The discrepancy between the demand and supply of talented developers and a competitive market scenario has given rise to a talent war. As more and more businesses continue to look forward to building their own tech teams, the demand for talented software developers is at an all-time high.
The situation becomes dire when you are looking to hire developers for a startup. Without access to finances and resources available to established enterprises, the struggle for bidding for skilled technical talent is real.
The challenge of sourcing and hiring the right technical resources for your business becomes even more critical when you consider the fact that the majority of the talent is passive in nature, are already employed and aren’t actively looking out for jobs.
Despite the apparent scarcity, the right talent for hire is out there. You just have to come up with the right strategy for sourcing and hiring them. According to Stack Overflow’s Global Developer Hiring Landscape report, 90 percent of the developers are employed on at least a part-time basis, 75 percent are open to hearing about new job opportunities.
Since a majority of this passive talent pool isn’t out there on the job boards looking for job opportunities, knowing where to reach out to them is the key to successfully hiring them.
Where should sourcing developers?
Traditional hiring methods aren’t really effective when sourcing and hiring tech talent. Understanding the developer mindset and following the recruitment trends is important for you to be able to engage with them and convince them to come on board.
The key to making valuable connections is to be where the talent is.
1. Developer meetups and Conferences
The development landscape is constantly changing so the developers need to constantly hone their existing skills and learn new ones to stay on top of their game.
Developer meetups and tech conferences are a great place not only for being updated on the technical front but are also the perfect ground for networking. You may not be able to comprehend what’s being discussed (unless you are a tech pro yourself) but you would definitely be able to forge the right connections.
Face-to-face networking has its benefits but it only pays off when done smartly. If you approach networking like a regular sales pitch, you are going to drive away prospective employees. Don’t be too pushy.
Focus on engaging talent with conversation instead. Show them what you do and why you are passionate about it. Make the conversation two-way and invite their questions. Elaborate on how they can make a difference at your firm and what benefits are entailed. Your pitch has to be curated for every individual to make sure that your efforts yield results.
2. GitHub
With over 31 million developers registered on it, the world’s largest code hosting platform is a tech recruiter’s dream and arguably one of the best places to source the right talent. You can get a ton of relevant information about the potential candidate by going through the developer’s GitHub profile.
You can easily shortlist the candidates based on your preferences and requirements. Once you have done that, you need to go through the developer’s repositories to get an idea about their previous work. This acts as a good conversation starter and also helps you to filter out the candidates that you think won’t fit the bill.
The candidates can be filtered based on their skills and languages they code in, their location, and the number of followers. As a rule of thumb, the greater the number of followers, the more respected that developer is within the community (and more difficult it is to hire them)
Once you have established that the developer is the right fit for you, you can go ahead to convince the developer why you are the right fit for him/her. The quality candidates are constantly being approached by recruiters on GitHub so you have a curate a pitch that lets you stand out from the rest of the crowd.
3. Stack Overflow
Stack overflow is a technical Q&A website that is a popular developer haunt. Technical resources use it to not only get their queries resolved but also to give back to the community and share their knowledge. The questions are tagged with the programming language making it easy for you to navigate to the wider talent pool.
Stack Overflow also has a specific tool for facilitating recruitment called Stack Overflow Talent. You can post job listings, search for relevant candidates and even set up your company page to showcase your brand. In case you don’t have the financial resources to opt for the premium features, you can also purchase individual job slots.
If your budget doesn’t even allow that, you can still connect with the relevant talent and lay the foundation of building a relationship with them. You can post specific questions pertaining to your application and reach the relevant candidates based on that.
4. Employee referrals
Employee referral programs are possibly the most underrated platform for hiring developers for your company. Hiring tech resources using the referrals of existing employees is arguably the most cost-effective method of hiring quality talent. It reduces the overall time to hire while boosting the quality of resources hired at the same time.
Hiring through the traditional inbound recruiting can be time-consuming and has an inherent risk associated with them. In referral hiring, you ensure that the candidates that you source are pre-vetted and have a quality of trustworthiness associated with them.
It has also been observed that employee referrals reduce the overall turnover rate of the organization. Employees that join as a result of referral programs are less likely to quit and have higher retention rates.
The key hiring quality resources is strategically implementing the referral program. The access to information regarding the open positions needs to be present throughout the company. Organization’s newsletters, both online as well as physical are a great way of communicating the positions that are open and inviting referrals.
The referrals shouldn’t be guided by the promise of incentives. An employee that is motivated merely by the amount of referral bonus he would receive won’t pay attention to the quality of hire or culture fit. The focus instead should be on providing a stellar work environment that propels the existing employees to share exciting opportunities with relevant contacts.
Summing up
The tech talent that you are searching for is out there. Great software developers are keen on working on great technologies, to create great products for great companies alongside great teams. You just have to find them, connect with them and convince them that you are the right match for them.
Sourcing talent is just one half of the journey. Hiring them and retaining them on a long term basis, despite the current rise in the gig economy is the key to the development of successful applications.