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Auren Hoffman is the CEO of Rapleaf, a personal-data aggregator that has been the subject of a remarkable amount of controversy but is wildly useful as a data provider to must-see apps like Rapportive and Gist.

While Hoffman's company may know a lot about you as a web user and person, he knows a lot of people himself the old-fashioned way, in real life. Introduced before keynoting at Austin, Texas's Capital Factory Demo Day as "the most-connected person in Silicon Valley," Hoffman gave a really interesting talk about how he handles hiring at his company. I live blogged his talk on Google Plus and offer my notes below.

Businesses, startups especially, always have a hard time sourcing quality candidates for new jobs, even if they have big budgets for a Human Resources team or outside recruiters who can scrape around and find leads.

But for startups and small businesses looking to hire for new positions in order to operate at optimal speed, hiring new team members that work out in the long-run can be one of the more difficult challenges.

There'’s nothing more inefficient than hiring a new person, on-boarding them (“showing them the ropes”), reviewing their input a month later, then realizing it’s not working out. You lose time and money, both of which are on short-supply for all startups. So, here are a few tips that startups should keep in mind to ensure they'’re hiring the right candidates for their jobs the first time around.

It's that time of year again, when college seniors start thinking about the next phase of their lives. In other words, that means it's time to start looking for a job, polishing up the resume, and hitting the campus career fairs.

As we've discussed here before in relations to internship programs, many campus events and recruitment efforts still cater primarily to large, established companies. This can make it challenging for startups looking to hire new talent and difficult for graduates hoping to find work opportunities at small or new companies.

The NYC Startup Job Fair - scheduled for the afternoon of April 8 - hopes to address this with an event expressly aimed at matching graduates with startups.

A few months ago, Nodejitsu co-founder Marak Squires wrote "The day's of resumes and references for developers are slowly dying." Squires sends his Github account to potential employers before he sends a résumé.

With that in mind, check out My Github Résumé, a web application that will generate a résumé from a Github account.

Right now there are a lot of reports about large companies in the Valley not being able to find the talent they need. There are also a lot of reports about companies bending over backwards financially to retain the people they have.

But what I found working for a large Valley corporate in the last few years is that it is not hard to find talent. The real problem is that companies are not ready for new talent. There is not enough flexibility in them to really embrace change and use creative, innovative and hungry developers to the best of their abilities. Companies want the new and cool, and then they try to force it to function just like the old and rusty. It's like trying to turn a 1980s Honda into a Hybrid with some batteries and duct tape.

Let's face realities here: it's no doubt tempting and cool for many developers to work for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook or Twitter to name but a few. Where it stops being cool is when gifted and courted developers face outdated infrastructures and the attitude of large Valley corporates.

One of the most common questions I get asked is "How can I find technical employees?" The market for good programmers is extremely tight, and traditional techniques like job-board or craigslist postings won't produce results. Even the best network of contacts probably won't uncover candidates willing to reach out to you. So, what can you do?

Start early: Accept that it's going to take longer than you'd like to find the right person, and so plan ahead now for hires you'll be making in six months or a year. If you do find the right person too early, make them an offer and take the hit of paying their salary for a few months before you really need them. The hiring process will be time-consuming, so schedule accordingly; treat it as a first-class task that will take up a significant chunk of every week.

A number of stories have crossed the wire in recent weeks about the "talent crunch" in the tech industry. Although the unemployment rate in the U.S. remains high, many tech companies are struggling to find and to keep employees. Compounding what's already just a general shortage of engineers, those tech companies with deep pockets are offering big salaries and bonuses to those willing to join (and hopefully stay).

In a bidding war for talent against the likes of Facebook, Google, and Zynga, how can startups compete in order to recruit and retain talent?

Although the Web may have helped the clarion call that "resumes are dead" - paper resumes, at least - employers still need ways to evaluate the experience and skill set of people they hire. This is particularly important for startups who, with far smaller staff sizes, have to make each hiring decision really count.

And hiring programmers can be particularly challenging, as you can't really look at a resume and judge someone's coding expertise.

Yesterday, I wrote about the things you can do to prepare your startup's website pre-launch. But your online presence doesn't solely exist on and shouldn't solely rely on your company website. And it's incredibly valuable that just as you work on it, that you work to develop an online presence for you, the entrepreneur.

Case in point: the relaunch this past week of SpeakerText, whose CEO Matt Mireles I had a chance to talk to. Looking back at the first mention of SpeakerText on ReadWriteWeb in January, that story begins, "You've probably never heard of Matt Mireles." But now, despite a back-to-the-drawing-board period for SpeakerText where the company itself was pretty quiet, if you're active in entrepreneurial circles online, you're much more likely to have heard of Mireles. He blogs and comments. He's active on Twitter and on Hacker News.

Montreal-based entrepreneur and blogger Ben Yoskovitz knows a thing or two about hiring employees at startups. Yoskovitz formerly founded his own company, Standout Jobs - a tool designed to improve hiring and recruiting techniques for small businesses on the Web. Needless to say, the hiring and performance tracking of employees at the SMB level is a topic of interest for Yoskovitz. One of the items he recently wrote about is whether startups should hire workaholics expected to work 80+ hours each week, and some interesting arguments against this doctrine emerged.