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7 Tips For Winning The Tech Talent You Need
7 Tips For Winning The Tech Talent You Need
7 Tips For Winning The Tech Talent You Need
Winning the
Tech Talent
You Need makers.tech
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Contents •
•
Mindset matters more than experience
The author
Grant Jessup is passionate
about helping leading brands
build their dream technology
teams.
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Introduction
Is there really a ‘tech talent shortage?’ Or is the
reason you’re struggling to hire tech talent because
of something else?
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Anyone is capable of We’ll explain how the
posting a job ad, sifting following can hold you back:
through resumes and doing
• You’re saying you only want ‘senior
interviews, but just doing developers’
those things doesn’t mean
• You’re filling your job descriptions
you’re doing it in a way
with pointless stuff
that gets consistent and
• You’re waiting for great people to fall
successful results.
into your lap
At Makers, we help shine a light on the • When you do find great people,
best recruitment practices, actively you don’t move fast enough
working with our partners to find and
retain the right talent for them. • Your interview process can be
improved
If you’re a company looking to hire
• You’re ignoring the long game
fantastic tech talent, but feel stuck in an
endless cycle of sticking up job ads only • You’re not willing to retrain your own
for dusty hay bales to roll past, it’s time people
to ask - what could you be doing better?
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01
Mindset
matters
more than
experience
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You’re saying you only
want ‘senior’ developers.
Considering the old adage,
‘Code Is King’, what exactly
Stack Overflow reports...
is a senior developer? Do
you measure seniority in
That one eighth of all professional
terms of years of experience software engineers have been programming
or languages known? Is it professionally for under 2 years, and it’s
managed or success of
That means if your job description says
projects undertaken? “minimum 3 years of experience” you’re
missing out on a wave of fresh new talent.
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02
Get your
JD to as
many people
as possible
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Make sure you’re
not filling your job
descriptions with
pointless stuff.
We all have biases, whether they’re
conscious or unconscious. And
sometimes we accidentally allow
these biases to create unnecessary
barriers to entry.
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Generally speaking, the best developers are polyglots – they can
adapt and grow into new technologies fairly easily, but their skills lie
in solving problems and in learning fast, regardless of the specific
languages they’re working in right now.
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03
Be proactive
in how you
attract talent
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If you’re
waiting for
great people
to fall into
your lap,
think again.
Today, when it comes to hiring
software developers, it is not a
business-driven market - it is a
candidate-driven market.
strengthen your reputation companies they will work for, and how much
they should be paid.
in the tech community:
Perhaps you want more diversity in your
• Develop content or speak publicly company, more women, a wider mix of ages
about your engineering culture and and ethnicities - the question is, why should
share it — what makes your workplace these people come to you?
different?
In order to find the right people, you have
• Encourage developers to do open to take action to strengthen your presence
source work and attend meet-ups. in the tech community. One thing that can
really help with both quantity and quality of
• Organise or sponsor hackathons applications is cultivating a strong employer
(or craftathons). brand.
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Building your brand in the
community will raise your
profile amongst potential
applicants.
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04
Move quickly
when you find
the right people
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What
is your It’s so important to
demonstrate to candidates
timescale
And it’s frustrating to invest so much
time into interviewing various potential
candidates only to miss out because of
job offer?
They’ve adapted their recruitment approach
to make sure they never miss the best talent.
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Optimise
your interview
process
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Your
interview
process is
important.
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Our entire education system
seems to be built on training
people to pass exams,
which doesn’t represent any
value in the long run. This
is something that needs to
change - and it can start with
your recruitment process.
Make sure that your technical test mirrors • Live pair programming session. This is
the sort of work your engineer will be doing a great way to examine the candidate’s
day-to-day. Otherwise, what you’re testing ability to communicate and collaborate
for becomes irrelevant. on software with others.
So what does qualify as a good tech test? • Take-home tech test. Trusting
That depends on the role requirements. candidates to choose for themselves
Some examples of excellent technical how long to spend on a tech test is a
assessments: good way to test for strong principles
of independent thinking.
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Play the
long game
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The most important thing you can do to keep
so much
more than The two biggest fears we see from
CIOs and CTOs when we suggest
ongoing on-boarding and training are:
one senior
companies train up will immediately
fly the nest, taking all their valuable
skills with them.
position.
This is about creating Our advice is to create a culture where every
a learning and training developer - no matter their experience level -
about the ‘skills gap’, and will you keep your talented developers, but other
talented developers will want to come and work
start developing a pipeline.
for you.
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07
Consider
retraining
your own
people
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When it
comes to
growing
your tech
talent
workforce,
your current
employees
can be an
important
pool of The Apprenticeship Levy gives
UK companies the opportunity
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Prashant Raniga was one of the “I also studied computing
first Vodafone employees to go at A-level.” He trained in
through the programme. architecture then went into
Vodafone retail with the
When Prashant was at school, he was intention to “have that as
involved in helping set up servers at school
a bridge until I got into
and learning how to build computers. “A
lot of my friends and I liked tinkering with architecture”. He was a
computers a lot, from building our own technical expert — he’d resolve
computers and setting them up to LAN technical issues in store:
gaming,” he said.
training staff on the systems,
being able to know how to use
the systems, and constantly
updated with the new hardware,
phones, and gadgets.
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Summary
Finding tech talent in today’s
market is becoming increasingly
challenging because it is a
candidate-driven market.
Let’s chat
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