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Just a week ago, we asked who wanted to work with Brent Ozar Unlimited®. We talked about our benefits, our health check approach with clients, and our plans for Employee #1.  The emails came in fast and furious, and we are completely floored and honored by the number of people who wanted to work with us.  You people rock.

Early on, one factor helped weed out a lot of resumes: community participation.  We wanted people who were so passionate and excited about SQL Server that they blogged and presented even when they weren’t being paid to do it.

Some emails started out with, “I haven’t been blogging or presenting, but I promise I’ll start once you hire me.”  We just can’t recommend enough that you get started giving back to the community today in whatever form that excites you the most.  Your online presence is your new resume.  If you want a fun day job working with fun people, start by doing it after hours, and the day job will follow.

Several candidates fit the technical know-how and community participation requirements, and then we started narrowing ’em down.  Had we seen them present?  Had we talked to them at user group meetings?  Had we read – nay, subscribed to – their blogs?

Coffee-drinking candidates got bonus points if their animated behavior got us excited about technology.  We like to think that we’re pretty lively geeks, but some folks out there are so upbeat and fun that we just want to spend more time with ’em.  Being in a small business, this kind of chemistry is so important.  It’s not like we can go to one of our other coworkers and complain – it’s just the four of us!  We can’t tolerate a whiny pessimist at this scale.

Hiring just one of the applicants was hard: even with our picky personalities, we were just overwhelmed by the number of people we wanted to hire.  Every time an email came in, we’d DM each other and say things like, “Wow, I can’t believe so-and-so applied!  Any employer would be honored to get ’em, and I would totally hire them right now.”

Ultimately, the decision boiled down to making an investment in someone.  We wanted to hire someone that could grow along with us as our company grows, someone that we knew would be a continuous source of fresh ideas about technology.

Let me start by introducing Employee #1 without giving her name.  (See, there’s a clue – she’s a her.)

The first time Kendra saw our new hire speak was to a group of 50 people. The session was on a 200 level topic, and our new hire knew her subject front to back, and then some. She had a few authors in the audience who’ve been writing advanced books and designing solutions in her subject area for many years– and yeah, it’s a great sign that these folks wanted to see her speak! At one point, an audience member asked a 500 level question which was outside of the session’s scope. She gave a brief answer and started to move on, but the authors in the audience wanted to offer opinions. And then these authors started to talk loudly to each other. Letting this go on would have completely taken the focus away from the original topic and confused the rest of the audience.

Zillions of people would freeze up at this point. Our new hire had no trouble: she held the floor with a big smile and a friendly joke and quickly scheduled an in-depth conversation on the secondary subject after the session was over. She had everyone laughing- including the authors- and was back in business with all of her original excitement. The audience was truly with her and actively learning. Kendra was seriously impressed.

But there’s more to our new hire than just great teaching skills. She has the type of experience that’s perfect for consulting. She started out in systems administration, so she has the foundational knowledge of how operating systems, storage, and network that we use in performance tuning. She’s taken on database administration in large and small environments, she’s worked with SANs and tiered storage. She has a degree in programming, and is naturally drawn to tuning whole systems: everything from the storage to the application layer.

Oh wait, there’s more!

Reporting caught her eye early on and she’s written about SQL Server Reporting Services. We’re thrilled that our first hire is as diverse as the rest of us – she’s interested in learning, presenting, writing, SQL Server, and Reporting. Finding two of these things in one person is a feat. Finding all of them in someone is just plain exciting.

Less Than Dot has been hosting her blog for a while now and it has been exciting to watch her blog change over time. She has covered wide variety of topics with clarity. Her passion and excitement shine through in her writing.

At this point, I’m sure you’re anxious to find out who we hired. We were really excited when we made the choice. We wanted to tell everyone, but we managed to keep it a secret until her employer made the announcement internally.

New jobs are big changes for a lot of people. We’re incredibly excited to be starting this big change with her. We know that our first hire will jump right in. That’s part of why we knew we had to hire her – she’s excited and passionate about SQL Server, technology, and her hobbies.

Don’t think that we’re all about work over here. Our first hire is interested in more than just SQL Server. She was one of the first #SQLRunners in the Portland Half Marathon and she’s training for her first full marathon. If you’re a big fan of cheering, you can catch her (from the sidelines, of course) at the Wisconsin Marathon on May 5 in Kenosha, WI.

We’re looking for a few good database professionals.

Well, actually, right now we’re just looking for one.  Things are going really well here at Brent Ozar Unlimited®, and it’s time to grow our family.  We’re hiring our first full time employee, and just like everything else we do, we figured we’d blog about it.  We figure we suck a lot less than most companies, so this is a fun way to introduce ourselves as potential employers.  Let’s start by covering what the job is like.

What We Do for Clients

People email us when their database applications are causing them pain.  We start new clients the same way an emergency room handles new patients – well, actually, nothing like that, because emergency rooms have a lot of paperwork and they smell bad.  What I really mean is that we triage the patient with a SQL Server Health Checkup: we spend 2-3 days together (usually remotely over WebEx) going through an extensive health review to pinpoint the cause of their technology pains.

This health check involves:

• Querying the DMVs
• Reviewing database schema (tables, indexes, stored procs)
• Checking the plan cache for resource-intensive queries
• Examining the server’s hardware
• Digging into storage (SAN) and VMware, and much more

Unlike an emergency room, we actually teach the patient – I mean, client – as we go along.  We show them how to diagnose health and performance issues so they can repeat this same process on their other servers.  We go off on wild tangents to answer questions that they’ve always wondered about how SQL Server works.

We finish the health check with a presentation that covers the source of the pain points and a prioritized to-do list for the client’s staff.  We don’t just jiggle a few knobs and call it good – we teach the client what needs to be done so they can do a better job of solving their problems quickly going forward.  Sometimes it’s a query change, sometimes it’s a server configuration change, and sometimes it’s rearchitecting a new way to store and access data.

Doing these health checks requires a tremendous amount of expertise in SQL Server, hardware, storage, virtualization, application coding, and frankly, politics.  Your job as a consultant will eventually be to run these health checks yourself – but we don’t expect you to get there overnight.

What We’ll Do for You

If you want to relieve technology pain, you’ve gotta do research and development – and that takes time and effort.  To stay current on the latest techniques, we usually work 3-4 billable days per week.  Your 1-2 non-billable days per week will be spent improving our products (health checks & training), learning about SQL Server, and giving back to the community.  If you’d like to blog and present, you’ll have plenty of opportunity with our blogs, our free weekly webcasts, our email newsletter, our free posters, our online video library, and giving back on #SQLhelp  – we’re always looking for new ways to help people for free.

Going into consulting with us is like a turbo button for your SQL Server experience: you’ll be exposed to amazing clients doing cool things with SQL Server, hardware, virtualization, and the cloud.  This week, for example, Jeremiah is helping a business move their SQL Servers into the cloud, Brent’s planning a SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn deployment for a TV network, and Kendra’s doing a health check and training a client on index tuning.  (Tim’s decided not to go the consulting route, so he’s taking the SQLCruise portion of Brent Ozar Unlimited® and going a separate way – here’s his post about it.)  You get to shadow us on work to increase your skills, and when you’ve got a question, you can get in-depth answers from 3 of the funniest people in the business.

We want happy people, so we offer great benefits:

• 6 weeks paid vacation per year
• 2 fully paid domestic conferences (you don’t have to be a speaker) and that doesn’t count against your vacation time
• If you’re an MVP, we’ll pay for your travel & time to the annual MVP Summit too
• Health insurance
• Full time telecommuting with a max of 1 week of travel per 2 months
• Paid certification attempts (whether you pass or fail)
• Home internet/VOIP/cell phone expenses paid
• $3,000 hardware/software budget every 2 years to pick your own tools (we like Apple gear, but you can pick whatever you want – you’re your own IT department)

Even though it’s full time telecommuting, this position is only open to US residents already authorized to work in the US full time.  We can’t sponsor visas, and most of our clients are in the US, so we need to keep US travel expenses & time zones in mind.

How We’ll Pick the Right Candidate

We’re looking for people with at least a couple of years of hands-on database administration experience.  We love all kinds of database professionals, and we might hire the rest of you later too, but this role is specifically for performing and improving our database health checks, and we want DBA experience there.  No, we don’t have a name for this role yet – we’re not too big on titles, and we’re actually looking for input from you to define your title.  Leave your job title ideas in the comments even if you’re not applying.  The current front runners are Expert, Consultant, and Bacon Wrangler.  I’m thinking about merging all three into Expert Bacon Wrangler Consultant.

If you’re the kind of person who loves to share by writing and presenting even when you’re not getting paid to do it, we’ll know you’re passionate about technology, and that’s what’s most important to us.  You don’t have to be a Microsoft Certified Master – you just have to be genuinely excited by Microsoft SQL Server and willing to share your enthusiasm with others.

Sound like your kind of job?  Email us at Help@BrentOzar.com.  If you’ve got a resume, include it, but don’t go to any work to build a new one.  We’ll Google your name to see what you’ve been doing for the community and where you’ve been speaking, and that’s better than almost any resume we could read.

And if you haven’t been giving back to the community by writing and presenting, well – here’s your sign that it’s time to start.

Because this won’t be the last person we hire.

UPDATE Friday 16th: We found our dream hire! Stay tuned….and if you didn’t have time to apply, drop us a line. We’ll keep you on our radar for next time.