You've sourced, phone screened, and interviewed a dozen candidates. There's a handful your team like and you 
think they'd be a great fit, but you've still got to sell them on your company. One of the trickiest parts of landing the elusive engineering hire can be adequately demonstrating the ins and outs of your organization's development process. Besides the technical nature of these processes, you may not even be privy to how your company's way of doing things shook out. Enter your company engineering blog.
Many companies are launching engineering-specific blogs where their developers write in great detail about what they're building, how they built it, and the challenges they faced along the way. In addition to displaying the development process, it's a great window into the types of projects candidates can expect to be working on once they've signed up. Below are a handful of companies who have put their engineering blogs to work in the recruitment war effort.
AirBnB Nerds
The self-deprecating name notwithstanding, AirBnB's engineering blog is a brilliant recruitment tool. In addition to in-depth looks into projects, there are more cultural pieces breaking down what it's like to work for a specific team. Another piece on the blog covers a topic unique to AirBnB -- that of establishing trust and mitigating risk in the letting-people-live-in-your-house world. A great way to sell talent is to show them what they can do at your company that they can't do anywhere else, and the Risk Mitigation piece is a perfect example.
Code as Craft
Etsy's engineering blog is particularly illuminating into life at the online craft boutique. The most recent post Building a Better Build, not only goes into the process of switching build tools, but also into the rationalization behind the switch. This provides a glimpse into the internal discussions and decision-making process, something that you'll never get a sense of from a careers page and a couple interviews.
Two Birds, One Stripe
Because of the specific audience the fine folks as developer-friendly payments app Stripe are trying to reach, their company blog is essentially an engineering blog. Posts here discuss in great detail the payments industry as a whole (an exploding area, on the minds of any engaged engineer) as well as the specific challenges they face at Stripe. If you frequent HackerNews, you've no doubt happened upon a Stripe blog post on the front page, which is a fairly accurate barometer of legitimacy and utility in the engineering world.
Engineering at Quora
The Q&A site's engineering blog might as well be in Chinese for all the sense it makes to me. Here, publishers go into depth about all parts of the implementation process, including how to set up specific processes, why they're important to the product, and how specifically it's used to solve problems at the company. There's something here for engineers of all types, as there's everything from the complete rebuild of the iPhone app, web server architecture, and much much more.
If you can successfully pull off an engineering blog like the companies above, you'll build a channel to engage and pique the interest of engineers in a brand new way. You'll be able to demonstrate what's unique about your company, as well as provide a window into technical internal processes. If done right, this can be a huge source of inbound applications for the hardest-to-find hires.
What are your experiences with engineering blogs? How are they best executed? Leave a comment or tweet @EnteloRob!
