Getting a high-quality new hire in a competitive hiring environment [closed]

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I am on a small software development team in a fairly small company. We are in a larger metro area (about three million people), but nowhere near Silicon Valley. I am not in charge of the search, though my boss (who is) clearly listens to my input.

We have a full-time vacancy, and we are having difficulty filling it. In this metro area, most developer hiring appears to be through recruiting firms. However, none of the firms we have engaged have brought us the right candidate, and in general they are bringing us too few candidates anyway. We have considered using Stack Overflow Careers, but right now, there are too few active profiles in our area to justify the (admittedly modest) expenditure. I have asked my "social network" without success.

I am very interested in getting this position filled by someone who will do a good job because, frankly, we're swamped.

What else can I do to help get someone good for this position?

manpreet 2 years ago

As one other comment suggested, you have to explore the possibility that something other than salary and location is hurting your ability to find good talent.

I live and work as a software developer in the greater Pittsburgh area and Allegheny Valley (roughly 2 million people). Like many other smallish urban areas there are the handful of large employers but there are also a good deal of technology startups and CMU initiatives. Beyond this however the pool of software developers is small per capita compared to other areas. There are rarely more than 2 degrees of separation between any two developers, as many of us know and have work with each other or at least in the same company, or we met each other at various local tech council meetings and conferences.

The developers in a small urban area talk.

We generally give each other heads up about the companies that are awesome, the up and coming, the grueling sweatshops, and the chronically understaffed/overcommitted/employee-abusers.

I worked for a few such, lets say, "negatively viewed" companies and found that it actually hurt my career. I like my job with my current boss, but he told me that he almost threw my resume away when he saw that I worked for _____ for 4 years, with the reasoning that anybody who stays there longer than 2 is probably not smart enough to know to escape.

If your company has a negative reputation amongst the developer pool for whatever reason then this may be why you are experiencing trouble finding good candidates even willing to interview with you.

One way I have seen such companies handle this is to sponsor H1B visas to help fill the gap. The talent for the most part can be comparable if you are careful. I have seen this system be abused though as a means to either grossly underpay for talent or a more insidious strategy of basically putting these H1B workers in an extremely tough or demanding situation and holding them hostage by not giving up their sponsorship or delaying and inhibiting any attempt to escape to a new job.