Free Swag! (And other less important recruiting issues.)

People tend to think of recruiting as an artless career — you interview people, hire them, and the job’s done, right? Well, yes, that’s part of it, but there’s a lot of nuance involved. The recruiting team at Color works on a breadth of projects: from choosing the right interview panel to closing a candidate to passing out coffee at a Caltrain station (yes, I’ve done this, and it was awesome). Being a recruiter at a startup involves creativity, insight, resilience and — inevitably, given the personal stakes involved — a lot of soul searching. Ultimately, recruiters are responsible for the process that builds our company and its culture. That’s why I love my job.

It also helps if you enjoy event planning. The past few months our team has had the good fortune to work with several great organizations at a variety of events. This summer, Color hosted a group of students from Girls Who Code, a program that works with junior high and high school students interested in engineering and computer science. After our CEO and CMO welcomed them, some of our team members presented — a genetic counselor taught the students how to create a family tree, our design team asked them to redesign our packaging, our robotics engineer gave a virtual tour of our lab. And as always, learned something at this event — did you know high schoolers really like pop sockets?

This was also our first year of college recruiting; we went to UC Berkeley and Stanford to chat with aspiring software engineers, designers, and product managers, among others. A recruiting team’s reputation always feel like it’s on the line at these career fairs — having the coolest booth, providing the most useful collateral, and of course giving out the most talked-about swag — so when people show up at your booth, you always let out a big sigh of relief. It’s definitely worth the hoarse voices. (Pro tip #2: college kids like reusable bags.)

Finally, later this month, we’ll be hosting lunches at Stanford’s Society of Black Scientists and Engineers and Society of Women Engineers. We’re looking forward to these opportunities to speak with smaller groups of students about what it’s like to work at Color, and the kind of impact they can make here. We’ll report back afterward with any relevant swag updates.

So, what is it like to work at Color? How can you make an impact? If you’re interested in finding out, please write to us at careers@color.com or apply here. Let’s build a life-changing company together.