Define Your Hiring Needs
Before you start looking for a developer, you need to clearly understand your business needs for choosing the best hiring strategies. By answering the following questions, you’ll be able to set the right recruitment direction.
What tech specialists do you need to hire and how many?
Depending on the product you create, you should decide on the tech stack your developers will possess and how many engineers you need to hire. To ascertain this, start thinking about the following questions:
- How complex is your product going to be?
For example, if you want to build a local online store, you might need one full-stack WordPress developer. But if you plan to develop a global logistic system, you’re likely to look for a team of back- and front-end developers. - Will it be a website, a web app, or a mobile app?
Different software types require different tech stacks. Thus, you’ll need to look for engineers skilled in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Java for the back-end and JavaScript for front-end web solutions. If you aim to create a mobile app, search for Swift, Kotlin, and React Native professionals. - Are you going to scale it in the future?
If you want to scale your product, your development team must grow along with it. While you can start with a small team, you’ll then need to expand it with more tech profs like software architects and DevOps engineers, etc.
How soon do you need a developer to join your team?
You probably have a business plan, set milestones and deadlines. Then you should stick to your plan and hire a developer on time to reach your goals. With project milestones in mind, you’ll also be able to understand if you need a senior programmer or have time to hire Junior/Middle tech specialists and teach them all the nuances of your product.
What’s your hiring budget?
This is one of the key factors in deciding how to find developers. Some strategies can cost you almost nothing but will take you a lot of time and effort. For example, you can search for programmers on your own using job boards, but you’ll spend an enormous amount of time vetting applicants and conducting interviews.
Other strategies, such as delegating hiring tasks to a recruitment agency, can help you recruit developers faster but could cost you a fortune. Usually, in the USA they charge a 15-35% fee or roughly $20-30K per hire.
In case you need help with finding programmers without breaking the bank, you should consider recruiting tech talents through Huntly. Thanks to our innovative view on tech hiring and a vast community of professional recruiters, Huntly is a winning solution for employers. You can define the price for a successful hire and enjoy our flexible payment options.
5 Strategies to Hire Developers in 2024
With the understanding of your hiring needs, tech stack, seniority, and number of necessary professionals, it’s time to think about how and where to find developers. Here are the strategies you can utilize successfully in 2024.
Use Online Platforms for Finding Programmers
When you start thinking about how to find a programmer, using online platforms is probably the first thing that comes to mind. You can post your vacancy on numerous platforms to speed up the sourcing process. Below, there are several types of online platforms you can utilize to search for programmers.
Niche job boards like Indeed and Glassdoor are mainly focused on the IT industry, so when you’re looking for tech professionals, such platforms provide a higher chance of finding great developers.
Social media websites have proven to be a powerful recruitment tool, so you definitely should consider posting your job on LinkedIn. With 61M people using the platform to look for jobs weekly, LinkedIn is the number one professional social media to find tech talents.
Freelance platforms like Fiverr and Upwork connect you with freelance developers worldwide, so you can find professionals with different tech stacks and prices.
Community-based recruitment platforms like Huntly are innovative hiring tools that allow professional recruiters to refer tech candidates to your open position, increasing the pipeline of relevant candidates dramatically. One of our significant differentiators from other platforms is the mix of technology and human touch that we use to provide clients with a 2-step pre-screening. You don’t have to filter out the wrong candidates — we do this for you and forward only the best matches for your approval. Last but not least, we are ready to assist you with creating job descriptions or preparing for an interview (like compiling JavaScript developer interview questions).
Find Great Developers Through Networking
If you aren’t in a rush to grow your team, you can consider strategic ways of recruiting developers. So how to reach developers and build long-term relationships? The answer is networking.
Attend tech events. A local hackathon or an online knowledge-sharing conference is a great way to extend your network and build connections with tech professionals. This way, you can gather a contact base of developers and reach out to them if you have an open position in the future.
Join developer communities in Reddit or freeCodeCamp to search for developers online. To find good professionals, pay attention to active community members who take part in discussions and show their expertise.
Social media is also a good place for networking. You can follow individual developers on LinkedIn or Facebook through hashtag search or join groups by interest to look for talents there.
Build Employer Brand to Recruit Developers
When thinking about how to hire developers, improving your employer brand might not be an obvious solution. However, it’s definitely an option worth considering. A solid employer brand is the reputation of your company which can become a decisive factor for job seekers. Top talents want to work for top companies, so they will likely check reviews on your company before signing an offer or even applying for an open position.
A strong employer brand means that you stick to the values you promote, ask for employee feedback and act on it. Having a good employer brand implies encouraging professional development among your employees, or fostering work-life balance, etc. And what’s more important, your employees should be able to prove it.
Building an employer brand can take you years but once you have a strong positive reputation, it starts to pay off and the best tech talents will line up to work for you.
Run Employee Referral Programs
Although we live in the era of tech progress, AI-powered tools, and almost unlimited tech possibilities, good old referral programs won’t lose their relevance in 2024. The thing is that just scanning a developer’s CV with smart software isn’t enough to make the right hiring decision, and this is where the human factor matters.
How does it work? Let’s imagine a situation. You have two candidates - a random job seeker from a job board and a referred candidate from your employee. Both have similar experience, perfect results of test tasks, and they both appeal to you as people. Who would you choose? You might opt for a referred candidate because they have a significant advantage — social proof from your current employee.
In addition to this, referral programs can bring you even more benefits:
- reduced hiring costs — a referral bonus is usually much lower than the cost of a traditional hiring process;
- quality pipeline of candidates — internally referred candidates are likely to meet tech and cultural requirements, since the coworker who refers them has a deep understanding of your company processes and values;
- improved employer brand — the more employees promote your company as a worthy workplace, the better your reputation.
Leverage Recruitment Agencies
When you don't know how to hire good developers but have a substantial hiring budget for delegating this task to vendors, recruitment agencies might become a solution.
When addressing agencies for assistance, you have an intro call with them where you share information about a vacancy and your expectations of candidates. Once all the details are agreed upon, recruiters start searching for suitable tech specialists. As a result, you should get introduced to relevant candidates. However, even recruitment agencies sometimes fail to bring top professionals to the table. One of the reasons is that 10-20 recruiters who work in an agency have limited access to rare developers with unique skills. Moreover, job seekers might be unwilling to apply through agencies since the latter don’t reflect your company’s culture and values.
Bonus Tip
I’d bet that all these tips on how to hire the best developers will still work in 2024. But you might wonder if there’s anything else that can help you reduce the average time to hire a software engineer. And the answer is yes — our community-based recruitment platform.
The idea of Huntly is to disrupt the world of tech recruitment by connecting employers with recruiters all over the world — for filling difficult tech positions. Thanks to this community of hundreds of recruiters, employers get a boosted pipeline of relevant candidates within several days. We forward you only those specialists who are open to considering your vacancy and passed our pre-screening. Moreover, finding a developer through Huntly is cheaper than using recruiting agencies. Our employers decide on the amount of referral bonus on their own, thus cut down the recruitment cost by up to three times.
Try out Huntly — it’s risk-free to get started! Posting a vacancy costs nothing and you pay only upon a successful hire.
