Recruiting the best developers is often a crucial step in the growth of companies, whether they are specialized in Tech or not. These software engineers have been among the most sought-after profiles on the job market for several decades. Attracting and retaining skilled coders is a competitive advantage in developing solutions that will gain market share. But with IT skills in short supply, how do you recruit the best developers? What techniques should you use? How can you optimize your recruitment process?
Attract the best developers with inbound recruiting
Toattract the best developers, you need to structure your recruitment process.
Inbound and outbound recruiting are the two ways to attract, hire and retain talent.
Inbound recruiting focuses on building a strong employer brand that will make the best people want to join you. Outbound recruiting consists of identifying and finding the profiles you need.
Adapt your corporate culture
The corporate culture is a set of values and references shared within a company and which have developed throughout its history (Maurice Thévenet).
Company culture is what makes your organization unique. How is being an employee at your company different from your competitors, regardless of the position you hold?
Form a cross-functional working group, then ask everyone to answer the following questions:
- What are the company's values?
- What are the specific rituals of your organization?
- What is the history of the company?
- Why does the company exist?
- What is the objective it seeks to achieve?
- What is his management style?
- What is his vision?
Once you've completed this assessment, it's time to ask yourself if this culture is appropriate for developers. To do that, you need to get a handle on their expectations. Most developers are looking for :
- From autonomy
- Inspiring projects
- A technically legitimate management
- The possibility of training and development
- An up-to-date technical stack
In terms of company culture, this means that you need to appoint developers as team leaders and CTOs. Avoid micromanaging and adopt an organization that gives teams a lot of autonomy.
Listen to your developers regularly. This means more frequent individual meetings than the annual meeting. If your products do not have a sufficient development pace, consider giving your employees time for personal projects or taking initiatives in the framework of sandbox projects.
Foster collaboration and communication through cross-functional projects and knowledge sharing. Keep your hardware and software up to date and be prepared to invest in maintaining your IT assets.
Listening to your employees and having an open and ambitious culture will allow you to retain your developers.
Communicate on your employer brand
Your employer brand is the image that you give of your company to outsiders. It is the mixture of your HR communication and the actions of your employees and managers. It is therefore both chosen and experienced.
It must therefore be in line with your corporate culture, otherwise you risk creating a dissonant and inconsistent image.
Your employer brand is built on four pillars:
- Your HR marketing
- Your brand name
- Your current employees
- Your former employees
Your HR marketing is the set of communication actions that you will put in place to highlight the fact that you work at your company. You can use a variety of media: career pages, job ads, social networks, trade shows and events, etc.
Your brand name helps build your employer brand. A popular product with high awareness will give you an advantage. On the other hand, a complex, unpopular or low-profile product will make your job more difficult.
Your current employees are your best ambassadors and your former employees are your best advocates when it comes to defending your employer brand. In the age of social networking, authenticity is a sought-after value.
While "VU on TV" was a guarantee of quality in the 90s, candidates and consumers are looking for some truth today. You'll get more results communicating images taken by a simple smartphone than with studio lighting. It's time for no filter and #truth.
Develop employee advocacy.
Employee advocacy is a virtuous circle where each step enriches and enhances the next: a good corporate culture guarantees you former employees who are"ambassadors" of your employer brand, which in turn attracts good candidates who, if they are well recruited, will be happy employees who will participate in building and maintaining your corporate culture.
As we saw in a previous article, employer branding is based on four pillars of content.
They involve employees, HR teams and managers. Employer branding must be a collective effort in which HR and marketing departments are the conductors.
In order to produce interesting content for developers, constantly monitor the :
- Stack Overflow
- Github
Start with your development teams. Create a culture of openness, internal communication, feedback, and the right to make mistakes.
Developers will be attracted by what they hear about you through word of mouth.
Organize events for developers
Before you organize these events yourself, you can start by allowing and encouraging your developers to participate in existing ones.
There is no shortage of developer conferences: trade shows, conferences, hackathons, etc. These events often have a theme:
- A computer language(Symfony, JavasScript with the JS World Conference)
- A theme (cybersecurity with IT & CyberSecurity Meetings, Big Data, Cloud, Hypercomputing, digital with Web2day, developers)
- A Tech specificity (the architecture of the Duck Conf information systems)
- A challenge (hackathon)
Developers are part of those technical professions where it is still quite difficult to discuss their job. Laymen don't understand what they do and technologies evolve very quickly.
Having the opportunity to meet with your peers is an exceptional opportunity.
If you take the plunge and create an event for developers, you're bound to have participants. Offering the chance to attend will help you build loyalty among your employees.
Find and recruit the best developers with outbound recruiting
Get the developers where they are
Developers are often active online in the communities we mentioned above:
You can also consult one of the 100 French-speaking communities talking about Tech.
Before approaching a developer, take the time to personalize your approach. Call them by their last name (or first name, depending on usage), make sure they have the profile and experience level you're looking for, and refer to a project they've worked on.
They receive several messages each week, so yours should stand out from the first few lines.
How to find developers on Github
Follow these four steps:
- Create an account
- Lancez une recherche Utilisez les 3 critères : followers, language, location Par exemple : language:javascript location:paris followers:<40
- Filter by user By default Github presents search results by Repositories.
- Find the email address Once you have found the profile you are interested in, replace XXXX with its Github nickname: https: //api.github.com/users/XXXX/events/public
Github members are ranked according to their activity. Generally, those who have contributed the most are the most sought after and often considered the best. They will often appear at the top of your search. So chances are they will also be the most contacted by other recruiters. Don't hesitate to contact developers who have little activity.
Activate your network and co-optation
If your employer brand is strong and your company culture appealing, you'll have a much better chance of convincing your employees to advise their network to join you.
Participation in external events is also an important lever to develop this network. Don't wait until you need to recruit to network.
We didn't mention it, but job fairs are also a good way to get known. You have to dare to be proactive and go and talk to the other booths. These fairs attract a lot of young people, so it will be difficult to find experienced profiles through them. On the other hand, you will be able to develop your professional network with other professionals present.
Optimize your recruitment process for developers
Developers often complain about unsuitable recruitment processes: technical tests that are not directly related to the skills of the position, length of the process, lack of visibility, insufficient salaries, poor presentation of technical projects, lack of training of recruiters who do not understand what they are doing, etc.
The quality of your recruitment can help you differentiate yourself.
Offer salaries in line with the market
The question of salary is often a problem for internal recruiters. While external providers address the subject at the beginning of the recruitment process (to avoid wasting time), companies do not always dare to do so.
There are several ways to find out what salaries are being paid. We recommend that you cross-reference sources of information to stay current. You can consult these different sources:
- Specialized recruitment consultants
- The candidates
- Compensation studies
- Benchmark tools such as Figures
You probably have HR requirements when you set the compensation for a new developer: salary scale, team members' salaries, etc. In any case, be transparent
with the candidate. Address the issue as early as possible in the recruitment process. We recommend that you do this after you have explained the position and its tasks in detail, before the first interview.
If you can, indicate it on the job ad. You will get more targeted applications. And if you are open to a junior or experienced profile, we recommend that you publish two different ads.
Speak the same language as the developers
Speaking the same language as the developers starts with understanding their interests and concerns when evaluating a position.
You think you'll interest them with an innovative product? But if you accumulate technical debt, you're going to turn some people off. Code quality is essential for a developer. So is access to information and knowledge sharing within the company. Create a central wiki where everyone can participate, exchange, get information, etc.
In order to have a relevant HR communication, you need to include technical managers in the recruitment process from the very beginning of the need. But it doesn't stop there. Ask them to write the materials: job ad, social media posts, career site, etc.
The value of a job is more than just a list of tasks. There are subtleties that can make or break the best candidates. Take the example of bug management. Developers need to be able to focus, but customers also need support. Balancing the management of trouble tickets and new release development is crucial to avoid too many interruptions.
Propose coherent technical tests
We often read on developer forums about experiences with tests taken during a recruitment process. The developer often thinks that part of their skill set is to Google the answer, while the company is looking to evaluate their thinking skills.
Sometimes it's hard to get the slider right. We need to get the lesser ones out of the process, but we also shouldn't insult the better ones who are scared off by the simplicity of some tests.
Relevance is also often questioned. Good practice is to test what is as close as possible to the skills that will be used by the developer if hired.
It is important to explain the process and purpose of the test.
It is also important not to make a test that is too long. Too often we read developers complaining about spending half a day for a company that didn't even bother to call them back.
If you want to attract and recruit the best developers, start by getting to know them. Listen to them, involve managers and technical staff who will know how to talk to them and assess their skills.
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