Your product will only be as good as the people who build it. You want to have the best product, which means you need the best software engineers and developers to build it.
If you’ve ever hired developers, then you have experienced the problem with supply and demand in this particular market.
To save yourself from an endless search process, it’s important to look in the right places. Below is a list of 10 websites and strategies you can use to find the world’s best software developers. The list is broken up into strategies and websites you can use to either find full-time or contract developers. That said, any strategy or site that can be used to find full-time developers can also be used to find contract developers.
Strategies and Sites for Finding Full-Time Developers
AngelList has made it much easier for promising startups to connect with investors and raise funding. It has also made finding top developers a much better and more straightforward process. Job candidates on AngelList tend to be more qualified, talented, and skilled than candidates on other job sites. AngelList users are generally more focused on getting into companies at an early stage when they can receive a larger share of of equity and have a greater impact. These candidates are willing to take lower cash salaries as a result, which is important for any cash conscious startup. Another perk of using AngelList for job postings is it’s completely free.
Posting job listings to AngelList gives you access to more than 450,000 active candidates. That said, it’s not enough to post a job listing on AngelList and wait for great candidates to come to you. To get the best results on AngelList, you need to actively reach out to your top candidates and encourage them to apply.
Stack Overflow is an online community where more than 4.7 million programmers help each other every month by asking and answering questions about software development. Members range from beginner coders to senior web developers, CTO’s, and VP’s of Engineering. Stack Overflow has a high-traffic job board where you can list your company’s open development positions. Job listings range in price from $495 for a 30 day listing to $2,499 for a 12 month listing. Users on the site generate lots of data when they ask and answer questions and vote on which answers are the most helpful. All of this data allows Stack Overflow to determine which programmers are the most skilled and knowledgeable. With this data and other information, Stack Overflow created a targeting engine that lets you show job listings to the best candidates for the job.
Coding bootcamps like Dev Bootcamp transform beginner coders into professionals who are ready to tackle junior development roles. These programs usually last for 10 to 20 weeks and are time-intensive. Other well-known coding bootcamps are Flatiron School, General Assembly, Makers Academy, Hackbright Academy, Hack Reactor, CodeUnion, Launch Academy, Bloc, and more. If your company needs junior developers, it should reach out to coding bootcamps and look to hire their graduates. Students from these programs are skilled, hard-working, hungry to learn and succeed, and less expensive talent to hire.
Sourcing.io is a product that makes sourcing talented software developers quick and easy. Over the course of the past few years, Sourcing.io has indexed information about millions of different software developers. With features that allow you to filter candidates by skill type, location, work history, and more, you can find the engineers who meet your exact criteria. Sourcing.io’s social graph features help you find candidates who are connected to your team’s current members, which makes it easy to get introductions to them.
CS departments at top schools — Every year the CS departments at top schools around the country produce thousands of smart, hard-working graduates who are looking for development jobs. These students are the next generation of senior developers and CTO’s. As they grow into their careers, they’ll help your company grow too. You can recruit CS majors via career fairs at top universities. Or, reach out to CS professors directly and ask them about their best students. Most university websites list the names and email addresses of their professors. So, finding the contact information for CS professors shouldn’t be too difficult. When you contact professors, they’ll hopefully introduce you to their most talented students. Here is a list of the universities with the top CS programs in the US.
Sport Programming Competitions are online or in-person competitions where developers try to solve tough programming problems as quickly as possible. Coders receive points for the correctness of their answers and how fast they solve problems. A recent profile of sport programming by Bloomberg News suggested that the world’s best sport coders make excellent hires at software companies. Vladimir Novakovski is a former sport programmer and the current CTO of Euclid Analytics who believes sport coders make excellent software developers. In the article he said, “Every time I have hired someone who is good at these contests, they have crushed the job. They tend to be fast, accurate, and into getting things done.” The biggest sport programming websites are Topcoder, HackerRank, and CodeChef. Look for the top sport coders on these sites and try to hire them.
Open Source Software (OSS) is software that is generally free to use for personal and/or commercial purposes. Most of the best new technology from the past 20 years like the Internet, the Mac, and more was built with open source software. Open source software is maintained by developers from all over the world. Most of these developers contribute to OSS in their free time and do it without being paid because they want to give back to the community. Good developers often make contributions to OSS on a consistent basis or have contributed to it in the past. Looking at developers’ contributions to OSS is a way to assess their skills before interviewing them. Go on GitHub or Bitbucket and look for top contributors to different OSS projects. These are skilled and passionate developers you should contact and potentially hire.
Andela is a startup that takes the top 1% of developer talent in Africa and seamlessly integrates them into your team as full-time developers. After selecting developers to be a part of the Andela network, the company vets and provides additional training to them for six months. Every developer that you hire through Andela flies out to your HQ for two weeks to get to know your team, culture, and product roadmap. After this two-week period, Andela developers work remotely for your company. To make things easier for you, Andela handles HR and infrastructure overhead for every developer you hire through it. With Andela you can scale the number of full-time developers on your team with a small amount of time and effort. Successful companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Udacity trust Andela to help them with their developer hiring needs.
Sites for Finding Contract Developers
Toptal helps companies hire some of the world’s best freelance software developers and designers. You tell Toptal what type of talent you need to hire for contract work and they find you developers that fit your needs. Toptal has developers who work with every type of technology like Rails, Django, iOS, Android, Node.js, AngularJS, and more. Finding a developer on Toptal takes as little as a day or as long as a few weeks. Toptal has fairly transparent pricing where you can hire a full-time front-end or back-end developer for $1,800 to $3,200+ per week. To hire part-time front-end or back-end developers, Toptal charges $1,000 to $1,600+ per week.
Hirable is a curated community of the best freelance web developers and UX designers on the web. An invite only collective, where coders are board-vetted, ensuring the most talented people represent the platform. Companies are granted access by choosing a daily, monthly, or yearly based subscription plan, allowing them to find the perfect developer to bring their idea to reality.
West Agile Labs is a premier digital design and development agency focused on web and mobile application based in San Francisco with additional global offices in Ukraine, Pakistan, and India. West Agile Labs handles all project management, UI/UX, graphic design, and QA in San Francisco, with core development occurring in our global development centers. They have worked with over 200 companies of all sizes- from early stage startups (including 5 from Y-Combinator) to larger enterprise clients such as Samsung, Ritz-Carlton, and Natera.
Gigster is a startup that lets you hire top developers for contract work in minutes. All of the Gigsters (the name for developers on Gigster) come from top CS programs (like Stanford and Caltech) or top tech companies (like Google and Microsoft). Companies have used Gigster to build prototypes, full-fledged products, and features for existing products. Developers on Gigster work with every major language and framework like Ruby, iOS, Android, Javascript, PHP, and more. With transparent pricing and success stories from companies like IBM, Gigster is one of the best places for finding developer talent.
Lockstep Labs is a boutique web and mobile team based in Bangkok that builds web and mobile applications using technologies like Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Clojure, AngularJS, ReactJS, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and more. They have spent the past two years recruiting, training and managing a solid 15-person engineering team with the goal of exceeding US quality standards at comparatively low rates. They have partnered with early and growth-stage companies across verticals to build or scale their technology,including Noozible, RideCache, Bungalow Insurance, TrustBooks, and more. They’ve built applications in social media, accounting, logistics, inventory management, and other niche markets. Go here to learn how Lockstep Labs can help you build your product or startup.
Putting It All Together
It’s tough to hire great software developers. Some of the world’s best companies have trouble hiring the skilled developers they need. Even when you look for developers in the right places, you have only one half the battle. You still have to convince them to join your company.
Finding a developer won’t be an easy process, but holding out for a high-quality developer is a no brainer. The success of your product and company depends on smart, hard-working developers.
Once you’ve found high-quality developer recruits, simplify the vetting process by having them complete a 1-hour coding screen test with something like Codility. Assuming they pass that test with flying colors, put recruits through the rest of your hiring process. After determining that a developer meets your standards, make them an offer to join your company that they can’t refuse.
The author of this piece is Jack Kaufman who is currently working with Dreamit. Jack is a junior at Haverford College and you can follow him on Twitter here.
