to join a focused, fast-moving company that has a sexy vision, top-notch talent and a whole lot of buzz going for it.
 OK. It's not quite that easy, he admits. As director of employment and staffing, Weiner says there is a lot of competition for talent. But he quickly adds that he has never worked for a company like Qwest.
"Good people want to work at a company that has exciting, cutting-edge technology to work on, and they want to work with internationally recognized experts in their field," Weiner says. Qwest offers both.
Weiner says Qwest's best recruiting tool is an employee referral program. Employees can earn up to $4,000 for helping bring someone in at a senior technical level. "Last year, we brought in 700 people and paid out just under $900,000 in bonuses," Weiner says. "It's the most effective program we have."
But Qwest doesn't stop there. With the backing of Barbara Brannen, vice president of human resources, Weiner has built a 41-person recruiting team, 95% of whom have worked directly for recruitment agencies.
"We have an aggressive recruitment plan in place that allows us to infiltrate our competitors and, quite frankly, bring the best and brightest to work here," Weiner says. "We have totally blown the doors off our cost per hire. We are well under industry averages."
In fact, Weiner's group has been successful at luring entire teams away from competitors.
"We pulled over a team of 15 IP network engineers from Sprint," Weiner says. "We started at the top with the director, selling him on the vision of the company with a lot of help from senior management, including [Chairman and CEO] Joe Nacchio. Once we pulled him in, selling the vision to the other 14 folks was fairly easy."
The company backs up the sizzle with competitive pay, and for many tech hires, a stock option plan.
Asked if Qwest's Denver headquarters makes hiring more challenging, Brennan says the city is becoming something of a technical Mecca. "There are lots of new businesses in town, which is good and bad. It ends up creating more competition for the technical people attracted to the city."
In fact Level 3, a carrier that preaches an IP-everything story like Qwest, is scheduled to relocate to Denver this summer.
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