The Top Strategies GoDaddy Employs to Recruit Top Technology TalentKeynote by Arnold Blinn, Chief Architect from GoDaddy

More than 4 out of 5 people know GoDaddy, but many still don’t know what we do. For years we’ve been the world’s largest domain registrar and web hosting company—but GoDaddy is going through a transformation as a company.

After being bought by private equity at the end of 2012 a new management team was brought in. This team put in place a number of changes.

Some of these are visible, with a new advertising strategy that portrayed women as strong, motivated entrepreneurs, not just sexual objects. We’ve improved the experience of the site and the reliability of our products. We removed some aging products and introduced some compelling new ones. We’ve embraced more open source, and collaboration with the rest of the industry. And we’ve acquired several companies.

Some of the changes are less visible externally. We’ve invested in our existing facilities in Arizona and Iowa. We’ve opened new offices in Silicon Valley, LA, Cambridge and Seattle, allowing us to attract and hire quality talent from these technology hubs.

All of this is in support of our longer term strategy and mission: To radically shift the global economy toward small businesses by empowering people easily start, confidently grow, and successfully run their own ventures.

Speaking of hiring, we’ve also taken a new approach toward recruiting, interviewing and hiring. This includes industry hires, and college hires. In fact, we’ve begun to show up on campuses. This is more than showing up at job fairs, and is about having a campus presence. In two short years we’ve gone from an afterthought on campus to a must talk to recruiter.

But hiring for us is more than free food, drinks and great facilities. Engineers want career growth and support. And we’ve put in place more formal career ladders and growth plans. They also want to solve hard problems, and we’ve done a better job communicating the unique scale problems faced by GoDaddy. GoDaddy runs DNS for well over 45 million domains on the Internet. That is larger than anyone else. We host millions of websites, are the second largest SSL provider, and run one of the larger email infrastructures on the planet to name a few scale problems.

We’ve also made huge strides in workforce gender diversity. Not only are we an active participant and sponsor in organizations like Grace Hopper, Anita Borg, and as an executive producer in the movie “CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap”, even our CEO has made huge strides in our recruiting a more diverse workforce.

GoDaddy had great people, and has hired more over the last two years. As we recruit, we are very focused on hiring the right people with the right skills for the job. Conversely the problems are able to solve is dependent on the workforce we have in place.

We want to hire the best; but equally important is enabling our employees to do their best work.