How to Hire Developers on AngelList

TL;DR: A solid company headline, a salary that shows you value top talent, and a positive culture with ambitious technical challenges will attract applicants.

For a developer looking for a job, AngelList is really convenient: it has plenty of job listings from interesting companies with good salaries. This makes it easy to look through jobs efficiently; once you’ve set up search filters, you can go down the list. If you’re trying to source candidates on a traditional job site, AngelList is probably your best bet.

Even on AngelList, listing an opening for a Software Engineer with a good salary won’t automatically attract inbounds. There are many listings, so job seekers need to be efficient. Anyone whose eyes pass over your post will apply a series of filters to decide whether to skip or dig deeper:

1. To get them to expand the listing, the company headline has to sound like it might actually be a good business and they need to see a job title they’re interested in with a salary they would accept (a maximum above $100k).
2. To get them to click through to the full job description, they need to connect with the “Product” and “Why Us” sections. You need to convey that you’re building something that real people actually need, and you’re doing it with a positive culture and fun, challenging work.

The full job description should further validate the company, culture and work. These are some questions to address:

1. Is the company working to solve an urgent, significant pain point for a specific market?
2. Is the company building a culture where employees will feel supported and enjoy going back to work every Monday?
3. Is the company going to provide the types of challenges that will help employees continue to grow, professionally?

The last step to lowering the barrier to inbounds is advertising a public email address through which people can send job inquiries. Filling out AngelList’s profile is mentally intensive, and not everyone does it.

On the other side of the coin, here are a few things that will make developers skip your job listing:

1. Any of the following technologies: PHP, Java, Wordpress, the LAMP stack, SQL Server, Windows
2. Saying you’re the Uber of something that doesn’t make sense. For example, “we’re Uber for plants.”
3. Focusing on specific programming languages or frameworks. This mindset conveys a short-term way of thinking that will put unreasonable time pressure on complex, creative work.

AngelList still requires companies to post jobs they want to fill and job seekers to apply for those jobs, which we at Tailspin believe is fundamentally a broken model. However, out of existing, traditional job marketplaces, it seems like the best one. They’ve attracted good inventory of job posts and they give job seekers more power by providing salary and equity ranges. If you’re going to post a job, do it on AngelList. If you want to source candidates who want the jobs you need to fill, check out Tailspin.

Tailspin is a job marketplace where job seekers post the jobs they want and employers invite them to interviews. Check it out.