Also, Recruiters tend to be a poor and expensive solution. It is hard to tell the good from those who just claim to be good and we get a lot of noise from them. Also, I'm not sure that the best candidates just call a random recruiter to find them a job.
What are others doing to both find jobs and to recruit?
The local labour market for engineers, technicians and developers is pretty much empty - as in, everybody with the skills required and the desire to live here already does.
Recruiting more often than not means sniping, or, if we're lucky - that someone has recently found a partner with desirable skills and coaxed them into moving up here.
Anyway, we've found that word of mouth is the most effective way; we simply let friends and associates, former colleagues and whatnot know that we're looking for X.
This is a hundred times more effective than LinkedIn for vetting candidates - people are quite unlikely to uncritically recommend someone when they will be reminded of their sell-in for years if it is a dud. (Much unlike LinkedIn endorsements...)
It turns out with friends&associates, friends&associates' friends&associates &c, you can cast a quite wide net - and also, the sell-in works better both ways; the candidates who do show up for interviews already have been told ours is a good place to be and are, more often than not, a good cultural fit.
(And, before someone asks - 'cultural fit' means 'Happy to work in a rather unstructured madhouse where the unofficial motto is 'We've never done that before, so we're probably quite good at it!') - we've assembled a motley crew from just about every nook and cranny of the planet, from Sri Lanka via Belarus to Argentina and Japan and lots inbetween. Oh, and the occasional Norwegian. All making world-class subsea equipment on a small islet way out in the boonies.
Figure out what you really need and how "good" is defined.
Good is contextual. My past company spent a lot of time on system design interviewing. Here is the problem. We didn't build anything close to a complex system. We created demos to show off to clients as MVPs. So we left positions open for months until we found the perfect person and they didn't want to join/did not stay as they wouldn't actually use those skills.
Said past company also wanted "product minded people", something in my own background. Devs had no influence on the product there. Yet they waited for people like myself to come along.
A job before that leetcoded. Nobody currently there could pass the leetcode. The dev doing the interview had never even seen a tree in production at any company. We certainly didn't care internally as the database was so small and it was a Scrum team focused on shipping tickets. But we kept reposting the job and then had to eventually just take a candidate (if you could solve a tree leetcode, you would not work at this place).
- There's a monthly "Who is hiring" thread on HN every 1st day of a month.
- Create a technical blog. When it gets popular and people see that it's high quality, brand awareness will increase. It takes time but it can bring massive gains. Extreme example: Cloudflare. But there are many smaller nice blogs. If your blog is good, it will naturally come up when people google for things etc.
- Create an RSS feed for the blog and a Twitter account ${Foobar}Engineering that RTs your blog posts. Just make sure the blog and Twitter are high quality and rare, and not random filler content every day.
- Do something unexpected, like: TikTok or YouTube channel. There's one small company in Poland that has a YouTube channel with basically short fun programming sketches (2-3 min), and this YT channel became huge. Everyone in IT in Poland knows them (https://www.youtube.com/c/HRejterzy).
- Relax your requirements, and post job offers to good job boards. Are you fine with people working remotely? Or 4 days a week? Check stuff like https://remoteok.com/ https://4dayweek.io/ etc.
- Include approx. salary data in job offer. No one likes this dance of "do they want seniors at half my current rate?".
- Perhaps become a sponsor of some underinvested opensource repos? The repo owners will likely give you some visibility on their website and top of the repo README.
Years ago at a previous job my boss donated a CAD workstation and some CNC time to the local public highschool's robotics team, then coordinated with their supervising teacher to have a couple employees (including me) mentor there one afternoon per week for the school year.
As a mentor, I helped students understand compiler errors, recommended writing a function instead of repeatedly typing the same code, and also gave more advanced advice, like explaining how PID loops could prevent gears from stripping. It was rewarding to see these students both grow and enjoy the learning process.
It also paid dividends for my boss when some of these students applied for summer internship at our company, which eventually led to several excellent full time hires after college, including referrals our interns had made to their fellow engineering students.
While it took a couple years to pay off, those few hours of community service introduced us to quality people that no jobs board could have.
It's easy to find job boards filled with ads from recruiters; but hard to discover companies that you might like to work for.
Literally 90% job of a recruiter is browsing through LinkedIn and spamming potential candidates.
Easy to do that job yourself, if you invest the time. Also, you'll be able to do the job much better, and will come across as much more genuine to candidates.
Does your company post these adverts on twitter/hn/reddit? Even if they _do_ see your posting, why would they work for you over any other dev job?
> Also, Recruiters tend to be a poor and expensive solution. It is hard to tell the good from those who just claim to be good and we get a lot of noise from them.
Recuiters are not a silver bullet, you still need to filter what they source. A good recruiter will want to know why you're rejecting the candidates you're sending. They are expensive, however if they're not getting you candidates then find another recruiter.
> Also, I'm not sure that the best candidates just call a random recruiter to find them a job.
No, of course they don't, but they might call _a_ recruiter they have a relationship with. Recruiters also reach out to candidates too. A candidate who has 10 years experience writing django apps might be miffed at a recruiter offering "an exciting frontend opportunity", but a goood recruiter will either have people they've been speaking to, or will know the signs on linkedin/etc of people who may want to leave their current jobs and might be a good fit.
My suggestions:
* widen the net. If you previously needed folks to be local, can you have them be in the UK? If you needed them in the UK, can you expand to the EU? If you previously needed ruby experts, can you work with someone who is an expert at another similar dynamic language (php, python, etc)?
* hire newer devs/junior folks if you can build or have the infrastructure to support them. From what I can see, there's not a dearth of folks looking for their first dev job. You'll just have to train them up.
* reach out to local bootcamps. There are a lot of folks there hungry for work. Sure, some of them aren't great, but there may be quite a few worth chatting with. Especially had luck with folks who had a previous career but were pivoting into tech.
* find a good recruiter. How? I'd look at recruiters who have invested in the community. I have one in Colorado who has sponsored community events for a decade. If you don't see one of those, maybe ask friends for referrals?
* be public about the company's engineering/design/product culture. This is a longer play, but can let folks self-select out or in to chatting with you. Posting on the monthly who is hiring threads here at HN is another way to be public.
* support local meetups for the technology you are using. I run a meetup and the sponsorships are quite cheap, esp when compared to recruiter fees or the opportunity cost of an unfilled job.1. Post your jobs on LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Any other website is basically pointless (maybe HN's Who is Hiring? at the beginning of the month can get you some attention too) because people only search on these, and any other website is flooded only with job ads from consultancies and recruitment agencies so yours won't pop up.
2. Add your salary ranges in your job's description, otherwise you will get people that apply expecting more than you can offer and you waste both of yours time (I've been told this by companies during the interview, they wanted to make sure I saw the ranges and it fits with what I expect).
3. Replace your "take home challenge" with a "live coding session" (if you have one). This will attract older people that are married/have kids which usually can't set aside 4 hours during the evenings or weekends even if they wanted too, due to family responsibilities. This will show them you respect them, so you can spin it up as a "benefit" of applying. If you can detail the entire job interview process in the job post and how long it takes, then even better!
4. You're in Tewkesbury, engineers probably want to be in London, so let them know you offer a WeWork office in there too, if they need it. Otherwise your location is going to put off many people.
5. Make sure you actually answer when somebody sends you an email with an application, or questions. Many don't, be better than them. If you don't have an email address where people can send you questions then make one, or allow them to send you messages "InMail" on LinkedIn.
6. Please don't ask about previous salary, or personal details like sexual orientation or things like this during the interview process, like those creepy Greenhouse job application forms. I can't believe this is not illegal in the UK. If somebody at your company does this currently, tell them not to anymore.
That being said, if you had any jobs related to Ruby on Rails with a possibility to transition to Engineering Management in the next 1-2 years, I would have applied.
PS: I'm a 30 year old dude from a 3rd world country learning how to code. I'm not good, yet, but I'm hard working and I learn fast. Just trying my luck, but do you guys take an apprentice? Or maybe in need of customer support? I'm just looking to learn. What's in for you is cost reduction and someone who would be grateful for life for giving him a chance.
You can be creative about it though. A story: when the startup was small, a maths student applied to work for us as a programmer. They were very smart and had a good personality, but were naive about their very limited programming experience. Most companies would have passed. Instead, the team lead said to them: I don't have time to mentor you, but if you can find another student with good programming experience who I like, and can mentor you, I will hire you both. And so they did. So, a 'pass' was turned into two hires for the price of one.
Of course, this probably only works if you can use new grads, who are all looking for jobs at the same time.
- I joined the major slack channels of developers/designers/whateveryoulookforspecialists in the area.
- joined the #workrequests, #jobs, #yougetthepoint channels
- actually read the guidelines of each slack channel and/or talked to the admin to have the right tone of voice, get their feedback, finetune it, etc
- posted the job
- after 1-2 years, specialists still come to us because of the posts
- maintain a spreadsheet so you don't lose track of good people
1. Embedded startup, <20 people.
> I contacted them. They were one of the few tech firms in my hometown & used a SW stack that I loved. Old-school email exchange. No social media. I learned of their existence via a newspaper profile article.
2. Semiconductor OEM, <150 people.
> I posted about being laid off on LI. An ex-colleague saw the post & invited me in for first interviw.
3. IoT startup, <20 people.
> I replied to an Austin Startup jobs posting from the company recruiter.
4. Software dev team, <10 people.
> The dev leader cold-emailed me after seeing my details in an HN "who wants to be hired?" post.
From experience, there's no single place that will just work. Have to keep trying through multiple channels all the time.
Here are some ways that we try.
- LinkedIn Jobs, indeed etc like job boards
- HN (whoishiring), angel.co
- technology specific job boards (welovegolang, pycoders weekly etc)
- references through current employees, their past colleagues etc
- cold pings on Linkedin, Twitter, github
- Some slack/discord channels for specific technologies
In personal experience, quality of the crowd depends on the channel too, however, wouldn't call this a confirmed observation.
Of course, you only get the candidates from the recruiters, even from firms which claim to do some screening for you. Recruiting firms usually work on keyword-based matches and decide whether the candidate is good based on a couple of calls with them or maybe they'll throw in a generic persoanlity test or a coding challange. You still have to make your hiring plan, your own screening criteria and interview for it, test them for your requirements and all the rest of the work involved and you have to pay a handsome amount to the recruiter... which is not fair... but unfortunately, that is how it is given the market.
The best way is to find a recruiter who works on success-based business model i.e. they only get paid if the employee ends up working for 6 months, a year etc... so at least you avoid those who will get you the devs, get their commission and immediately start spamming them other opportunities.
Good luck!
Disclaimer: No affiliation or anything.
2. Recruit yourself. You cant just post a job online and hope for the best. It's like dating. If you make yourself look all nice and go out to the bar but dont talk to anyone you are not all that likely to be approached, assuming you're a male. But if you go and talk to people your chances of having a good conversation go way up.
Recruiting is the same thing. Send messages on linkedin. Send emails to candidates. Recruiting isnt easy but the reason recruiters get paid is because this type of monotonous "sourcing" work is boring and its somewhat difficult to find relevant people. If you don't want to pay someone else to do it then you need to do it yourself.
Those are the big ones. Other optimizations can come from making sure you have a good pitch, email and verbal, about your company and the role. Making sure your website is attractive to folks. Basically look at everything you are presenting to the world and think, "If I knew nothing about our company would I respond to this email?".
Hope that helps.
A bunch of my pals over the past five years have used Indeed successfully to find software development work (contract and permanent), that's how it was recommended to me. And my current role came from an ad on Indeed.
> Recruiters tend to be a poor and expensive solution
Agreed, from the job hunter side of things. If I see roles advertised by a recruiter I tend to be less inclined to apply for the job.
Also make sure your advert contains as much detail as possible about required skills, desirable skills, holidays that kinda thing. Maybe also include a salary range for the role, ads that displayed salary expectations were more likely to get a click from me than those that didn't.
---
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Indeed, just demonstrated what worked for me as a job hunter.
If you are requiring in UK, consider remote within a couple time zones.
Digging deep into your company’s network is also important in the early days. I set up a referral bonus to incentivize folks to spend energy outside work hours to cultivate good referrals. $5-10k sounds steep but it’s cheaper than a recruiter so you can be generous here.
I don’t think job postings are useful for a small company. Filtering out cold outreach is very time consuming. Pay a recruiter to do this.
I've experimented with pretty much every paid job board and have settled in Linkedin, it seems to get a reasonably broad range of candidates for most positions posted.
Also I have moved to a policy of posting the exact starting salary.
Not a range, not commensurate with experience, etc. Just like here's what we're going to pay you, right from the beginning. Also here's the benefits, they're good and they're 100% paid by us. It just feels like a more ethical way to do things and stops all the stilly time wasting around compensation.
If I want to consider a range of applicants with a wide band in compensation (which, sometimes you do, maybe you're open to a wide range) then I just post more than one ad. There's nothing wrong with posting for Junior, Senior, Director, with the same core job function.
Your home page is just one point where you should post job openings. StackOverflow has a jobs board, for example, as do many industry-specific magazines.
Another option is to poach people from advertising and consulting agencies. Many people use them to get a foot in the door of the employment world after university/vocational training and then, once they're sick of having to balance ten projects a day, shift towards one stable employer.
- In the initial stages, we've recruited from within our own network of former colleagues.
- We had a successful open source project and recruited from amongst its contributors
- We hired people that our employees had worked with before and that they recommended
- We went to meetups and conferences, talked about technology and what we were doing. After the talks you often have conversations with attendees that might be interested in the project.
Here's what never worked for us:
- job ads / "career" section on our website
- going to meetups with the sole goal of recruiting people
- linkedin cold outreach
Even the very largest companies like Google and Amazon use recruiters, they just happen to have an army of them on payroll rather than going out and hiring them on a piecemeal basis from external agencies. You also say the best candidates don't call a random recruiter, and you're right, they don't. The best candidates know one or two really good recruiters who can get them interviews lined up in the next few days and an offer on the table by the end of next week.
The only other thing I've seen have some level of success is going to recruitment events targeted at the sort of people you want to hire. If you're looking for junior developers your local university will run recruitment fairs, and if you're looking for more experienced people there are a few events such as Silicon Milkroundabout (the worst name ever) where you can pay to get a stand. Either way be ready to commit whatever time you're going to be at the event itself, plus a few days to follow up with people you've spoken to.
Make yourself easily reachable.
In this instance for example, the fact that you have asked this question means you are hiring. One of the HN reader reading this could be your potential hire but for that person there's no easy way to approach you. A single link in your profile could make that happen :) Otherwise you are wasting this opportunity!
You should be articulate and explicit about your hiring needs to your network, and careers page etc. Add a link to your company in your profile! You are on the front page of Hackernews, but even though I'm looking for one of the roles you mentioned and wanted to know more I can't see what you're hiring for or anything about your company.
As for actionable things - some local devs, in my area, started a tech/dev meetup group here that's evolved into a 500 person slack channel (in-person meetings pre-covid) and it's a great place to find people and talk about jobs/local market. Definitely not a short-term fix. Also, leveraging any kind of news about a funding announcement or big contract or local impact helps get your name out there. I know a few former colleagues who saw the company name in an article/newspaper or an industry magazine and wound up applying for roles.
Best of luck!
This alone will set you apart, and attract more applicants.
Advertising on Reddit and Stack Overflow etc is fairly low return for the effort because it becomes a full time job answering queries and doing filtering (unless you have an in house recruiter in HR who can do this).
Advertising on your own web site has a very low reach if you are just a small company; who do you think will look this way? At least post it on some job sites; also post in local community groups, like local Facebook groups, if any, unless you are in a large city where this will not work. You can also use LinkedIn, but I don't know what is the cost in UK.
Overall it has been a positive experience. It allowed us to scale up our engineering numbers relatively quickly. Potential cons to consider are the culture changes that come with it, the risk of outsourcing too much domain knowledge (direct vs. indirect hires) and potential time zone differences. It has also bought us time to focus on growing our direct hire count, which takes longer.
I sort of co-run a tiny company (less than 10 people) and the only thing that works is networking. We're so few that one bad hire would hurt a lot so we'd rather ask around.
If you mean 50+, things change.
Everyone I know job hunting is doing so for a big salary boost, as the pandemic has pushed prices high. People want to work remote and buy houses.
Smaller companies are at a significant disadvantage in terms of salary. Doubly so as in the UK, granting equity is rare unless you join as an exec or non exec.
I think finding the candidates is going to be the easy part. Convincing them to take less pay in a time of significant price rises is going to be hard.
As others have commented, think about how you’re different. (And “family “ and “culture” is a red flag, not a differentiator).
However there are people in the UK who frequent sites like this, so why dont you have a link back to your website in your profile or in your submissions?
"Good" is also a very all encompassing word, you might need to be a bit more specific over your requirements.
some of the more niche technologies is word of mouth, through user groups, bbs's news groups, things like that, but not on any recruitment sites ironically.
It's a grind, and you need to be selling yourself.
If you're finding it tough go speak to Thayer: https://team-prime.com/about/ they are an agency but won't bill you by person hired but by role advertised (i.e. if you need to hire 4 systems engineers you'll pay for the effort to source and work a single distinct role for the period of time it takes to fill the 4 positions).
There's also lists that aggregate top startups: - https://topstartups.io/ - https://www.breakoutlist.com/
My suggestion is to look at compensation / benefits package. If you have a great benefits package then you are more likely to attract that top tier talent you are looking for.
Of course this is going to cost, great candidates don't come cheap.
Look at paying £100k+ for the best.
What can I conclude from this ?
Money talks.
Also reading a lot of these responses... I wish I could more easily advertise the salary I would accept. Its a field to fill in some applications I guess.
I should note:
The companies I’m hiring for are not (yet) household names. Most of our employees had never heard our company names before applying.
We’re not offering crazy salaries — we just aim for market-rate.
And we’re not using external recruiters to help. We have some recruitment costs, but they’re relatively low.
So… how do we do it?
1. We hire remotely.
We do care about timezone, and we avoid a few countries due to the legal challenges of hiring there, but we’re not restricted to only hiring in a given city (or even country).
This massively increases the pool of talent that could meet our needs.
2. We identify the things that make us special.
It’s not the salary, our company name, or the job title.
It is:
- Our core values, where we combine a focus on impact with enjoying the journey
- The opportunity to work in a small and rapidly growing company, where you can learn loads and make a huge impact
- Being profitable, so the above benefit isn’t combined with high stress
- The opportunity to work was directly with successful entrepreneurs
- Our wider benefits package, including 40 days vacation leave, 4 months paternity/maternity leave, an annual in-person meet-up, and so on.
To the right person, these are huge!
3. We create an ad which _really_ sells this message
We do not have an ad titled “Mid-level developer (JavaScript, NodeJS, React)”
We have an ad titled “Join our remote team and enjoy work-life balance as a Full Stack Developer (JavaScript, NodeJS, React)”
Spot the difference? :)
You can review the rest of one of ads here: https://docs.spidergap.com/en/articles/2011605-join-our-remo...
4. We post on job boards
Our favorite for developers used to be StackOverflow. It cost £3–5k but was worth it for the quality of applicants. Sadly they’ve stopped supporting job ads now.
We also use weworkremotely.com. Posting here is cheap, and your ad will get picked up a number of other remote job boards for free.
5. We ask 3 simple questions to start the filtering process (— and we do NOT look at their resumes — at least not yet)
We want to make it easy for the right candidates to start the process, but in doing so we’re going to get a lot of junk.
So we ask 3 simple questions:
- What’s your proudest achievement, and why?
- What’s your favorite non-fiction book, and why?
- Which of our features do you like the most, and why?
80% of the applicants will fall at this first hurdle.
Loads will fall due to poor English, or by giving one word answers.
A surprising number will answer the 3rd question with “I haven’t looked, sorry!”
They aren’t difficult questions, so we should be looking for great answers. And some answers will stand out. So they’ll go through.
Reviewing these applicants is quick — well under a minute each on average. But it still takes time with 1000 applicants, so we do outsource some of this work to a virtual assistant.
6. We then have a sequence of steps to filter it down further.
For a developer, these would be:
- Answer 2 coding challenges (75% filtered out again — ~62 candidates left from 1000)
- 15 minute core values and communications interview (50% filtered out — 31 left)
- 30 minute dev team interview (50% filtered out — 15 left)
- 90 minute head of department interview (75% filtered out — 4 left)
- 20 hour mini-project (50% filtered out — 2 left)
Yep… after 6 stages, we've turned 1000 hopeful applicants into just 2 outstanding candidates who we offer jobs to.
Now — it’s worth noting that for other roles (sales, HR, finance, etc.), we have fewer steps (e.g. there’s no mini project as we’re can effectively test their ability in the interviews) and a much higher rate of great candidates get to the end of the process.
Hiring developers is particularly hard because we maintain a high bar for engineering talent, and fewer candidates meet our expectations for communications etc.
To manage this process, we simply have a series of forms and checklists. We’ve used Podio in the past, but expect to be using AirManual to manage the whole process for future roles :)
In both cases, you’re getting a very affordable and flexible tool — we’ve seen no need to spend $1000s on an expensive recruitment tool.
7. We offer a job to the great candidates we’re able to hire!
8. If we can’t hire everyone who makes it this far, we ask them to join our “farm team”
This concept, and many of the other ideas in our process, came from “How to Hire A-Players” by Eric Herrenkohl.
Recruitment takes a lot of time, so it’s every manager’s responsibility to build a farm team of people who we’d love to hire, and are keen to join in future.
When the next job comes up, we know exactly who to reach out to!
And… that’s it.
Hope that's useful :)
"Gieb monies, plx!" - potential employee
"K!" - small company