By Allan Maurer

Pardot CEO and co-founder David Cummings looks out the window of the company's 33rd floor offices in Atlanta.

ATLANTA – Unemployment may be a major problem generally in America, but many high tech companies are nevertheless struggling to find just the right talented IT engineers.

So, while the IBM’s of the world are laying off staff, Atlanta’s Pardot, which sells a marketing automation platform that helps businesses track, score and nurture leads, is offering a $10,001 bounty to anyone providing a talent referral that works out.

Pardot, which currently has about 60 employees, offers great benefits. “We pay 100 percent of healthcare premiums, which includes dental care, match 401k contributions, cater lunches on Friday’s and breakfast Mondays,” says Pardot co-founder Adam Blitzer. Blitzer co-founded the company with David Cummings.

The company is looking for people familiar with Software-as-a-
Service (SaaS) and Web apps. But, Blitzer adds, “We’re a small company. We all wear a lot of hats and work with each other closely. The toughest part for us is finding people who fit into our unique, quirky culture.”

Adam Blitzer

Helicopter high

Pardot is located on the 33rd floor of the One Atlanta Plaza building, where you can just about look weather helicopter pilots in the eye. It shares the generous space with Hannon Hill and Shotput Ventures. For a look at the “unique quirky culture,” see “A Dizzying View from the Top.” The offices include such amenities as a telescope, a pinball machine, a ping pong table, a gong, a telescope and a “culture book.” It is reminiscent of the heady days of the Dot Com boom at the beginning of the century.

But that culture also includes an attitude. “They need to be positive, self-starting, and supportive. A positive attitude (or its lack) comes right out in an interview,” Blitzer says. “You would be surprised how many applicants bad mouth former employees, complain or come off negatively. If they’re that way in a job interview, what would they be like to work with?”

Blitzer says the company is offering the extra dollar of the $10,001 bounty to set it apart from a similar offer by a Seattle company. The idea, Blitzer says, “Is that instead of working with one or two recruiters, we want to accelerate the process by tapping into the community. We have always offered an internal bounty for finding talent, and we wanted to make that external and see what we get from making everyone a recruiter for us.”

Blitzer says a strategy like that probably would not have worked before the advent of social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn. “They make it much easier,” he says.

The bounty offer will run indefinitely until the company “Can’t hire anyone else,” Blitzer says. “We’ve been growing faster than we could hire. Ideally, just in engineering, if we could hire two a month for the next five months, I’d be happy.”

Interested? Email jobs@pardot.com.

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Tags: Adam Blitzer, Allan Maurer, Atlanta, David Cummings, Hannon Hill, Pardot, Shotput Ventures, talent bounty, tech culture, tech jobs