The Hire Haywire, or Who Hires How
Like many of you who have a profile on LinkedIn, I see job postings in my LinkedIn feed every day. There’s a game going on. While LinkedIn is a lucrative place for recruiters looking for potential hires, tech professionals who are much wanted these days often seek some shelter from recruiters. This game of the “hunters and the hunted” has provided me with an inspiration to share an ad-hoc overview of how top talents are hired in software development.
The Old-School Hiring
The conventional way of hiring is to list job requirements, post an ad, and wait for job candidates to submit their CVs. This approach might still work at some locations, but it’s getting less and less effective. What do old-school style recruiters usually do when they see that job postings don’t work? They start behaving like vendors at an Oriental bazaar as they push you annoyingly to buy their stuff. Our natural reaction to being chased is to dodge, obviously. I guess such obsolete hiring methods might hypothetically be used by a company that runs business at a location where tech talents crave for jobs as they spend days waiting to be picked up in the street.
Yes, that was an intended absurd statement. I just want to emphasize the point that this annoying hiring does not work.
There’s something that needs to be in place if one wants to hire talents. The company has to be an irresistibly attractive place for the like-minded and like-hearted people. “Culture fit” is the buzzword for that. The kinship of minds, hearts, values and aspirations might even override salaries and perks in importance, and we are moving on to a very friendly way of hiring.
Personal Connections
This one works great. Unfortunately, there’s only so much personal connections, and they might simply be not enough, no matter how great a place to work at the company is. What if this great company has used up the potential of personal connections? The CVs coming in response to job offerings do not comply with the talent quality that this company requires, and all the cool friends of friends have already been hired. Hmm.. What goes next, then?
Nurturing
This is another great strategy. Nurturing is about taking young interns on board and training them at work. It might take several years for the interns to mature into seasoned professionals. There are some downsides to this strategy, though. One needs to have a buffer of those several years — which often is not the case, because normally the new people are needed right now — making sure that the nurtured folks would want to stay with the company.
Locking them in with multi-year contracts would hardly be a solution, that’s why the employer company will want to be able to spark a sense of strong personal commitment with their folks. Some companies who nurture talents do see them mature into professionals, but then at some point the freshly-nurtured rock stars choose to leave.
Acqui-hiring
I consider this a brilliant strategy for companies of a Google-like or a Facebook-like caliber. Promising start-ups that excel at engineering but lack in operational management prowess, or are in need of a financial influx, get acquired by giants that either ingrain them in their business, or let them work on potentially interesting projects. However, acqui-hiring seems to be carrying some stigma with it.
What if a company has tried old-school hiring, personal connections, nurturing and is not yet ready for acqui-hiring? What else has to be taken into account?
Miscellanea
Here we are about to enter the realm of the dig-deep things that go beyond the subject of hiring in software development. It’s about what people want to do with their lives, and this goes all the way down to educating our kids. Which culture is prevailing in this society: the culture of co-creativity, inspiration and pursuing some higher goals in life, or dragging along with the consumerist lifestyle? Are there many tech professionals, in general, who see their work as something larger than a paycheck-producing machine? I’m not even talking about extra passion or motivation. If we lack such people in general, something must be wrong at a deeper level, and there might come a time that even acqui-hires won’t work any longer.
Besides, it all very much depends on the location where a company runs business. As a long-term strategy, it would help to keep an eye on how demographics, education and business dynamics evolve in different nations. This is very nation-specific, as countries (and states in the USA) have various social and economical conditions. Some technological hubs are emerging, some are declining. It looks like the global quest for talents brings us to the point where businesses choose to move to places where talents flock, not the other way around.
… and, of course, there’s this big topic of working remotely and all, but I’ve intentionally left it off from this post, for now :)
What’s your take on hiring in software development? Feel free to share your opinion in comments, or submit your article for publication on Q-Blog!
This story has been re-written from an earlier version.
