How to hire software developers

Salaries are usually a business’s top expense, and a bad hire can cause all kinds of problems, financially and culturally. In some places, getting rid of someone who just isn’t working out can be a challenge. Add in laws, rules, and regulations surrounding human resources issues, and you have a concoction that is fraught with peril. 

And of course, you have to find good people to succeed, right? Yikes!

Hiring software developers can be especially difficult. First, the people who normally write job advertisements and screen people aren’t well-versed in knowing what makes a good developer. Developers aren’t notoriously gregarious, so first impressions can be deceiving. Just getting them interested in your open position requires a good understanding of who developers are and what they want.

Expect top developers to interview you just as hard as you interview them. Good developers will want to see that you are doing things the right way, including a good version control system and excellent CI/CD processes. You’ll only attract top-tier developers if your organization is built to support them. That’s the first order of business.

Keep it real

Developers are notoriously difficult to market to, and when you are looking to hire a developer, you are marketing your company to them. When doing so, it is as important to know what not to do as it is to know the right things to do. 

For the love of dependency injection, skip the use of slogans like “hiring rock star developers” and “looking for code ninjas.” Avoid phrases such as “fast-paced environment” (“We’ll burn you out in a year!”) or “mature company with a startup mentality” (only startups have startup mentalities). Clichés turn people off. That fluffy pabulum is a dead giveaway that you aren’t a serious development organization.

In short, avoid the marketing spiel. Instead, just tell it like it is. Give a straightforward description of the technology your company uses, the methodologies involved, and the product that the hiree will work on. Developers like perks as much as anyone, but what they really are looking for is challenging work and an opportunity to grow in their career. They want the ability to work on their own and develop their skills.

As for those perks, the ability to work remotely is certainly the most valuable perk of all. Since the Covid pandemic, developers have come to value working where they want. Telling them they must come into an office will not endear you to a candidate. The developers you want to hire probably don’t live within driving distance of your office anyway. 

To find the right people, you have to recruit nationwide—which means offering remote work. These days, developers expect it. If you don’t offer it, they’ll assume you’re extremely controlling and not up to it technically.

Where to look

The developers you want are hard to find, so where you go looking makes a big difference. The really valuable developers already have jobs, so they aren’t spending time perusing the normal job boards looking for work. The reality is that to find the very best, you are going to have to entice them away from their current situation. That means making your job known in unconventional places like the monthly “Who is hiring” post on Hacker News or manually tracking them down on LinkedIn. 

If you are serious about hiring the best, you almost certainly will have to engage a recruiter. They know how to find the best people, particularly people who are only passively searching for a job. Many top developers who are looking for a change will not apply for jobs but merely make themselves available to a number of recruiters who will match them with clients actively looking for new people. You’ll never find these folks without a recruiter.

Respect their time, and don’t have a seven-stage recruiting process. Do an initial screen, a technical interview, and then a final interview with the team that they’ll be working with.  Avoid hurdles like personality tests and drug tests that include marijuana.

If you give candidates a take-home technical exercise, accept and expect that they will use AI to solve the problem. Shoot, encourage them to do so, because that is what they’ll be doing on the job anyway, right? Measure not the method used to arrive at the result, but the ability to recognize good, clean code. You can—and should —ask the candidate to explain their code if you are concerned about it.

I’m not a big fan of whiteboard coding exercises. Many people don’t perform well under direct pressure, and “thinking on your feet” is not a skill you should be interviewing for. In the real world, developers have the time they need to ponder over a problem. You don’t want them writing code off the cuff, so why would you use that as a measure for hiring someone?

If you build it

One final thought: First impressions are important. I can generally tell if someone will be a hard no in the first five minutes. Usually it takes a complete interview cycle to get to a yes. That said, there have been times when I knew was going to make an offer after five minutes. Don’t discount that initial assessment.

Hiring well isn’t just about avoiding bad fits. It’s about building the kind of place great developers want to be. That means clarity, respect, good tools, less fluff, and more solid fundamentals. Do that, and you won’t need to beg for talent—they’ll come to you.