What is the best way to do this? The ideas that we have so far are to:
- Increase our presence in the local tech community by sponsoring and attending Meetups
- Go and talk at conferences
- Advertise on Stackoverflow
- Increase salaries
Any other suggestions?
Treat them with respect and dignity
Respond to them promptly
If you find someone you want to hire make the offer immediately.*
* I've had companies seemingly devastated that I took a different job in the three weeks they took to get back to me after the interview. True story!
I know that is sacrilege.... every employer believes with utter certainty that they know exactly how to pick great people, but I think that's often incorrect and arrogant.... i.e. YOU might be the problem.
- take folks with less experience and commit to training them (even bootcamp grads, depending on the position!)
- offer remote work options
- offer part time work
- hire contractors and try to woo them
- craigslist
- look at other benefits (leave, pto, etc). This is dependent on the market, so what are other companies in your area doing?
- recruit from places other companies aren't looking (outside the cs department, votech schools)
- offer a recruiting bonus to get the team engaged
- I have never implemented this, but if I was in your shoes, I'd try it: http://firstround.com/review/Mine-Your-Network-for-Early-Sta...
You haven't talked much about the sector/experience/tech, and of course that will affect what flexibility you have.
Aren't you getting any applicants at all? Are you getting applicants, but none that match your needs? Are you getting enough good applicants, but can't convince them to work for you? Different problems require different solutions.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-eve...
There's also (the slightly contradictory) advice that because the bad programmers are the ones without jobs, a large proportion of your application will be from a tiny percentage of the developer spectrum.
Good developers are hard to find for the fact that there's a high probability that they are in great demand. Everyone's clamouring for their attention.
Also, for the applicants that you do get, are they fundamentally terrible at coding/problem-solving or do they just not know the tech stack you're using? If it's the latter, you might want to re-evaluate as good to great developers are capable of picking up languages easily. You just need to give them some room to ramp up.
I would react totally different if a programmer invited me to a coffee, lunch, or a beer than I do with regular, tech-wise dumb recruiters.
(full disclosure: I work at the party company, and it's our latest product)