This is part five in a series on Engineering team growth.
Before you can hire or even interview, you need to find candidates. How this happens changes with the market, the size of your company, and many other factors down to time of year. It’s best to have a variety of techniques at your disposal.
Referrals
In many ways, referrals are the best way to hire: they are more likely to pass the interview process and tend to work out well when hired. Referrals are fantastic when you can use them. They are especially useful for early stage companies that don’t have deep pockets for recruiters, or time to sift through thousands of resumes.
Because they tend to work out so well, some companies offer referral bonuses, which is often less expensive than other recruiting tactics.
The major downside to referrals is they tend to lead to less diverse teams. I’ve also seen companies hire less qualified candidates because they were referrals who weren’t given as rigorous an interview process. There are also some legal issues you should be aware of if you are offering referral bonuses.
Advertising
There are a million job forums out there, LinkedIn being the 500 pound gorilla. You can post jobs on these forums and expect to get a million responses. In my experience, it’s too much to sift through and you might achieve better results from niche sites that cater to developers. I once got a great job from stack overflow, which, sadly, no longer has recruiting pages, but Wellfound and Welcome to the Jungle are active.
Recruiting
Hiring a recruiting company is costly (usually 1 month’s pay), but it can be worthwhile. Alternatively, some companies have an in-house recruiter. Recruiters get a bad rap because many of them rely on techniques that are little better than spamming, but as long as you go with a high-quality, reputable recruiter they can achieve fantastic results.
Recruiters usually start with your JD, have a discussion with your team about the role to make sure they understand it, and get to work. Once they find a few potential candidates, they should show you their resumes or linkedin profiles to get your feedback. This helps make sure they understand what you are looking for and finding the right people.
Direct outreach
Nothing beats having the CTO, VP of Engineering, or hiring manager reach out to a candidate they found searching LinkedIn directly. This might feel spammy, but having been on both sides of it, I don’t think it is. At worst, you might get ignored, and at best you’ve found someone who’s likely a good fit and gotten them interested in your company. Often it lands in the middle where someone isn’t interested at the moment, but they might stay in touch, so it’s a good way to expand your network.
Posting in forums, job fairs etc.
There are a lot of other things you can do, like sponsor job fairs or hackathons. My experience in general is that you don’t get the best applicants this way and it’s not worth the time in and of itself, but if you are hiring a lot of people, or you value the good will and visibility this can create for your brand it might be worth it. Existing employees often enjoy attending hackathons as sponsors, so it can be a morale booster as well.
One thing I have had good luck with is posting jobs on niche sites and mailing lists, especially ones that might increase the diversity of your applicant pool. Hire more women in tech has some great resources.
