Recruiting Software Engineers: 5 Tips To Find Technical Talent
February 11, 2013
Have you ever heard of an unemployed software engineer? Unless they are retired, the answer is probably “no”.
I hear this pain point over and over again — growing technology companies need, need, need software engineers.
Why so desperate? Lack of technical talent can develop into a huge impediment, hindering a company’s potential success or growth, and unfortunately, there simply isn’t enough great engineering talent to go around. It’s a major imbalance of supply and demand, and since we’re talking about a highly specialized skill set that requires targeted training/education and work experience, there is no quick and easy solution.
Some companies are so focused on developing a reliable pipeline of these types of candidates that they have gone so far as to hire specific technical recruiters in-house.
How can you recruit these engineers who are so sought after? Here are five options to start with right away.
Job Boards
I’m only listing this option in order to say no to it. Honestly, I would be moderately wary of considering a software engineer who has applied via a job board. The good ones are being actively hunted down and poached left and right. They don’t need job boards and they know it.
My point is, do not depend on a job board to fill this type of position. You need to think outside of the box
This is a good start. However, be aware that some really fantastic engineering talent may not be active on Linkedin at all. These types of candidates are inundated constantly by recruiters (sorry!), therefore they might not even create a Linkedin profile in order to avoid the cluttered inbox.
The best way to use Linkedin when searching for software engineers is to join relevant groups, such as “Boston Javascript Developers” or “Storage Architects”. You can identify top talent by checking out the discussions or searching through the members. Fair warning, though, you might be surprised to find that a large portion of the members are actually recruiters.
Meetup
If you’re not familiar with Meetup, you may want to check out their website. This is basically a site that organizes groups of people to engage in their interests by – you guessed it – meeting up with other people who share the same interest.
So what interests do great software engineers have? Software development! There are likely lots of Meetup groups local to the area you are searching in that will have Meetups on learning more about a specific technology.
You can use Meetup to simply find members of a certain group to message, or you could go the extra mile by actually attending the Meetups and introducing yourself in person. I recently spoke to a recruiter who actually organizes Meetups for local software engineers to attend and network, and I think that’s a great idea.
Referrals
I highly recommend developing a referral program to find top engineering talent. The best engineer working at your company is likely to know other great software engineers. Hand out something like a $2-5K bonus, and in no time you will find talent rolling in — and you’ll save yourself potential agency recruiter fees and time in the process.
Networking
This goes hand-in-hand with a referral program, but when it comes to any hard-to-fill position, networking is key. Talk to lots of people and get a buzz going around. Understand the effective value proposition that would convince an engineer to work at your company. Perhaps it’s a specific, exciting type of technology, or maybe it’s the ability to head up a new deployment that no one has rolled out before. These candidates have opportunities proposed to them on the hour, so realize what sets your opportunity apart and evangelize it.
These are my top tips for recruiting software engineers. I’m sure there are other strategies companies use to attract top technical talent.