The ulterior motives behind this YOUmoz post:

• Firstly, I was at 999 SEOmoz points when I started and wanted to get to 1,000 (which happened in the meantime, in the end).

• Secondly, I want to get some advice. This post is going to be all about the challenges of recruiting for a small agency - coincidentally, just at a moment in time when my company, Distilled, is hiring for a search marketing apprentice and web developer. If you want to come and work at a great small company in London, please apply!

Right. With that out of the way...

Since we are recruiting at the moment, we have been thinking a lot about the right way to go about things, and I thought I would share some of my thoughts and also ask for anyone else's advice.

A question

One of the things that has been bugging me is how to implement the advice from Good to Great (Rand's post and Gillian's post), which says that the first priority is to get the right people 'on the bus' and only then to make sure they are 'in the right seats'.

When you are the size we are, I'm not sure how to advertise for generic 'great people' - we are still stuck advertising roles and positions. How would you go about trying to find the best people? Anyone got any great advice?

Some answers (to different questions!)

Although we haven't cracked it all yet, we have learnt a few things, and one piece of advice that has been absolutely invaluable has been to only accept applications through an online form (we use wufoo to make this really easy).

When we advertised our first job ever, we accepted applications by email and it was very time consuming because we got an incredible amount of rubbish - people who clearly hadn't even read the advert, but were just spamming CVs to anyone and everyone. In contrast, when we advertised our last set of positions, the form meant that about half our applicants were serious.

Finding the right place to advertise is probably pretty dependent on where you are in the world. This time around, we are advertising here on SEOmoz (search marketing apprentice and web developer), on Craigslist (which is only just starting really here in London), and on gumtree (which is very popular in London - not sure if it has reached the US?). We also considered the Marketing Pilgrim jobs board and Joel on Software's, but they had practically no London jobs advertised so we figured there wouldn't be many people looking, either.

Back to you

I would love to hear other people's input on the questions raised above, great places to advertise jobs, people's experience with recruiters and the big jobs boards, and anything else you guys have picked up along the way.