How to hire a DevOps Engineer
One of the biggest challenges these days when growing up an IT team, and with it the company, is to find and hire good professionals with the necessary technical knowledge and enough soft skills to work together. The huge demand on the market and the highly specialised profiles needed to cover these positions make the hiring process a real challenge.
Why this article?
I’m currently working as a DevOps Engineer for a Startup in the sunny city of Barcelona, a city with a fast growing startup hub, and this growth is attached to an increase of demand of profiles like Devops, developers, QA engineers, blockchain gurus, etc…
This increase of demand means an increase of recruiters sending offers desperately. My goal with this article is to write down my thoughts about the process of reaching out possible candidates and how hard is to get a positive response from them.
I end up ignoring 98% of the job offers
Like my colleagues developers, I receive an average of 3 job offers every day, at the end of the week this means 15 direct messages through Linkedin or emails, of which I reply one at maximum, and much more of contact requests from recruiters that I end up rejecting.
Not replying them has become the normal behaviour in this sector, and it’s something I can’t really feel proud of. But there are some reasons for this, and it’s not because developers are rude :p
- Lots of offers are not even close to our current job position or level of experience. And not to mention the messages with the name of other people. This denotes a total lack of filter and personalization from the recruiters when reaching candidates, forcing them to just ignore the message.
- Lack of information or context. Some offers are just a couple of lines telling that they are looking for a DevOps, but without any speech about the company, the team or even the position itself. Other offers are from HR consultancies that can’t tell you the final company or the salary range because “it’s confidential”, but what’s the point of this? Not giving basic information about the job position and the company is probably going to get the interest of the possible candidate lost. Why not bet all in the first shot trying to maximize the interest of your target?
- The third and the main point I wanted to talk about, lack of distinguishing points from other companies, here is where I think the difference between being or not interested in the offer is. So let’s talk about this topic in the following part of the article.
How to get the interest of the possible candidate in the first contact
Obviously all the job offers are not made for all the people, each person has a different situation where she/he can be more or less interested in listening for new opportunities, and as a recruiter your goal is to reach as many people as possible to increment the chances to get a positive response, flooding Linkedin with direct messages using a few filters.
Sending standard job offers we can agree that the response ratio is quite low, making this process very inefficient, and as a engineer, my instincts are telling me that this can be improved.
From my point of view, a standard job offer is only targeting people who are looking for a change actively, but it doesn’t captivate the rest of the possible candidates.
For me a standard job offer is the one that specify just the name of the position and the typical requirements for it, without more information, and I can tell you that I’ve received a quite substantial number of offers that don’t even have these.
Hello, I have a new opportunity for you, if you are interested tell me when I can call you.
Seriously? This is more like a message for a date than a job offer!
I like to compare the relationship between a recruiter and a possible candidate as a car dealer with a possible buyer. The example above is like the seller is trying to sell me a car without giving me more information, and it could work if I need one urgently , then I would ask for more information, but if my car still works, I will probably be too lazy to replay.
So let’s move on to the main point of the whole this, how should be a message to have the maximum response ratio possible from the people who is not actively looking for a job?
I’ve been thinking about it for a long time now, and I came up with these several points that would add value to a job offer with the goal of giving a crystal clear picture of it, and also giving to the possible candidate all the necessary information to have a first useful opinion about the offer:
- Brief intro to the company. Sell it as you were pitching an investor. And for the HR consultants, don’t miss this point, introduce the company you are representing. Only the company itself can add a huge value to an offer, and it’s always an important point to consider.
- Specify the job position with a global definition of it. Probably the main points of the position are shared with the offers from other companies, so it’s better to give some general points and leave the details for the PDF with the extended offer.
- Enumerate the distinguish points that your offer have compared to other offers/companies. This is the most important point, you are selling the offer to the candidate, she/he has to feel motivated after reading this part, enough at least to reply the message. This point can include the technologies/platforms she/he will work with, projects where will be involved, the goals of the position,…
- Talk about the team. One of the most important points to evaluate is your teammates. The job position can be pretty similar between companies, and your team and the environment is, most of the times, the main point that makes you decide to move on and change to another company.
- Talk about the work environment, the office, the benefits.
- Attach the extended job offer with all the details about the position itself. If the possible candidate got excited with the main message, the extended job offer will be an important point to decide if it’s interesting for him or not.
While writing this post I received a job offer that was the perfect example as a model to follow, it had pretty much all the points above and also demonstrates that the hope is not lost yet. With her permission I’m pleased to share it with all of you :)
Build a community
Another strategy to be closer to the possible candidates is to be involved in their communities, creating meetups in your office, hackathons, publishing tech posts, participate in events, and at the end, make yourself known.
Summary
Because the high number of offers we can receive during the week, and the lack of information/context of most of them, to captivate a possible candidate is necessary to work hard to give an excellent first impression, with the goal of providing a better response ratio.
Trying to add all the points mentioned in this article we can improve the quality of the messages and the traction of the possible candidates, making the process much more efficient and the possible candidates happier and more comfortable with it.
And don’t forget to be involved with the community, as more popular your company is more traction you will get with possible candidates, until you don’t need to browse Linkedin looking for people anymore because they will come proactively to you :)
