CEO Leslie Haywood with systems engineer Miguel Pereira [Photo: Michael Heape]

At many small tech companies, the premium is on experience. Small companies, the thinking goes, don’t have the employee depth to hire recent graduates and train them. Tampa-based eBridge, a 30-employee paperless document management company, takes a different view.

“In some cases, if someone comes with a great deal of experience, they may have some bad programming habits that are not easy to break,” says CEO Leslie Haywood.

eBridge is hiring programming developers with a bachelor’s in computer science or a related field. Support personnel need a high school diploma plus customer service experience and other skills. Developers first go through an HR screening and then talk with the people who would be their direct managers and co-workers. Tech employees take a written domain test and may field questions designed to see how they solve problems — questions like how many golf balls it would take to fill a school, for example.

eBridge is the rare tech company with women forming the majority of the senior executive team while men form the majority of employees. Haywood has a bachelor’s in management information systems and an MBA in technology management.