Here's Exactly How Developers Want to Be Recruited

April 30, 2015 at 2:13 PM by Rob Stevenson

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Tech talent are a tricky bunch. Their skillset can be hard to grasp given a non-technical background, making it difficult to talk shop with them on a meaningful
level. Most of them aren't actively looking for jobs and are happy at their current role. And the worst part is that a handful of lazy people are making the truly great recruiters -- that's you, dear reader -- look bad with their awful spam messaging. As Recruiters, you can strategize all you want about the best way to engage with Developers. But at the end of the day, what better way to learn how to recruit Developers than straight from the horse's mouth, or in this case, straight from the Developer's fingers?

That's what I did when I took to HackerNews, an active, Reddit-like site aggregator explicity for tech news whose userbase is the technical talent listed above. I asked them how they'd prefer to be recruited given the site's general distate for talent professionals, and they were more than happy to indulge my curiosity. Here's what I learned.

User Rubiquity chimed in with the following:


For me it's all about not wasting my time, not because I'm a big deal, because I'm not, but because this happened frequently before I went freelance. There are so many non-starters when it comes to jobs, why do companies insist on leaving these out until the very end?

Warning: the content below is slightly dramatic but a pretty fair representation of this game.

1) Tell me the salary range up front.
2) Tell me whether you're down with remote up front.

Great, we got past 1 & 2. Let's move on:

3) Let's talk about best practices. These are important to me because it makes my life at work pleasant.
4) Great, show me proof of these best practices you talk about. See, I knew you were a dirty liar. You're not doing <best practice> because Visionary/CEO/Financier/Business person that is guaranteed to make my life a living hell doesn't see the value in it.

If we make it past 3 and 4 (rare), we're onto salary negotiation!

5) Your idea is never exciting enough to where I'll want to do it for less than my market value.
6) Why yes, I do love programming. No, I won't work for less just because I love doing it.

Some great insight here. First, the reminder to make sure you're on the same page in terms of comp at a relatively early stage. This ensures you don't get all the way through the interview process only to learn that you're way off on salary expectations, and have effectively wasted everyone's time.

Next, Rubiquity requires some explicit explanation of office culture and company practices. They make it clear that an example of a company virtue is not enough, but rather how it works in practice so that you can prove that's actually what things are like at your organization. There's an understandable temptation to be overwhelmingly positive at this stage, but it behooves you to be honest, because employee churn is worse than candidate churn.

User Jerven echoed a familiar sentiment about effective messaging:

Thoughtful personal customized with understanding both "me" and your client while respecting everyone's time. It is not magic it's time consuming work.

Jerven reiterates an oft-repeated (at least by me) messaging maxim. There's nothing worse than an obvious email template without a true understanding of who you're dealing with, so take the time to learn about your candidate or don't bother.

The next comment spawned an interesting conversation about how one engineer would prefer to be recruited by his future teammates.

MalcolmDiggs: I think a lot of recruiters fail to understand that many tech folks (like myself) simply don't want to work for the kind of company that would hire an outside recruiter, period. So...how do I want to be recruited? Only by actual employees of the company I'd be working for. No middle men.

whichdanAs an engineer involved with recruiting: how would I stumble across your profile/resume, and how much time do you expect engineers to spend clicking through LinkedIn profiles? Would it be a positive or negative sign to you if the company that's recruiting you is having engineers filter out candidates instead of writing code?

MalcolmDiggs: Personally I have a resume/profile on Careers.StackOverflow.com, Angellist, CodeEval, Github...etc.. I don't expect engineers to spend any time clicking through profiles though. That's exactly the point, if you're recruiting for a startup you can afford to do things that don't scale (like reaching out the authors of your favorite open source repos, meeting people at conferences and meetups etc). If you need soooo many engineers right now that you need to employ tactics like farming LinkedIn...then we're a bad match anyway. The point of my original comment was that some people (like me) prefer to be recruited in ways that don't scale because that lets us know that it's a certain kind of company (namely a small-scale startup that is hand-picking their team very carefully). And that's what appeals to me.

It makes sense why someone would prefer to be contacted by a future teammate. For one, they'd know immediately they're being approached by someone who speaks their language. Further, they'll feel hand-picked by someone who is looking not just to fill a role but build a team. At Entelo, each department blocks out an hour a week during which they source candidates, which helps our Recruiters build a pipeline as well as learn what an ideal candidate looks like to each team. If you can get some help from each team with sourcing and initial outreach, you can shift into a more facilitative role who gets the candidate in the office after you're sure they've had meaningful warm conversations with your team.

Next up is user s3b with a great description of how much information they want right off the bat:

I want a transparent process where I know in advance what I'm getting into. I'd like to know how much they're willing to pay (the range) and what exactly I would be expected to do - the role as well as the product I'd be working on. I'd also like to know about the interview process and how long after an interview I'd be told the result (preferably immediately). Also tell me about the sort of people I'll be working with - team size, roles, backgrounds etc. Once I have that information, it's easier for me to decide on whether to attend the interview or not.

Setting specific expectations and meeting them is a great way to provide a seamless candidate experience. Above, the talent wants to know that they're getting themselves into an interview process that's going to be efficient and worth their time.

If you want to see the full thread, you can check it out here. Be forewarned, not all the comments are as helpful and prescriptive as the ones above.

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