For a company on the hunt for top tech talent, the corner of Eighth and Market streets is prime poaching ground.
Every morning, herds of tech workers gather there awaiting shuttle buses to the campuses of Google, Facebook, Adobe, LinkedIn, among others. Corralled and stuck in line, the tech bus crowd is a captive audience.
For the past two weeks, recruiters from software startup Bigcommerce have taken advantage of Silicon Valley's well-known commuting regimen. Members of its executive team, bolstered by a small army of help-for-hire, have descended upon techie shuttle stops around the city in a bid to win over top engineering talent.
"Are you interested in changing the world of e-commerce?" Steve Donnelly, the recruiter, asked a couple of dapper guys waiting for the Facebook bus. They were not interested.
And if changing the world wasn't an enticing enough offer, of course there would be free drinks as well.
The ploy is gimmicky, yes, but it is also apparently effective: The company has spoken with more than 1,000 potential candidates, extended offers to at least six and hired two, so far. Bigcommerce, based in Austin, Texas, is opening a San Francisco office and needs more than 40 engineers and product developers in a hurry. Since turning bus stops into job fairs, the company says traffic to its career site has increased by 54 percent and application volume by 150 percent.
West Stringfellow, the company's new chief product officer, came up with the idea at a previous job when he commuted from Noe Valley to Market Street, passing shuttle stops on the way.
"Every day, I would just see all this top talent hanging out on the sidewalk," he said. "I thought, if I ever have to build a team really fast, I'll just go hit those folks right where they're standing."
A big campaign
Initially, he envisioned sauntering over to a tech bus stop and chatting people up, but it soon morphed into a full-blown campaign with a clever hashtag (#poached).
Last week, the company set up coffee stands at stops, passed out 400 poached egg sandwiches and 500 cups of coffee to would-be hires. On Thursday, Donnelly and four others were at Market and Eighth, one of the "more receptive" shuttle stops, handing out invites to a hiring happy hour with libations, live music and a raffle for Google Glass. All told, 40 engineers showed up at the happy hour, begetting eight interviews.
Another recruiter chatted up a plaid-clad Instagram engineer.
"We're just trying to get people off the bus," she said. "I mean, why have a three-hour commute to the valley?"
The engineer, who declined to give his name, said he wasn't really looking for a new gig. That said, he still planned to check out the happy hour.
Donnelly said his team has noticed some pretty consistent archetypes among tech bus riders. Google employees are generally less willing to chat, while Facebook, Yahoo and Zynga employees are more open. Bus lines in the Mission are, generally speaking, a tougher crowd.
"I had this one girl come up to me, and say that her boyfriend was in line for the Google bus but didn't want to come talk to me in front of his co-workers," he said. "This crowd is a little more receptive."
A good job lead
Donnelly approached Josh Southern, a 26-year-old developer who just moved to San Francisco from Canada to join his husband, a software engineer at Google. Southern hadn't yet started looking for work, but just by walking his husband to the bus stop he stumbled upon a pretty good lead.
"I think I'll check it out," he said. "I don't have anything going on tonight."
Bigcommerce, which is expanding significantly after a $40 million Series C round of funding raised from former AOL chief Steve Case's venture capital firm, isn't the first to attempt the bus line hire. Last fall, Roku tried to poach Google employees waiting for the shuttle in Saratoga.
Stringfellow said that the company also has been using more traditional recruiting tactics, but generally the bus-side poaching has been more effective.
Bigcommerce plans to keep it up until it fills all of its San Francisco slots. Stringfellow's peers at other companies are not pleased.
"My friends at the executive levels at eBay and Facebook," he said, "they think it's clever, but they are also like, 'Do you have to be so bold?' "
Kristen V. Brown is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kbrown@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kristenvbrown