[LRUG] Where would you look for a job or next hire?

Fri May 24 01:15:49 PDT 2013

This may help?? I put it together a few weeks ago

How to find good Web Developers

10 Tips on hiring the best Talent

Hiring Full time Developers is Hard. Here’s why:

The demand is high; you will almost always come up against other agencies on every hire these days. The contractor market is booming and most good devs can stroll into London on a £350 day rate. Lastly, vetting and testing candidates coding skills is difficult, furthermore, they may have good programming skills but may be totally wrong for your company culture.

I’ve hired full time developers including Ruby, PHP, .NET and Drupal for Digital Agencies since 2007. I have probably interviewed over 400 developers and probably found jobs for about 50 Developers total! Here is what I have learnt through the years

1)     Do NOT use job boards like Monster, Jobsite & Reed. Use tools like Twitter & LinkedIn to engage with targeted, passive and less contacted Job Seekers.  

2)     Research networking events and take yourself to go and meet these people – There are regular meet-up groups and networking events relevant to certain technologies, for example there is LRUG http://lrug.org/ where London’s Ruby community come together once a month to talk, socialize, and discuss opportunities etc. It’s a great place to meet potential employees and friends for the future.

3)     Poach?? Keep your channels of communication open so that good developers who are unhappy in their job can approach you – Unbeknown to you there are hundreds of talented developers unhappy in their current day job!!  

4)     Get them early – Bring Grads in through University schemes – spend some time and money bringing them up to speed and working how you see fit.

5)     DO NOT PANIC HIRE – This is pretty self explanatory – But it never works out and always comes back to bite you in Ass!!

6)     Do not just look for key words and pick the first person that looks great on paper

7)     Use your site to demonstrate what a cool company you are to work for… First you have to make the business a genuinely fun, vibrant and rewarding atmosphere. People will approach direct wanting to work for you.

8)     Invest in sending your devs to events and seminars that they want to attend. Whether you like it or not these guys are all talking to each other and word of mouth spreads like wildfire.

9)     A university degree is NOT important. Some of the best developers I have hired did not study Computer Science at all!

10)  Build, Network, Socialize and keep your network organized. From one hiring round to another – Keep candidates on file and build a database of people you can call on in the future. I have a pool of candidates that I can mail or call on whenever a requirement comes in. But make sure you are above all a nice person who genuinely wants to help and offer a great opportunity. People buy from people and if you are an asshole – You DO NOT stand a chance (majority of recruiters :)

This guide (in my opinion) is pretty much common sense but you will be astonished at how much competition there is for developers in general. Follow these steps and you are ahead of the game.  

Best Of Luck

--  

Arash Peyami Head Of Talent

Rawnet Ltd (http://www.rawnet.com) | T: 01344 266 208 Follow: @ArashPeyami (https://twitter.com/ArashPeyami)

On Friday, 24 May 2013 at 09:04, Paul Robinson wrote:

> On 23 May 2013, at 21:17, Agustin Viñao <agustinvinao at gmail.com (mailto:agustinvinao at gmail.com)> wrote:
>  
> > One thing I see in almost all jobs sites or ads is that anyone can be a sponsor, and each day I see more and more jobs offers without people to apply locally.
>  
>  
> Legally, you're right, anybody can be a sponsor.
>  
> But as somebody who has seen the process up close a couple of times now, I wouldn't recommend it unless you have quite a lot of resource on hand for dealing with it.
>  
> It just isn't worth the effort 90%+ of the time - you end up putting the same amount of effort in as you would if you were trying to recruit somebody who has tenure at MIT...
>  
> I'd also suggest that the whole "you need to work on-site" culture has been taking some knocks for a few years now, and I think in 3-4 years the majority of development will be telecommute.  
>  
> It's better for everybody, and instead of having to get a visa to work in the EU which takes an age, companies can use the money they're saving on offices and fly people in every 8-12 weeks to have 2-3 days of focused creative team meetings, before everybody gets back to work.
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>  
>  

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