How to hire three software engineers in one week

Step one: don’t write click-bait blog posts like this one

Hiring engineers requires teamwork and snacks

Did you really hire three engineers in one week?

Technically, yes. Last week, three engineers accepted offers to join the Sqreen team. And technically no, because these 3 hires have been months (years?) in the making.

What is the secret to hiring engineers in Paris?

Sorry if this is what you came for, but I think there probably are no secrets. It feels like everybody is looking for software engineers, and everybody is struggling.

However, I do think that hiring engineers, like any good problem, can be broken down into manageable stages. For me, these three stages are: finding engineers, moving them through your hiring process and ultimately, convincing them to join you.

Let’s start at the start — where do you find engineers?

At Sqreen, we hire technical and non-technical people from all over the world and routinely relocate new Sqreeners.

We cast a wide net to find our future Sqreeners — can you name all the flags?

In an ideal recruitment world, the best, most-qualified candidates would apply to work for us and our job would be simply to assess their skills.

Whilst we’re working on our employer brand and increasing our visibility, today it just isn’t reasonable to expect enough volume or quality to come via our own self-hosted careers page.

So, to help us find our future Sqreeners, we rely on external partners and platforms including:

LinkedIn Recruiter

Highly specific LinkedIn search for “great engineers”

I spend about half a day per week on LinkedIn Recruiter, using the powerful search functionality to target potential candidates. The advantages of LinkedIn? Many engineers are already on the platform and whilst the same can be said of Github or Stack Overflow, on LinkedIn the primary use of the platform is professional networking so recruiting activity feels less intrusive.

Of course, it isn’t enough to simply locate engineers, you also need to work out how to engage with them. More on this below.

In terms of ROI, you pay annually, and one mid-level recruitment made via the platform roughly equates to a recruitment agency’s fees for one placement. Make two or more hires with it over the calendar year and your cost per hire vastly improves.

One of the hires we made last week was thanks to LinkedIn Recruiter.

talent.io

A French-born startup, talent.io is quickly becoming the only platform that engineers turn to when they’re thinking about their next job. Each Monday a new batch of around 100 technical and product profiles are published on the platform. It takes me around an hour to screen them all, and I usually reach out to between 2–10 engineers / week. The majority accept and go through to phone screens, and around half of that group go through to our onsite interviews. According to talent.io, an engineer receives around 8 interview requests and spends an average of 20 days on the platform before accepting an offer.

talent.io’s model is a pay-per-hire success fee (around 15% for startups), making it on an average cost per hire basis more expensive than LinkedIn, but with the added benefit that all the candidates you’ll encounter on the platform are actively seeking a new role. Add to this their proactive account managers and a frankly more than decent UX — and that’s worth paying for.

The second hire we made last week was thanks to talent.io.

The community effect, online and IRL

Our CTO and co-founder at the DevSecOps Conf

At Sqreen we’re heavily involved in the developer community — our Sqreeners organise and participate in several of Paris’ most popular Meetups, we talk regularly at conferences and our own product is designed to make developers’ lives easier. As such, we meet engineers all the time, and occasionally that conversation turns to recruitment.

The third hire we made last week was following a pull request on one of our Open Source projects on Github.

So you’ve located the engineers, what then?

Well, ideally you want them to give you some of their time usually by means of a quick phone call. The best way I know to convince an engineer to spend 15 minutes on the phone with me?

Ask. Ask nicely.

Working in recruitment requires knowing how to have a good conversation. Starting a conversation with an engineer requires acknowledging the context. I know that my message won’t be the first one they’ve received that week, or even that day. I also know that at this stage I have more to gain from this conversation than they do.

If you’re the one doing the asking you have to make it easy for people to quickly decide if they want in or not.

The Recruiter, in her natural habitat

My standard outreach message looks something like this:

Hi Paul,

My name is Alison, and I’m the Talent Manager here at Sqreen, a tech startup on a mission to democratise security and reinvent the way we secure web applications. We’re looking for excellent engineers to join our team based in Paris to take Sqreen to the next level.

Notably we’re looking for a Core Python Engineer to take full ownership of our Python agent. You’ll find more details here.

Your wealth of Python experience and OpenERP contributions are what made me think this could be a good fit for you! I see you’re currently based in Switzerland, but figured it couldn’t hurt to reach out just in case :)

Please let me know if you’d be interested in discussing further.

Have a lovely day,
Alison

Is this the most perfect outreach message in the history of outreach messages? Nope. Is it better than most — I’d wager yes. Why?

It includes:

• Who we are and what we do
• What exact role I think they’d be a good fit for and a job description
• Evidence that I’ve understood their experience and current situation

It doesn’t include:

• Hyperbole; reference to rockstars, ninjas, unicorns, rocket ships or similar
• A request for referrals ‘if you or someone you know would be interested’
• *Mystery*

Now you’ve connected with an engineer, then what happens?

What makes a good recruitment process?

The answer is probably quite different depending which side of the table you find yourself on. As a recruiter I want the process to be robust, scaleable and free from bias — as a candidate I want it to be swift and relatively painless while giving me the information I need to assess the company and the role.

You’ll find details on Sqreen’s recruitment process over here.

But the tl;dr version is:

• Brief the candidate on all of the steps from the beginning, so they can mentally keep track of how many steps remain
• Keep the process moving, never leave a candidate without news for more than 48 hours (and ideally aim for <24 hours)
• Make sure you know what you’re specifically looking for at each step, to avoid a bunch of wishy washy ‘getting to know you’ interviews

How do you convince engineers to work with you?

I think these three things go a long way towards getting that ‘enthusiastic yes’:

• Design a painless hiring process that helps rather than hinders (move swiftly, give regular updates, offer useful feedback)
• Talk about motivations and logistics (€€) upfront so there are no surprises
• Treat the candidates you turn down / who turn you down at least as well as the ones you hire

Of course, it helps if you also have an awesome product, a great founding team, and a culture that appeals to adults :)

Interested to know more about how we hire engineers? Drop me a line.