Michael Trafton

Fire Ant Software

Michael Trafton (Mikey to his friends), is the founder and CEO of Fire Ant Software, a startup making products that help doctors get paid faster by insurance companies.

As well as Fire Ant Software, Mikey is also the founder of Blue Fish Development Group, a software consulting firm delivering fixed-price, product-quality software solutions for clients such as Southwest Airlines, Wells Fargo, and Nike. Under Mikey’s leadership, Blue Fish was selected as one of Austin’s Best Places to Work and was recognized as Austin’s tenth fastest growing company in 2008. Mikey is a mentor at Capital Factory, Austin’s startup accelerator.

Talk

Recruiting and Hiring a Bad-Ass Team

Mikey delivered a brilliant talk at the 2012 Business of Software Conference at Business of Software Conference that offered software entrepreneurs and coders a three part framework to understand the importance of culture in an organisation, what happens when culture goes wrong and how to ensure organisational culture is embedded within your company.

Mikey is picking up on his talk from last year about building a world class culture to share some of his tips and tricks on building a world-class team that is a rock solid culture fit and incredibly productive. Mikey will explain:

• How to determine what capabilities you need for a given position
• How to attract the best talent
• How to ignore useless resumes and screen candidates using other (better) techniques instead
• How to interview (including my favorite interview questions)
• How to make an offer of employment that will know the candidate’s socks off
• How to differentiate your offer from all the others that top candidates receive
• How to make the candidate feel loved so that they will accept your job offer instead of someone else’s
• How to keep the candidate from accepting a counter offer from their current employer