I work for a small-ish engineering firm on a small rock off the Norwegian coast.

The local labour market for engineers, technicians and developers is pretty much empty - as in, everybody with the skills required and the desire to live here already does.

Recruiting more often than not means sniping, or, if we're lucky - that someone has recently found a partner with desirable skills and coaxed them into moving up here.

Anyway, we've found that word of mouth is the most effective way; we simply let friends and associates, former colleagues and whatnot know that we're looking for X.

This is a hundred times more effective than LinkedIn for vetting candidates - people are quite unlikely to uncritically recommend someone when they will be reminded of their sell-in for years if it is a dud. (Much unlike LinkedIn endorsements...)

It turns out with friends&associates, friends&associates' friends&associates &c, you can cast a quite wide net - and also, the sell-in works better both ways; the candidates who do show up for interviews already have been told ours is a good place to be and are, more often than not, a good cultural fit.

(And, before someone asks - 'cultural fit' means 'Happy to work in a rather unstructured madhouse where the unofficial motto is 'We've never done that before, so we're probably quite good at it!') - we've assembled a motley crew from just about every nook and cranny of the planet, from Sri Lanka via Belarus to Argentina and Japan and lots inbetween. Oh, and the occasional Norwegian. All making world-class subsea equipment on a small islet way out in the boonies.

Do you not hire remotely from the entirety of the European Union? Would you consider hiring a web developer with 4 years of experience, of which 2.5 is backend and 1.5 is full stack (HTML, CSS, JS within a CMS)?

I am asking because that reflects my situation and I am having a difficult time interviewing with most people expecting 3+ year exclusively in frontend.

I have been trying to make a switch from backend to frontend development. I went from Backend Dev -> Fullstack Dev and I am currently trying to do the next step to -> Frontend Dev.

Would be nice to know how to approach this.

-We're at the other end of the stack, I'm afraid - Siemens S7 PLCs for the most part; whenever I code I basically write assembly code like it's 1979 - and it will never, ever be exposed to the web if I've got any say in the matter.

Ah well, you can use (allmost) all the web technologies completely offline and even interfacing with low level hardware.

So you could have javascript and html to power your devices, but you probably do not want to.

That we can, but we do not want to. :)

We basically sold our soul to SIMATIC, Siemens' automation ecosystem long ago.

While it does have its quirks (to put it charitably), it is utterly predictable; as a first-order approximation, the ridiculously underpowered, ridiculously overpriced hardware never fails. (Unless you exert undue influence with a blunt object or high voltage)

I've (recently) patched code on Siemens PLCs being made in West Germany, that is, before October 1990. They still go about doing their thing. That kind of reliability makes me willing to suffer quite a lot of quirks.

Hence, STL, Siemens' near-assembly experience, it is. Snippet below:

A "InData".Joystick.WinchHoistCmd

  JCN   lowr

L "WinchDrumDb".SpeedExpCmd

L "WinchDrumSetupDb".Winch.MaxJoystickSpeedCmd

*R

T "WinchDrumDb".SpeedCmd

JU end2

At least it has mnemonics!

Yeah, I have heard of them(I think my dad used them back then even in east germany) and they are probably right for what you are doing and I am not suggesting, you switch to javascript.

But in other newly developed hardware, it can actually make sense nowdays, to use javascript. Mainly because you can get an abundance of developers for it, but then probably the hard part is to weed out those, who can barely script some website, to those who have indeed the right skillset.

If you are looking for STL people, you probably get STL people.

No github then?

Hey, we're hiring frontend engineers remotely, feel free to reach out to my e-mail on my profile! :-)

Anything for apprentice? Would even take a customer support role. I'm a 30 dude from a third world country making a career switch and learning how to code.

Incidentally, to your tips on what you guys are doing to hire, I would add 'posting insightful commentary on Hacker News', ha — likely this post alone has gotten you a couple new interested folks.

That honestly sounds fantastic. I just accepted another job so I’m not looking now but I could easily imagine that this would be exactly the kind of thing (and place!) where I’d want to head a few years from now, and I think I would have a relevant profile (as an aerospace engineer with software skills and some exposure to embedded work and robotics). Would you mind dropping me an email (address in profile) with some more detail about the company?

Seeing your team from all over the world, are you guys still hiring? Taking apprentice?

Oh, they all arrived here as flotsam some way or other - through love or war, basically.

(The catch being that we currently do not have any remote employees and it is nigh on impossible to hire someone from outside the Schengen area unless they've already found another way to legally stay here. That usually means either being granted asylum or marrying someone, I'm afraid)

So, assuming I can get Schengen Visa from another country, is the process easier? I want to immigrate and Norway, Sweden, Finland are my top 3 destination. The thing is, getting visa there is harder. But if getting a Schengen visa would help (probably from France), I'm interested about the process to follow, can we have a chat?

At least for Sweden the process is pretty straightforward (at least at the moment). Once you have a job offer, the offering company usually hires some lawyer or company licensed (to fast track the visa within a week, a month at max).

Drop me some contact info, I can refer you. At least you can go through the process and check it out.

You can email me at ralinoro [at] outlook [dot] fr.

They're talking about changing it, but AFAIK, you can still get a pretty automatic visa for Sweden if an employer wants to hire you.

How is the view towards self taught in Sweden?

Legally, you just need a job offer. There are no degree requirements.

"Happy to work in a rather unstructured madhouse where the unofficial motto is 'We've never done that before, so we're probably quite good at it!'"

OTOH, some of us are at their happiest in this kind of environment!

Do you mind sharing the (rough) area? It sounds awesome :)

-Just a little north of the wall, at some 62N/6E.

Thank you for sharing!

Google returned these photos, which look both desolate and gorgeous: https://confluence.org/confluence.php?lat=62&lon=7

Particularly #5 here https://confluence.org/photo.php?visitid=6821&pic=5

Though in photo #6 that looks mountain fed, and she looks tough.

Never done any recruiting, but here something I have noticed in recruitment efforts.

Figure out what you really need and how "good" is defined.

Good is contextual. My past company spent a lot of time on system design interviewing. Here is the problem. We didn't build anything close to a complex system. We created demos to show off to clients as MVPs. So we left positions open for months until we found the perfect person and they didn't want to join/did not stay as they wouldn't actually use those skills.

Said past company also wanted "product minded people", something in my own background. Devs had no influence on the product there. Yet they waited for people like myself to come along.

A job before that leetcoded. Nobody currently there could pass the leetcode. The dev doing the interview had never even seen a tree in production at any company. We certainly didn't care internally as the database was so small and it was a Scrum team focused on shipping tickets. But we kept reposting the job and then had to eventually just take a candidate (if you could solve a tree leetcode, you would not work at this place).

'Figure out what you really need and how "good" is defined.'

That would be ideal, but as a candidate, have you ever really met a company that knew what they wanted?

No, but that is part of the reason every company is having so much difficulty right now.

I love this story.

I have plenty more like it. This isn't an exclusively software dev problem either. It is just that you can't get away with asking for everything when hiring devs.

Finance roles - programming experience required preferably c++. Draw out recruiting because feel that the experience the candidate had wasnt super top notch.

Day one; here is an excel spreadsheet - type in the new numbers every day please.

Where are the places that developers show up? On HN and Twitter. Do something to spread awareness of your company. It will be a long journey, but if you don't have $$$ to throw at a problem, you need to find alternatives:

- There's a monthly "Who is hiring" thread on HN every 1st day of a month.

- Create a technical blog. When it gets popular and people see that it's high quality, brand awareness will increase. It takes time but it can bring massive gains. Extreme example: Cloudflare. But there are many smaller nice blogs. If your blog is good, it will naturally come up when people google for things etc.

- Create an RSS feed for the blog and a Twitter account ${Foobar}Engineering that RTs your blog posts. Just make sure the blog and Twitter are high quality and rare, and not random filler content every day.

- Do something unexpected, like: TikTok or YouTube channel. There's one small company in Poland that has a YouTube channel with basically short fun programming sketches (2-3 min), and this YT channel became huge. Everyone in IT in Poland knows them (https://www.youtube.com/c/HRejterzy).

- Relax your requirements, and post job offers to good job boards. Are you fine with people working remotely? Or 4 days a week? Check stuff like https://remoteok.com/ https://4dayweek.io/ etc.

- Include approx. salary data in job offer. No one likes this dance of "do they want seniors at half my current rate?".

- Perhaps become a sponsor of some underinvested opensource repos? The repo owners will likely give you some visibility on their website and top of the repo README.

> No one likes this dance of "do they want seniors at half my current rate?".

This is the reason I don't even bother with permanent roles in startups anymore. Every time the budget ends up being disappointing and about half my current income.

Even worse when they approach me on a platform where they can see my profile & history and infer very well what I currently make and still proceed to pitch me their terrible role.

Haha, seriously, although to be fair to the startups, it occasionally works. I was getting really burned out at my last job (wasn't a FAANG, but had FAANG-level pay), and ended up joining a startup at ~half my current pay, but way less stress. I am so much happier now.

Also, thanks mostly to equity appreciation, I'm almost up to what my previous jobs starting pay was :-)

Also there's no point going through 3 weeks of interviews to get lowballed in the end. If they don't mention salary range by the first interview, I squeeze it out of them or turn the job down.

> Every time the budget ends up being disappointing and about half my current income.

Protip: on the very first call, say “My current salary is XY. A competing offer is in your budget?”

Protip2: XY doesn’t have to be your actual salary, use a number that is your desired floor to start the negotiation from.

I get the impression that in the long term and on average, people benefit more from being honest.

So how about just saying, "I'm currently only considering positions with salary XY. Is that in your budget?"

Often if I go job hunting, there's a 25%-250% increase in salary. The 250% is often some tiny startup in a developed nation, which comes with its own costs; no healthcare, dodgy contract, remote, etc. But the idea is that it's easy to just take -- or turn down, a range much higher than you make now.

We run a few developer-dedicated job boards with mandatory salary information (and our own approach to the Joel-Test):

- UK: https://devitjobs.uk

- US: https://devitjobs.us

- Germany: https://germantechjobs.de

The audience is growing steadily and the US and UK sites are free to post (but you have to provide the salary)

Looks like there's a typo in your US link, I believe it should be https://devitjobs.us/

Thanks, fixed!

Do developers show up on twitter?

Of the 100 or so professional software engineers and it pros I have worked closely with over the last decade, I think I know... 1 that used twitter. Maybe they follow engineering on twitter, maybe not. Twitter gets you, twitter people, not necessarily software engineers.

There are many people who passively use Twitter and don't follow / comment much. But I agree it's true, Twitter is massive time sink and many people rightfully avoid it. It's just one of places to look, and it attracts specific subset of devs.

Also: think about all the candidates you implicitly reject and others reject. They are an opportunity. Hire people that no one else wants (for wrong reasons).

Go to universities and hire motivated juniors. Offer paid internships etc.

Highly recommend to follow https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz

The vast majority of candidates are applying because they got bounced around and have to apply everywhere due to not being qualified. If you're a no-name firm paying merely around market rate you're not even going to see the high performers because they've already been snapped up by bigger or higher paying players.

I don't know a single person from my college days who I'd describe as a strong performer that would have taken a job from a random startup (i.e. no name recognition of founders or investors) for subpar pay. The people who ended up working at these no-name companies with subpar pay were almost always 1x or 0.5x programmers, whereas many of the people I knew who got A/A+ in OS and compiler classes were easily 10x programmers capable of building complex products from scratch.

Not saying we don't need 1x programmers but if you're a startup I think paying 3x salary for a 10x programmer is a much better deal than hiring 3 1x programmers.

There are diamonds in the rough especially at university. I wouldn't consider myself as a "high-performer" but I did consistently get decent grades and I myself worked for below "merely" market-rate as we didn't have alot of big companies in my country. Now days I work at one of the most "prestigious" tech companies in the world that alot of people want to get into. So I wouldn't be jumping straight to the conclusion that all good tech talent is immediately already in the "amazing" companies as soon as they graduate.

> we didn't have alot of big companies in my country

I mean yeah, you were operating in a different talent market. If you are a U.S. based company it's going to be very hard to get high quality talent out of university as a rando company with median pay. If you are in Europe then it's a lot easier because there is less competition.

> all good tech talent is immediately already in the "amazing" companies as soon as they graduate

Yes, there are going to be missed gems, but if you're looking to hire without going through a couple hundred bad candidates (not even an exaggeration) to find gems you need to stand out as a company.

If you think about this from the employer perspective, there's no signal to go on to find these gems: people with decent, but not incredible grades, no prior internship history, bog standard side projects, etc. Now imagine those resumes are mixed in with a bunch of people with 0 side projects or work experience, subpar grades in core CS classes, etc. What do you filter on? What's your signal for hiring?

You filter on the number of projects on their GitHub?

Hiring juniors and/or interns is something every company should do, however they're not "just" missed opportunities. If you want them to succeed you have to put in the work to help them do so, and that in itself needs to be budgetted for with every junior hire.

Definitely. Every option requires $$$/time/effort or combination of them. There are very few good & experienced & cheap & available devs just waiting for job offers.

Add StackOverflow jobs to the mix.

SO jobs is shutting down in a few weeks, sadly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023343

Oh no! I didn't know that.

If you've got time for the long game, consider building your network by mentoring STEM students.

Years ago at a previous job my boss donated a CAD workstation and some CNC time to the local public highschool's robotics team, then coordinated with their supervising teacher to have a couple employees (including me) mentor there one afternoon per week for the school year.

As a mentor, I helped students understand compiler errors, recommended writing a function instead of repeatedly typing the same code, and also gave more advanced advice, like explaining how PID loops could prevent gears from stripping. It was rewarding to see these students both grow and enjoy the learning process.

It also paid dividends for my boss when some of these students applied for summer internship at our company, which eventually led to several excellent full time hires after college, including referrals our interns had made to their fellow engineering students.

While it took a couple years to pay off, those few hours of community service introduced us to quality people that no jobs board could have.

>While it took a couple years to pay off

You're operating under a time frame most startups don't dare. Most startups are trying to sell to a FAANG in the time it would take a highschool student to graduate undergrad.

They did say "if you've got time for the long game".

Perhaps modify it? Mentor under your own name, form a network on LinkedIn, some of your former students will follow you into your next venture. You'll have a pool of potential candidates ready when you are.

The OP said they are a small company, not necessarily a startup.

Part of Firebase's recruiting success was due to early engagement at collegiate hackathons. Top tier candidates were applying out of school because they liked working with the product and liked the team behind it.

This is a great long tail suggestion.

For the short term it's really about networking and poaching.

Wish I had heard about these opportunities, I spent 5 years inside FRC and got nothing but this lousy t-shirt...

As a developer, I frequently wonder about the exact opposite question: where does one learn about companies in need of developers, and about what these companies do and how they do it. For example, if I were a frontend web developer looking for a company that builds their product(s) as a progressive web app using web components, where would I look?

It's easy to find job boards filled with ads from recruiters; but hard to discover companies that you might like to work for.

Agreed. Whenever I look at one of those job sites, even when they're dedicated to software development, or even front-end development, almost all jobs listed are listed by an agency for the actual company. I'd rather deal with the companies directly, but too often the agencies hide away name and contact information. Of course, now and then I can figure out which company it is, anyway, but it is a hassle.

I suppose that smaller companies think they don't have the resources to maintain their job listings in various databases, but I think they should.

Are you looking for a job where you can work with web components and build PWAs? :)

I mean, I have a job, but I am always on the lookout :-)

Cool, gotcha. ;-)

angel list maybe?

> Recruiters tend to be a poor and expensive solution

Literally 90% job of a recruiter is browsing through LinkedIn and spamming potential candidates.

Easy to do that job yourself, if you invest the time. Also, you'll be able to do the job much better, and will come across as much more genuine to candidates.

And I'm glad they do, I've received a ~40%, ~10% and then ~50% salary increase because of recruiters who've reached out to me.

If you have the skills, you pretty much have your pick of which ones to respond to.

> Although we advertise on our web site, unless people are looking quite specifically, they are unlikely to find the adverts

Does your company post these adverts on twitter/hn/reddit? Even if they _do_ see your posting, why would they work for you over any other dev job?

> Also, Recruiters tend to be a poor and expensive solution. It is hard to tell the good from those who just claim to be good and we get a lot of noise from them.

Recuiters are not a silver bullet, you still need to filter what they source. A good recruiter will want to know why you're rejecting the candidates you're sending. They are expensive, however if they're not getting you candidates then find another recruiter.

> Also, I'm not sure that the best candidates just call a random recruiter to find them a job.

No, of course they don't, but they might call _a_ recruiter they have a relationship with. Recruiters also reach out to candidates too. A candidate who has 10 years experience writing django apps might be miffed at a recruiter offering "an exciting frontend opportunity", but a goood recruiter will either have people they've been speaking to, or will know the signs on linkedin/etc of people who may want to leave their current jobs and might be a good fit.

It's tough. I've been a hiring manager and my company is trying to hire like mad now (link in profile if you want to check it out; we legally must provide salary range so it might be of interest for comparison purposes).

My suggestions:

   * widen the net. If you previously needed folks to be local, can you have them be in the UK? If you needed them in the UK, can you expand to the EU? If you previously needed ruby experts, can you work with someone who is an expert at another similar dynamic language (php, python, etc)?
   * hire newer devs/junior folks if you can build or have the infrastructure to support them. From what I can see, there's not a dearth of folks looking for their first dev job. You'll just have to train them up.
   * reach out to local bootcamps. There are a lot of folks there hungry for work. Sure, some of them aren't great, but there may be quite a few worth chatting with. Especially had luck with folks who had a previous career but were pivoting into tech.
   * find a good recruiter. How? I'd look at recruiters who have invested in the community. I have one in Colorado who has sponsored community events for a decade. If you don't see one of those, maybe ask friends for referrals?
   * be public about the company's engineering/design/product culture. This is a longer play, but can let folks self-select out or in to chatting with you. Posting on the monthly who is hiring threads here at HN is another way to be public.
   * support local meetups for the technology you are using. I run a meetup and the sponsorships are quite cheap, esp when compared to recruiter fees or the opportunity cost of an unfilled job.

Advice from somebody currently job searching in the UK:

1. Post your jobs on LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Any other website is basically pointless (maybe HN's Who is Hiring? at the beginning of the month can get you some attention too) because people only search on these, and any other website is flooded only with job ads from consultancies and recruitment agencies so yours won't pop up.

2. Add your salary ranges in your job's description, otherwise you will get people that apply expecting more than you can offer and you waste both of yours time (I've been told this by companies during the interview, they wanted to make sure I saw the ranges and it fits with what I expect).

3. Replace your "take home challenge" with a "live coding session" (if you have one). This will attract older people that are married/have kids which usually can't set aside 4 hours during the evenings or weekends even if they wanted too, due to family responsibilities. This will show them you respect them, so you can spin it up as a "benefit" of applying. If you can detail the entire job interview process in the job post and how long it takes, then even better!

4. You're in Tewkesbury, engineers probably want to be in London, so let them know you offer a WeWork office in there too, if they need it. Otherwise your location is going to put off many people.

5. Make sure you actually answer when somebody sends you an email with an application, or questions. Many don't, be better than them. If you don't have an email address where people can send you questions then make one, or allow them to send you messages "InMail" on LinkedIn.

6. Please don't ask about previous salary, or personal details like sexual orientation or things like this during the interview process, like those creepy Greenhouse job application forms. I can't believe this is not illegal in the UK. If somebody at your company does this currently, tell them not to anymore.

That being said, if you had any jobs related to Ruby on Rails with a possibility to transition to Engineering Management in the next 1-2 years, I would have applied.

Are looking for local dev/designers only? Remote first is the hot thing right now, so maybe that would help as it would be more attractive.

PS: I'm a 30 year old dude from a 3rd world country learning how to code. I'm not good, yet, but I'm hard working and I learn fast. Just trying my luck, but do you guys take an apprentice? Or maybe in need of customer support? I'm just looking to learn. What's in for you is cost reduction and someone who would be grateful for life for giving him a chance.

Remote can be challenging for different reasons. We do have remote (UK only) folks but as soon as you extend that to other countries, it is kind of like offshoring but without the value-add of local management. Risk are:

* Time zones can cause things to take a long time to resolve

* Cultural differences can be confusing (like people who say, "yes" to be polite, not because the answer is yes!)

* The legal protections are much lower when dealing with another country

* You have practical concerns like shipping things (laptops etc.) that just create even more work

* Possible language barriers, especially with very complicated or subtle things

I think it can work well but only when you have designed your company around remote-first working and probably only for experienced staff who you can expect to know what they are doing.

I totally agree with you, but you have to provide something attractive for the people you want to hire. You mentioned FAANG, and you know why they get so much attention? They pay 40% above market rate. If you can't attract people with money, you have to find something else. An even with all the challenges, remote work is what attract people nowadays. Try putting yourself in the shoes of those who are looking for work.

> They pay 40% above market rate.

In many cases, that is a severe underestimate.

One startup I worked for hired good people organically, basically by having a realtively altruistic mission (educational products for young kids) and good PR.

You can be creative about it though. A story: when the startup was small, a maths student applied to work for us as a programmer. They were very smart and had a good personality, but were naive about their very limited programming experience. Most companies would have passed. Instead, the team lead said to them: I don't have time to mentor you, but if you can find another student with good programming experience who I like, and can mentor you, I will hire you both. And so they did. So, a 'pass' was turned into two hires for the price of one.

Of course, this probably only works if you can use new grads, who are all looking for jobs at the same time.

Hi, 5 ppl firm owner/developer here:

- I joined the major slack channels of developers/designers/whateveryoulookforspecialists in the area.

- joined the #workrequests, #jobs, #yougetthepoint channels

- actually read the guidelines of each slack channel and/or talked to the admin to have the right tone of voice, get their feedback, finetune it, etc

- posted the job

- after 1-2 years, specialists still come to us because of the posts

- maintain a spreadsheet so you don't lose track of good people

I don’t think you can be successful unless you go out and start looking for people on LinkedIn. I mean messaging those you think might be a good fit. And you need a really personal message to convey why a candidate needs to join you. Small company probably means early stage/high risk. Think of the reasons people wouldn’t join such a company. Try to anticipate some of the concerns.

In previous companies, the most effective way seemed to be the network, i.e., asking current employees if they knew someone interested in working here or asking publicly on LinkedIn.

My experience being recruited:

1. Embedded startup, <20 people.

> I contacted them. They were one of the few tech firms in my hometown & used a SW stack that I loved. Old-school email exchange. No social media. I learned of their existence via a newspaper profile article.

2. Semiconductor OEM, <150 people.

> I posted about being laid off on LI. An ex-colleague saw the post & invited me in for first interviw.

3. IoT startup, <20 people.

> I replied to an Austin Startup jobs posting from the company recruiter.

4. Software dev team, <10 people.

> The dev leader cold-emailed me after seeing my details in an HN "who wants to be hired?" post.

I'm not from UK but it seems the story is pretty much the same for small companies.

From experience, there's no single place that will just work. Have to keep trying through multiple channels all the time.

Here are some ways that we try.

- LinkedIn Jobs, indeed etc like job boards

- HN (whoishiring), angel.co

- technology specific job boards (welovegolang, pycoders weekly etc)

- references through current employees, their past colleagues etc

- cold pings on Linkedin, Twitter, github

- Some slack/discord channels for specific technologies

In personal experience, quality of the crowd depends on the channel too, however, wouldn't call this a confirmed observation.

Yeah, we're doing the same in Germany. Also I have a team in the Ukraine (can't recommend right now haha) and also recruiters for specialists and seniors. Pretty expensive, but cheaper than not growing. I can also recommend join.com, lot's of noise though.

> HN (whoishiring), angel.co

I have communicated with companies via both of these methods.

The other suggestions make sense too.

The reason to use recruiters, specially as a small company, is that they do the hard work of spamming everyone with an online profile all the time and have build a database of people who you are looking for. Even for the best candidates, it's much easier for them to reply to one of the many messages recruiters are spamming them instead of trying to constantly search themselves, specially when they are not really actively looking but would switch if an interesting opportunity presents itself.

Of course, you only get the candidates from the recruiters, even from firms which claim to do some screening for you. Recruiting firms usually work on keyword-based matches and decide whether the candidate is good based on a couple of calls with them or maybe they'll throw in a generic persoanlity test or a coding challange. You still have to make your hiring plan, your own screening criteria and interview for it, test them for your requirements and all the rest of the work involved and you have to pay a handsome amount to the recruiter... which is not fair... but unfortunately, that is how it is given the market.

The best way is to find a recruiter who works on success-based business model i.e. they only get paid if the employee ends up working for 6 months, a year etc... so at least you avoid those who will get you the devs, get their commission and immediately start spamming them other opportunities.

Good luck!

A niche market to tap into in general might be areas that promote startup companies and job seekers. A while ago on desktop I used https://startup.jobs/ and was able to search by company size (1-10, 11-50, 51-100, 100-200, etc.), but I just went on my phone and that doesn’t seem to be an option. Anyone out there use this site and/or can verify if there are more search criteria available on desktop then phone?

Disclaimer: No affiliation or anything.

1. Get recommendations to good recruiters. Call people you know who have hired engs and ask them if they can recommend a good recruiter. When I was recruiting a large percentage of my business came from referrals and those relationships tended to me much stronger than random companies we picked up.

2. Recruit yourself. You cant just post a job online and hope for the best. It's like dating. If you make yourself look all nice and go out to the bar but dont talk to anyone you are not all that likely to be approached, assuming you're a male. But if you go and talk to people your chances of having a good conversation go way up.

Recruiting is the same thing. Send messages on linkedin. Send emails to candidates. Recruiting isnt easy but the reason recruiters get paid is because this type of monotonous "sourcing" work is boring and its somewhat difficult to find relevant people. If you don't want to pay someone else to do it then you need to do it yourself.

Those are the big ones. Other optimizations can come from making sure you have a good pitch, email and verbal, about your company and the role. Making sure your website is attractive to folks. Basically look at everything you are presenting to the world and think, "If I knew nothing about our company would I respond to this email?".

Hope that helps.

I'm on the other side of this currently; how do I find small companies like these? There are "HN: Who is hiring?" posts, but apart from those, do any of you have a good strategy when it comes to picking a new, yet unknown, employer like OP?

Just for context; I'm from Central Europe, have 7 years of experience in a world-class Mobile app company and am searching for remote options, mainly in the states.

You open source some of your existing code, then hire the people that you find working on expanding it in their free time.

Eh, like 99% of existing OSS projects never get serious contributions from external developers.

This strategy can work only if your company is behind very high profile/successful projects.

Have found DMs on Twitter to be high ROI. Recruiters in the UK can be hit or miss as it's such a low barrier of entry job. Some out there that really are worth their weight in gold and others out there that give them all a bad name.

Recruiters are being given an unfairly bad rap, methinks.

It is a shame that 95% rotten apples give them all a bad name.

To be honest if 95% actual apples I came across were rotten, I probably wouldn't eat apples either.

For the UK, try listing on Indeed. When I was looking for a position back in 2020 it was the only job site that listed jobs where the companies looking to recruit actually got back to me. I used to use JobServe and S1 but sadly they're overrun with recruiters.

A bunch of my pals over the past five years have used Indeed successfully to find software development work (contract and permanent), that's how it was recommended to me. And my current role came from an ad on Indeed.

> Recruiters tend to be a poor and expensive solution

Agreed, from the job hunter side of things. If I see roles advertised by a recruiter I tend to be less inclined to apply for the job.

Also make sure your advert contains as much detail as possible about required skills, desirable skills, holidays that kinda thing. Maybe also include a salary range for the role, ads that displayed salary expectations were more likely to get a click from me than those that didn't.

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Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Indeed, just demonstrated what worked for me as a job hunter.

Finding a good recruiter is probably your best bet if you have multiple reqs open. This is hard. But, while expensive, a good recruiter is worth it in my experience (10s of engineering hires). Pre-pandemic metrics: if you are not getting a hire you are thrilled with in 10 top-of-funnel first interviews something is wrong, but since the market is tighter now your hit rate might go down. You only pay a recruiter if you hire, so make sure your interview process is thorough. This is hard.

If you are requiring in UK, consider remote within a couple time zones.

Digging deep into your company’s network is also important in the early days. I set up a referral bonus to incentivize folks to spend energy outside work hours to cultivate good referrals. $5-10k sounds steep but it’s cheaper than a recruiter so you can be generous here.

I don’t think job postings are useful for a small company. Filtering out cold outreach is very time consuming. Pay a recruiter to do this.

I advertise on LinkedIn and use Workable as my applicant tracking system.

I've experimented with pretty much every paid job board and have settled in Linkedin, it seems to get a reasonably broad range of candidates for most positions posted.

Also I have moved to a policy of posting the exact starting salary.

Not a range, not commensurate with experience, etc. Just like here's what we're going to pay you, right from the beginning. Also here's the benefits, they're good and they're 100% paid by us. It just feels like a more ethical way to do things and stops all the stilly time wasting around compensation.

If I want to consider a range of applicants with a wide band in compensation (which, sometimes you do, maybe you're open to a wide range) then I just post more than one ad. There's nothing wrong with posting for Junior, Senior, Director, with the same core job function.

My employer (~100 people) uses a combination of job fairs (organized e.g. by local universities), recruiters, LinkedIn, employee network incentives and (social) media advertisements.

Your home page is just one point where you should post job openings. StackOverflow has a jobs board, for example, as do many industry-specific magazines.

Another option is to poach people from advertising and consulting agencies. Many people use them to get a foot in the door of the employment world after university/vocational training and then, once they're sick of having to balance ten projects a day, shift towards one stable employer.

It changes with size. For my own company we started with just two co-founders and eventually grew. We did so in a number of ways:

- In the initial stages, we've recruited from within our own network of former colleagues.

- We had a successful open source project and recruited from amongst its contributors

- We hired people that our employees had worked with before and that they recommended

- We went to meetups and conferences, talked about technology and what we were doing. After the talks you often have conversations with attendees that might be interested in the project.

Here's what never worked for us:

- job ads / "career" section on our website

- going to meetups with the sole goal of recruiting people

- linkedin cold outreach

"We had a successful open source project and recruited from amongst its contributors"

I can imagine this is a quite sustainable way of recruiting in the long term in general.

Primarily I would say use recruiters, either external ones (you'll have very mixed results here, be prepared to sift through a ton of barely relevant CVs), or hire a recruiter as part of your core team. Either way as a small company you're going to get very few candidates who seek you out and decide to apply, the job of a recruiter is to go out and find good candidates for you and then sell them on applying for a job with your company.

Even the very largest companies like Google and Amazon use recruiters, they just happen to have an army of them on payroll rather than going out and hiring them on a piecemeal basis from external agencies. You also say the best candidates don't call a random recruiter, and you're right, they don't. The best candidates know one or two really good recruiters who can get them interviews lined up in the next few days and an offer on the table by the end of next week.

The only other thing I've seen have some level of success is going to recruitment events targeted at the sort of people you want to hire. If you're looking for junior developers your local university will run recruitment fairs, and if you're looking for more experienced people there are a few events such as Silicon Milkroundabout (the worst name ever) where you can pay to get a stand. Either way be ready to commit whatever time you're going to be at the event itself, plus a few days to follow up with people you've spoken to.

I second this, it's been my experience at smaller companies, too. If you can find a smaller recruiter company, generally they have seemed to perform better than the larger name-brand recruiter companies in my experience.

At least in the US, expect to pay a good recruiter who finds you a candidate you hire somewhere in the 20-25% of first year salary for the hire (ie: you hire a candidate for $100k/year total comp, you pay the recruiter $20-25k in fee for that hire).

No matter what you do, you're going to sift through a LOT of candidates who are definitely not the right fit.

I also concur with going to local university recruiting days. It's a whirlwind and you'll likely lose your voice after the first day talking to so many students, but it costs less than hiring a recruiter and you'll likely get enough good resumes and enough first interactions with the humans behind those good resumes to justify it.

But also, just offer to pay your existing employees a non-trivial referral bonus for finding someone (like multiple thousands of USD, as compared to paying a recruiter this is super cheap). Sure, the incentives aren't perfect, but if you have someone you already trust as an employee or partner or past coworker referring someone they want to work with, odds are that candidate is going to be pretty good.

Recruitment fairs are very important either way; if people know your company exists, they're more likely to take a look.

Maybe also host some user group meetups or whatever. Word of mouth is very powerful. My current employer (same town as previous) is small, and it was even smaller when I joined. Still, I heard about it somewhere and applied.

When I’ve recruited for niche roles, which these are a lot like, I would hyper target with good results. Meaning go after people on a particular team at a particular company, or recruit from people who graduated from a specific program or lab in a school. If you can narrow your search criteria down to a specific set of names, you can often just reach out directly and do a better job at it than a recruiter. Conferences used to be good for this, too, and sometimes meetups.

What is your competitive advantage? Do you offer 30h week? Remote work? Free luxury cars? Incredible salary? Find out what is special about working at your place.

adding this as a new comment since this is a different take.

Make yourself easily reachable.

In this instance for example, the fact that you have asked this question means you are hiring. One of the HN reader reading this could be your potential hire but for that person there's no easy way to approach you. A single link in your profile could make that happen :) Otherwise you are wasting this opportunity!

Best way is to hire through network.

You should be articulate and explicit about your hiring needs to your network, and careers page etc. Add a link to your company in your profile! You are on the front page of Hackernews, but even though I'm looking for one of the roles you mentioned and wanted to know more I can't see what you're hiring for or anything about your company.

As many have said it really depends. But for a smallish development company (under 50) there's really nothing quite like organic growth - which generally means word of mouth and/or friends (or friends-of-friends) and former colleagues. I'm from an island in the North Atlantic so although it's a 'city' it's a pretty small town - word gets around if you've got something good/new/interesting on the go.

As for actionable things - some local devs, in my area, started a tech/dev meetup group here that's evolved into a 500 person slack channel (in-person meetings pre-covid) and it's a great place to find people and talk about jobs/local market. Definitely not a short-term fix. Also, leveraging any kind of news about a funding announcement or big contract or local impact helps get your name out there. I know a few former colleagues who saw the company name in an article/newspaper or an industry magazine and wound up applying for roles.

Best of luck!

Let me give some advice I’ve heard from candidates: post the compensation information!

This alone will set you apart, and attract more applicants.

It's not always as easy as that though.

The range might be literally £20-80K depending on experience so OK, that helps someone on £100K to know they are not likely (but not impossibly) going to get the same or more salary.

I can't say that is not the case. I have not looked at the data, but that seems wide. Can you really have that wide a spread for a single role? Does that imply something else is wrong?

There are tech focused recruiters who do a good job of filtering candidates and can even do a great job at filtering coding skill. To your other point the most clued up and experienced candidates will have an idea about the recruiter they would use if not an existing “relationship”. E.g. if you’ve been hiring and came across a good recruiter you’re likely to go to that recruiter for your personal search. Maybe you need to start your candidate search with a search for the right recruiter.

Advertising on Reddit and Stack Overflow etc is fairly low return for the effort because it becomes a full time job answering queries and doing filtering (unless you have an in house recruiter in HR who can do this).

Medium and good developers usually look at well known (at least locally) companies for a job. Small companies are generally known for lower salaries, less expertise and sometimes strange owner or management, so the problem you have is lack of reasons for people to apply.

Advertising on your own web site has a very low reach if you are just a small company; who do you think will look this way? At least post it on some job sites; also post in local community groups, like local Facebook groups, if any, unless you are in a large city where this will not work. You can also use LinkedIn, but I don't know what is the cost in UK.

We ended up making use of hiring partners (basically consultancy companies) for this. They gave us access to a somewhat vetted candidate pool to interview from i.e. they could skip a tech test stage of an interview process.

Overall it has been a positive experience. It allowed us to scale up our engineering numbers relatively quickly. Potential cons to consider are the culture changes that come with it, the risk of outsourcing too much domain knowledge (direct vs. indirect hires) and potential time zone differences. It has also bought us time to focus on growing our direct hire count, which takes longer.

Wouldn't this be vastly more expensive? (like, 2-3x?)

Pass, wasn't privy to the financials on this one.

What I do know is that for various reasons we struggled with direct hires and needed to grow quickly. So I guess the numbers somehow worked in its favour.

I've been involved with hiring consultants before (in UK and Norway, using consulting companies like Capgemini and Sopra Steria), and it was always the case that it was a lot more expensive - but yes, it means you have instant access to a large talent pool. It also meant that if someone didn't work out, we could swap them out with 2-4 week's notice, depending on the provider.

Define "small".

I sort of co-run a tiny company (less than 10 people) and the only thing that works is networking. We're so few that one bad hire would hurt a lot so we'd rather ask around.

If you mean 50+, things change.

2022 is going to be quite different.

Everyone I know job hunting is doing so for a big salary boost, as the pandemic has pushed prices high. People want to work remote and buy houses.

Smaller companies are at a significant disadvantage in terms of salary. Doubly so as in the UK, granting equity is rare unless you join as an exec or non exec.

I think finding the candidates is going to be the easy part. Convincing them to take less pay in a time of significant price rises is going to be hard.

As others have commented, think about how you’re different. (And “family “ and “culture” is a red flag, not a differentiator).

I found my previous job with a very small company on Indeed, but it was the only job I applied for on there because Indeed is full of garbage postings that barely describe the job, don't give a salary range, etc. I also got bombed with recruiter spam. I had just about given up on them when I came across the posting for my previous job, which was one of the only authentic postings I came across in a few weeks of searching. So, not a great experience, but you might get lucky with it or similar sites.

Recruitment firms can be very expensive, fees that charge £000's to place someone in a city firm, are not uncommon.

However there are people in the UK who frequent sites like this, so why dont you have a link back to your website in your profile or in your submissions?

"Good" is also a very all encompassing word, you might need to be a bit more specific over your requirements.

some of the more niche technologies is word of mouth, through user groups, bbs's news groups, things like that, but not on any recruitment sites ironically.

Network and direct sourcing.

It's a grind, and you need to be selling yourself.

If you're finding it tough go speak to Thayer: https://team-prime.com/about/ they are an agency but won't bill you by person hired but by role advertised (i.e. if you need to hire 4 systems engineers you'll pay for the effort to source and work a single distinct role for the period of time it takes to fill the 4 positions).

I only look for jobs at small companies and my preferred places to look are the HN’s “Who is hiring?” thread and Angellist. My last 3 jobs came from these two sources.

The VC-backed startups tend to get help from their investors by getting listed in portfolio sites, funding news etc.

There's also lists that aggregate top startups: - https://topstartups.io/ - https://www.breakoutlist.com/

Sounds like you are wanting top tier talent. In this case I agree then recruiters and job boards are not by themselves going to get you top tier talent.

My suggestion is to look at compensation / benefits package. If you have a great benefits package then you are more likely to attract that top tier talent you are looking for.

Of course this is going to cost, great candidates don't come cheap.

Look at paying £100k+ for the best.

Do you have funding? Have you launched a version of your product? Throw money at the problem of if have funding. Talk about your product if it is solving an interesting problem. Hopefully that will make some noise to attract some talent. I'm based in UK too and would love to see people crack this problem the bootstrapped way. Would you mind sharing what you are building?

I am leading a mixed team of 15. All the team-members hired from LinkedIn and/or went through a leetcode testing, and with "strong IT skills and experience" on CV, proved to underperform or unable to integrate into the group/project. The others, hired by other means, proved to be ok.

What can I conclude from this ?

Basically they bumble around and ape FAANG methods. Then they offer 50% FAANG pay and no one accepts.

Lots of job postings I have seen online look like challenges to say as little as possible with as many words as possible about the actual job. I kinda feel like you could stand out quite a bit just by clearly explaining in your job posting what the job actually entails.

This question comes up every so often. All I can say is money talks. I know money isn't everything but I'll be damned if I ever go through another battery of interviews, code tests, behavioral screens etc just to find the position pays $50k. Never again.

Money talks.

So many people are having trouble filling positions... I would think I'd get more responses from my applications!

Also reading a lot of these responses... I wish I could more easily advertise the salary I would accept. Its a field to fill in some applications I guess.

Do you have software meetups in your area? They can be a good place to recruit from if you find one related to your company’s open recs. Also, consider sponsoring one.

Word of mouth. We’re research/science adjacent enough that the grad school social network works well; there’s also a modest finder’s bonus.

Not in the UK, but workable.com works great, blasts resumes out for you to all your favorite job sites and consolidates them for you.

I really appreciate this question and insights below. Keep the coming please!

My company is ~15 and hires (rather successfully) via LinkedIn

Well… I can share how we get often get 1000+ applicants and end up with a few incredibly talented individuals joining us.

I should note:

The companies I’m hiring for are not (yet) household names. Most of our employees had never heard our company names before applying.

We’re not offering crazy salaries — we just aim for market-rate.

And we’re not using external recruiters to help. We have some recruitment costs, but they’re relatively low.

So… how do we do it?

1. We hire remotely.

We do care about timezone, and we avoid a few countries due to the legal challenges of hiring there, but we’re not restricted to only hiring in a given city (or even country).

This massively increases the pool of talent that could meet our needs.

2. We identify the things that make us special.

It’s not the salary, our company name, or the job title.

It is:

- Our core values, where we combine a focus on impact with enjoying the journey

- The opportunity to work in a small and rapidly growing company, where you can learn loads and make a huge impact

- Being profitable, so the above benefit isn’t combined with high stress

- The opportunity to work was directly with successful entrepreneurs

- Our wider benefits package, including 40 days vacation leave, 4 months paternity/maternity leave, an annual in-person meet-up, and so on.

To the right person, these are huge!

3. We create an ad which _really_ sells this message

We do not have an ad titled “Mid-level developer (JavaScript, NodeJS, React)”

We have an ad titled “Join our remote team and enjoy work-life balance as a Full Stack Developer (JavaScript, NodeJS, React)”

Spot the difference? :)

You can review the rest of one of ads here: https://docs.spidergap.com/en/articles/2011605-join-our-remo...

4. We post on job boards

Our favorite for developers used to be StackOverflow. It cost £3–5k but was worth it for the quality of applicants. Sadly they’ve stopped supporting job ads now.

We also use weworkremotely.com. Posting here is cheap, and your ad will get picked up a number of other remote job boards for free.

5. We ask 3 simple questions to start the filtering process (— and we do NOT look at their resumes — at least not yet)

We want to make it easy for the right candidates to start the process, but in doing so we’re going to get a lot of junk.

So we ask 3 simple questions:

- What’s your proudest achievement, and why?

- What’s your favorite non-fiction book, and why?

- Which of our features do you like the most, and why?

80% of the applicants will fall at this first hurdle.

Loads will fall due to poor English, or by giving one word answers.

A surprising number will answer the 3rd question with “I haven’t looked, sorry!”

They aren’t difficult questions, so we should be looking for great answers. And some answers will stand out. So they’ll go through.

Reviewing these applicants is quick — well under a minute each on average. But it still takes time with 1000 applicants, so we do outsource some of this work to a virtual assistant.

6. We then have a sequence of steps to filter it down further.

For a developer, these would be:

- Answer 2 coding challenges (75% filtered out again — ~62 candidates left from 1000)

- 15 minute core values and communications interview (50% filtered out — 31 left)

- 30 minute dev team interview (50% filtered out — 15 left)

- 90 minute head of department interview (75% filtered out — 4 left)

- 20 hour mini-project (50% filtered out — 2 left)

Yep… after 6 stages, we've turned 1000 hopeful applicants into just 2 outstanding candidates who we offer jobs to.

Now — it’s worth noting that for other roles (sales, HR, finance, etc.), we have fewer steps (e.g. there’s no mini project as we’re can effectively test their ability in the interviews) and a much higher rate of great candidates get to the end of the process.

Hiring developers is particularly hard because we maintain a high bar for engineering talent, and fewer candidates meet our expectations for communications etc.

To manage this process, we simply have a series of forms and checklists. We’ve used Podio in the past, but expect to be using AirManual to manage the whole process for future roles :)

In both cases, you’re getting a very affordable and flexible tool — we’ve seen no need to spend $1000s on an expensive recruitment tool.

7. We offer a job to the great candidates we’re able to hire!

8. If we can’t hire everyone who makes it this far, we ask them to join our “farm team”

This concept, and many of the other ideas in our process, came from “How to Hire A-Players” by Eric Herrenkohl.

Recruitment takes a lot of time, so it’s every manager’s responsibility to build a farm team of people who we’d love to hire, and are keen to join in future.

When the next job comes up, we know exactly who to reach out to!

And… that’s it.

Hope that's useful :)

Interesting process - Is the 20 hour mini-project paid? And if 2 people pass that milestone, are they both hired? Or could you do OK on the project but still not get the offer because the other person did better?

Yep - it’s paid at a reasonable rate. And we’re v flexible to making it work alongside other commitments.

We hire them if we can afford them, but as a small company that not always the case. And sometimes there’s only 1 person from a round of recruiting, and other times it’s 3 or 4.

This is where the farm team come in!

That was a great read. Would you hire self-taught juniors? Someone from Africa, Madagascar especially? I'm in a process of switching career trying to get into software development. I'm literally following a course¹ teaching your tech stack, I'd really like to apply to your company when I'm done with it. Covid made remote work the norm, so might as well give it a shot.

1. https://fullstackopen.com/en/

Yes - we put zero emphasis on education, qualifications or years of experience.

Our process instead gets you to demonstrate if you’re a good fit for us based on your skills - both technical and wider - and alignment with our values.

We’re not actively recruiting at this moment but will be later in the year. Pls feel free to submit your details :)

- 20 hour mini-project (50% filtered out — 2 left)

Is this paid? This seems like an awful lot of hoops to make people jump through.

Yes it is :)

From our perspective, it’s saved us from making some big mistakes (I.e. bad hires), so it’s a hugely important part of the process.

Those that have gone through it have mostly raved about the experience - including those that we’ve rejected! They get a lot of coaching as part of it, and it also serves to demonstrate if we’re a good fit for them.

I should also note that we’re often able to make the call in 12-15 hours. As soon as we’ve seen what we need to, we finish the project and move forward :)

What's your website?

"I has monies!" - small company

"Gieb monies, plx!" - potential employee

"K!" - small company