By Tobin Harris (with thanks to Lee Sommerville for the “lessons learned” idea)

We’re currently in the process of hiring iPhone developers. Given the modern age of social networks and t’internet, we’re keen not to use agencies for this task.

As many may have discovered, it’s not easy. So… we’re blogging a bit about the process. This is the first instalment, which touches on what happened when we spuffed £200 on a cwjobs.co.uk advert.

WARNING: it’s not pretty. Sorry for the RANT!

So, one of our starting points was cwjobs.co.uk, a highly popular job board for people looking for jobs in the UK.  

We spent over £200.00 on posting a nice job advert up, which looked a bit like this…

Ok, so what happened next? Did we get 100’s of responses from eager iPhone developers? Did we connect with awesome people who would love being on our team? 

No. Not even close.

What happened was this…

Ad Cloning Galore

I’ve got Google alerts setup for our ad, and I’m seeing it being cloned all over the place by different recruitment agencies. Basically, they copy your ad, remove all your details so candidates don’t know who you are, and then post it up all over the place. 

The cheekiest one by far was by Opus, who copied the add and put it up on the same site with an increased salary to attract more attention. 

Spot the difference between this and the above…

Great, they’re diluting our ad-impact. Thanks.

To make matters worse, they then got in touch trying to sell us a candidate! So, they:

• Copy our ad under their own name
• Make it more attractive by giving a false higher salary
• Bombard us with phone calls
• Then try and sell a single candidate to us for £7,000. 

No wonder they wouldn’t drop under 15% on rates, they need us to pay heavily for all this fun they’re having.

Nice. 

Agency Bombardment!

A 2nd side effet of posting up at cwjobs.co.uk is a volley of phone calls. For the last week, every day we’ve had about 3-8 phone calls from agencies. I think every agency in the game has phoned us to try and sell us candidates. 

Basically, they must see on this site, and target us like animals.

On The Plus Side

cwjobs.co.uk isn’t all bad. We’ve had 2 genuine enquiries from good people. Unfortunately they don’t have the skills we’re looking for, but we might be able to train them up. So, not a complete fail.

Key Take-Aways

£200 isn’t much to pay csjobs.co.uk for a job posting, but be ready for recruitment agencies to clone your add and drown it out from an SEO perspective. I don’t think we’ll be doing this again unless we learn more about how to do it successfully.

Consider putting copyright notices on the bottom or your ads, it might stop agencies cloning them, but I doubt it.

Have a response ready for when you get bombarded with agency phone calls. 

Sorry all this is a bit negative, we’ll try and post up more positive feedback once we have more success!

The IGD have released an article about how smartphones are set to revolutionising customer relationships in the supermarket industry. 

They also mentioned ASDA price guarantee app, which we developed in 2010.

Asda’s iPhone app now plays a key role in the retailer’s digital strategy by allowing shoppers to validate its Asda Price Guarantee. This commits Asda to being at least 10% cheaper than its main competitors with the retailer refunding the difference if items bought were less than 10% cheaper. The app enables shoppers to input receipt details, compare the cost of their shop with competitors and receive a refund if applicable.

By Tobin Harris

Was nice to see some praise for our iLegal app in the Guardian today.

The good news is that the interface is excellent. The app is simple, fast and well designed. It runs offline, which means that you can access it when you have no phone signal. Legislation is presented clearly and is fairly easy to read.

Obviously we did something right! That said, the article does mention some feedback about the content being out of date, which is a real shame. We’re working on fixing that with Tim Leigh, the inventor and owner of the iLegal brand.

By Tobin Harris

We’re currently hiring iPhone app developers, and we’ve been hunting for places in the UK to post up job adverts. Ideally places that have a community around them and won’t charge a small fortune. 

If you’re looking for an iPhone job, this list might help you. Feel free to post up more in the comments. 

CoderStack

www.coderstack.co.uk

This is a site written by developers, for developers. It’s nicely done, and easy to post up a job posting. 

So far, job postings are free “whist they get traction”. Looks like there are 20-30 UK iPhone developer jobs up there right now.

AppDevJobs

www.appdevjobs.com

This site allows free job postings, and seems to have a healthy selection of UK iPhone jobs going. This is focused on the mobile sector, so also includes Android, BlackBerry etc. And it has both freelance and permanent positions.

The Engine Room Apps Phone job up on there too.

CWJobs

www.cwjobs.co.uk

Ah, this is one of the big guns in the UK when it comes to looking for jobs. They seem to have a lot of iPhone positions on there. We’ve posted a job up there too, cost about £195.

SuperScout

www.superscout.com

This is a growing social network for the job industry. The idea is to use social stickyness to grow a job community. I love the idea, although it needs more traffic (go and give it some!)

I also spoke to the founder, Stefan Debattista, he’s a nice guy with a clear vision. I really hope that SuperScout gains traction. 

Google

google.com

As part of our recruitment drive, we’ve also created an Adwords campaign for attracting iPhone developers. It looks like others are doing the same. 

So, just search google and look at the non-organic links, you might find something!

A Few Misses…

We were hoping that StackOverflow Careers would have had more UK companies posting jobs up there, we didn’t find many for iPhone.

We were also hoping that the Yorkshire Evening Post would have more local software development jobs, but nope.

Any More?

There’s probably loads more places we could have mentioned, but these were the most promising ones. Please suggest more if you know them. 

iLegal is an app we developed in partnership with Timothy Leigh in 2010.

By Tobin Harris

We’re reaching out to any experienced developers who want to help us create great iPhone and iPad solutions here at Engine Room Apps.

This is a permanent role in our Leeds city center offices.  

Here’s the deal..

• You’ll earn up to £35,000 salary 
• You’ll get to practice agile methods on a daily basis. We take that seriously.
• You’ll be working with our creative team who love new technologies and best software practices. 
• You’ll have the opportunity to skill up on new stuff. We also work with MongoDB, Ruby on Rails, Android and Mobile Web Apps.
• We provide you with a top spec iMac for development
• You’ll be working in a cool office, with loads of nearby creative companies, and bars & cafes on site. There are regular tech/creative conferences in our building too.
• You’ll be in a relaxed & friendly working environment, and encouraged to occasionally work from home.  
• You’ll be joining a young growing team who want to kick out world-class mobile solutions.

What we need you to have…

• A few iOS apps on the store that we can download and try out
• Some code to talk us through, demonstrating your approach to solving problems and excellent OOP skills
• A diverse history with a great deal of development experience and wisdom
• Expertise with Git or some other version control system
• The ability to put clean, crisp user interfaces together. We don’t expect you to be a designer, but we’d like you to have an eye for detail and an understanding of user-flow.
• An understanding of what it means to deliver business value to customers, and a willing to participate in an agile studio.
• Expertise in Objective-C and deep knowledge of the iOS SDK
• Expertise in SQL and normalisation, and Core-Data of course 
• Expertise in creating apps that work over RESTful web services, using JSON or XML. Also, expertise in handling offline mode and caching.

If this sounds great to you, please get in touch by emailing tobin@engineroomapps.com, or phoning 0113 3944342.

Look forward to hearing from you!

By Tobin Harris

It was interesting to see that Shazam has launched on the Nokia platform this week. Shazam was been around for years, it’s that cool app that lets you hold your phone up in public places, and then tells you the name and artist of the song playing on the stereo.

I thought it would be interesting to take a really quick look at their mobile strategy over the last 3 years.

How Do They Reach An Audience

Firstly, it seems they’re methodically trying to cover as many platforms as possible, to have the widest reach of audience.

• July 2008: iPhone Launch  
• December 2008: Android Launch 
• Apr 2009: Blackberry Launch
• Oct 2010: Windows Phone 7 Launch
• Jan 2011: Nokia Launch

Right now apple has 28% smartphone market share, Android has 26% market share, and Blackberry has 26% market share. Shazam have over 80% market coverage with those platforms alone. So…

…Why Bother With Windows and Nokia?

Last thing I heard, Windows Phone 7 has a 0.5% market share, and Nokia’s not been to hot in the apps/smartphone arena either. So, it’s interesting that Shazam are backing these platforms.

I think Nokia still have an absolutely huge customer-base that out-weighs Apple, RIM and the rest, but that’s more related to normal phones rather than smartphones. 

My suspicion is that Nokia and Microsoft are 2 companies who have taken a hit, and who will rise to the competition. Therefore, Shazam wants to be ready for if/when that happens. I don’t have the market share figures for Nokia smartphones, which would help. Sorry :(

Native vs Web-Based Mobile

Another aspect of the Shazam strategy how they build their apps. Their apps are written specifically for each phone. That can be an expensive route.

Normally if someone wants to cover all platforms quickly, I’d recommend mobile-web, or something like Appcelerator Titanium. However, Shazam app needs audio recording capabilities, which you can’t easily do on a Mobile Web App or generic framework.

So, Shazam can’t reach new platforms on the cheap, they have to develop and support specific apps for each new platform. In turn, that explains why they’re keen to cover as many platforms as possible, they probably have cash in the bank and want to be ready for whichever smartphone-war players come home victorious.

By Tobin Harris

Chris gathered some stats from the first year of Engine Room Apps, which explain why we all welcomed the Christmas break so much.  

In 2010, we developed…

• 20 iPhone Apps
• 3 iPad Apps
• 1 Android App
• 2 Universal iPad & iPhone Apps
• 1 web-based leisure boat booking system (to support iPhone app)
• 1 web-based twitter-like social network (to support to iPhone app)
• 1 sports promotional web site including that worked with YouTube 
• 1 awards based web site
• 1 company product web site
• 1 agile productivity tool (internal project)

On top of that, one of our clients ordered 29 separate branded versions of his Android and iPhone/iPad app, bringing our app-store submission total to 54. Holy moses.

It was a year of highs and lows. We delivered a lot of work & built some great relationships. We also made a ton of mistakes and sacrificed a lot of income. That said, I think we all had a reasonably enjoyable time :)

Cheers to 2010, looking forward to 2011!

Engine Room Apps worked with Asda to develop their first ever iPhone app. 

The Asda Price Guarantee iPhone app was launched about a month before Christmas, and allows customers to compare prices with other supermarkets, and get money-back vouchers that can be redeemed in-store. 

You can download it on the App Store.

The project was a great success, and we hope to continue to improve the app over time. We also thoroughly enjoyed working with the Asda team and were proud to be part of their first mobile app. 

More info on our web site.

By Tobin Harris

This is a quick shout out to our two new latest Engine Room Apps guys; Thomas Curley and Richard Towers.

Thomas has joined us as an iPhone app developer. In his spare time he’s also an independent developer, working with his brother Marting to create games for the App Store. 

Richard is our user interface designer, who’s fascinated by interactivity and touch-based solutions. 

Welcome guys, it’s great to have you on board.