What Roles/Skills Do You Struggle to Hire For?

So the biggest problem I had was hiring my first employee. I needed help with a lot of things -- development, graphic design, web design, sales, accounting, product management, etc.

But the people looking for jobs are looking for a very specific role. Eg. they want a job as a developer, or as a graphic designer, and it's kinda hard to find someone who can do more than just one thing. But as a small company I don't really have enough work for a full time employee who does just one thing.

Most of the people I met who are good at more than one thing had their own business or startup and weren't looking for a job.

Honestly it's not technical things that are hard to hire for its finding engineers who show initiative and can communicate well with stakeholders. Its like finding gold especially now in remote working.

For us, I would say in the UK, all are hard to hire.

The main background issue is a lack of supply if you are not in a place to hire worldwide remote (which many companies are not).

As a small company, doing the communications required for doing recruitment all in-house, as well as getting your job listings out to where people will find them is hard. However, using Recruiters is expensive and they have less ability to do quality filtering of applicants, especially since they are driven by commission more than quality so I think they would rather get us to interview someone who isn't a great match "just in case".

Waiting for hiring managers to jump in with their tales of woe, about how nobody is able to meet their 'hiring bar' aka 5 rounds of leetcode hard grilling.

A founder-mentality developer. A great developer who's willing to take a pay cut for a larger amount of equity. Competition is fierce, and we're not in crypto :'(

Architects for sure. We permanently have open positions and it is impossible to find qualified candidates.

Open-minded Rails developers with strong SQL skills (ideally Postgres).

By open-minded I refer to the ability to evaluate and challenge everything that "the community does this", evaluate it in the context of a team/company and suggest the best approach given the specific team conditions, without the presumption that the Rails community is right by default fir every usecase in the world.

Bonus points if the person is interested in software design and even system architecture.

People with broad technical knowledge ( from system programming / asm to Javascript/browser stuff, networking, algorithms, etc). And if they don't know everything ( which is ok), I expect them to want to learn what they don't know. It's also ok if they're not experts everywhere (broad vs deep) , but having a good understanding of how software systems from first principes makes solving lots of problems much easier. It also allows them to help other people.

These people are invaluable, but are very hard to come by.

Blue Team positions, junior or senior. There’s no shortage of decent penetration testers but when it comes to the other side, whether it’s incident response, detection engineering, security operations, etc it’s been very difficult.

I’m talking months to find someone. Many candidates apply and look good on paper but turn out to just lie and made us waste many hours of interviews.

As for the why, I suspect one of the following:

- good candidates already have a job they love

- people are not willing to relocate (job is remote but inside one of the countries we are operating in, which is 80)

- there is simply not enough people in the field, which goes back to my first point

I've found architects to be extremely hard to find (both software and security). A good architect needs both wide technical experience (even if they have specialities) and great communication and documentation skills. Attention to detail and also big picture thinking.

It's not that hard to find architects, but it's insanely hard to find good ones. Although, that probably applies to pretty much any role.

Windows Kernel devs... They seem to be a rare breed

We'd love to hire a few senior java devs, especially folks who want to go soup-to-nuts (front to back end). We were trying to hire in Denver, CO, USA, but eventually expanded to all of the USA because we weren't getting the candidates we needed.

$CURJOB has a downloadable product, which is a different world than the SaaS jobs that are prevalent these days.

Security roles are really hard.

Assessor's that aren't just tool operators. Security architects that can threat model and deliver requirements, in the design phase. Anyone that has intersectional experience between security and external compliance is also a problem.

Engineering in APAC. India has become a competitive market, much of Asia has been capitalized by financial industry players and Australia has gone to the FAANGs. As a Us based startup with not shallow pockets, we still can't compete.

Tech co-founder for XR simulation project. I am looking for someone with 3D graphics/Virtual Reality/games experience on Android platform who will be comfortable with NDK and Godot engine.

Devops/cloud engineers that can do both.

Sr Frontend Engineer that can solve for complex logic as well as make things look good.

CSS developer!

Because it's hard to master the CSS systematically.

good front-end engineer that can do 2 things:

- ui - logic

good devops engineer that can do 2 things:

- dev - ops

Clojurists.