How to Win Engineers and Influence People

August 21, 2012 at 3:09 AM by John McGrath

An engineer's perspective on sourcing engineers.
Caught!At best, engineers view recruiters as a necessary evil. At worst they consider them leeches, sucking cash from hapless clients while adding little value. As with so many troubled relationships, miscommunication is a big part of the problem. Here are some tips to help you woo engineers, from someone who's been on the receiving end of many, many pitches.

But first, let's take a long, hard look in the mirror.

Best thing you can do to help yourself? Source good jobs. You can be the very model of charm and seduction, but if you steer people to jobs offering below-market wages for drudge work, you will drive away good candidates, both for the job in question and any future opportunities. Formulated another way, send appropriate jobs to the appropriate people--'A' listers should be sourced for jobs corresponding to their skills and experience. Candidates with less of either might be sourced for entry level or less-senior positions. But ideally, if you can avoid sourcing shit jobs, or working for shit clients, you should. It's not in your long-term best interests to be a body shop.

Now, those communication tips.

· Be polite. Given how difficult it is to attract top engineers, it's remarkable how many recruiters are flat-out rude. I can hear my mother's voice insisting you should be polite to everyone--and of course you should. But really, when you're trying to get the attention of someone where you stand to gain tens of thousands of dollars for successfully placing them? Be polite.

· Know what you're recruiting for. You do not have to be an engineer. Pretending to understand stuff you don't will backfire. But understand what categories different technologies belong to. Ruby is a language. Rails is not--it's a programming framework which is written in Ruby. Objective-C is the primary language for writing iPhone apps. To get a basic grasp of tech terms, see Skillcrush.com. You don't have to know, or pretend to know, the details of any of these. But confuse what they fundamentally are and your outreach is likely to get ignored. Skimming the first paragraph or two of the Wikipedia article for a given technology can help orient you.

A correlative is that it helps to have an inkling of the cultures surrounding different technologies. Java and C# are used by many larger companies. Python and Ruby are popular with startups. Node.js, Scala, and MongoDB are all technologies (used for very different things!) that have recently gained in popularity, and are of interest to those who like to stay current.

· Be brief. We all suffer from email overload, and an unsolicited email from someone I don't know should quickly get to the point. If a recruiting email is longer than 3 paragraphs I'll delete it without even reading the first sentence.

· Include key facts. Brief is good, but coy is bad. If you don't tell me the name of the company you're recruiting for I'll delete your email and probably mark it as spam. Include the job title and the technologies involved. You get huge bonus points for including a salary range. If we're not a good match, it's in both our interests to discover that immediately. Let's not waste each other's time.

· Treat candidates as unique and valuable, and treat the jobs you're hawking the same way. I was once very aggressively recruited for a short-term contract gig to write software for the Georgia Department of Corrections in rural Georgia, at about half my usual rate. The job required relocation; I lived in New York City at the time. It would be hard to write a job description to which I'd be less attracted, and they didn't try very hard--it sounded about as appealing as being an inmate. Years later I had the opportunity to drive through rural Georgia, and was taken by how beautiful parts of it are. I had translated the recruiter’s email as "get underpaid, in jail." A better copywriter could have had me thinking "civic-minded work in a bucolic country setting!" I would have at least glanced up at that.

· Don't push. If someone contacts me with a reasonable inquiry, and then politely backs off when I tell them I'm not interested, there's a chance I'll pay attention if they check in the following year and my situation has changed.

I get that engineers of a certain profile tend to be prima donnas, and how unattractive this is, given that so many skilled people are struggling to find employment. But for many reasons, this is the shape of the supply-demand curve at the moment. It's also why the field of tech recruiting exists: if engineers grew on trees, employers would post to job boards and be done. But those days are long gone, and show no signs of returning. Proactive recruiting is how the best candidates are discovered, and it's in all of our interests to cultivate an etiquette around that.

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