How to recruit tech talent (7 strategies and best practices)

Looking to recruit tech talent for your organization? Wondering how to attract the best candidates?

It’s true - The current tech hiring landscape seems rather bleak.

Layoffs. Hiring freezes. Intense competition for each position… It all might suggest that you are in control again. That to recruit tech talent, you just need to advertise the job, perhaps mention the salary, and immediately attract the best candidates in droves…

But the situation might not be that simple.

Granted, your job ad is likely to attract countless resumes and responses. Such opportunities are few and far between these days, after all, and given the rising unemployment in the tech sector, many developers will consider working for your company.

And naturally, there is a chance that you might find good candidates among those people.

But the opposite is true, too. It’s also possible that the best people - those who can help scale your product or business - will not even feel confident enough to apply for your position.

I’m not guessing here, by the way. My statement above is based on quite an alarming statistic I discovered recently.

You see - As it turns out, compared to last year, developers have significantly less faith in their ability to change companies or roles today. And so, it’s safe to assume that many of the best ones simply won’t act on your position. Some don’t believe they stand a chance. Others fear taking action in the current tech hiring landscape.

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But that doesn’t mean you can no longer hire top tech talent. However, it requires a slightly different approach involving building a strong employer brand and making the company more attractive to the best candidates.

In this article, you’ll discover seven ways that will help you recruit tech talent (including an amazing way to speed up the process!)

So, let’s get right to it.

Seven ways to boost employer brand, make your company more attractive for candidates and hire the best tech talent.

Not long ago, candidates could really pick whom they work for. You had to work tirelessly to make your company more visible to the best tech talent.

Today, as we’ve seen in the stats I shared above, they might be suspicious about any potential roles. Would the job be there 3 months from now? What if they change companies and the new company cancels the project?

And so, your challenge today is to convince candidates about how serious you are as an employer. Coincidentally, doing so also makes the company more visible to tech talent.

So, below, I’ve outlined seven ways to do just that, plus make your company more attractive to the best candidates.

#1. Gaining exposure at tech events.

This isn’t a small feat to achieve, I admit. However, establishing a presence at local (and top global) tech events will go a long way towards appealing to candidates.

For example:

• Being seen at these events will help you be seen as an organization actively participating in the tech sector, a factor that would certainly add credibility and keep you top of mind for candidates.
• It will allow you to control how your brand is perceived.
• It would make you more connected with the overall tech community as well.

Worth remembering - You probably don’t need to run dedicated booths at all events. Simply showing up and becoming involved in the community is enough to raise awareness of your company as a potential employer.

#2. Boost your recruitment marketing

You know, we rarely consider recruitment to be something that needs to be marketed and promoted. And certainly, we don’t consider recruitment to work in a similar way as lead generation - We don’t think that we need to fill recruitment pipelines the same way our marketing colleagues do with leads and sales.

But that’s exactly the case nowadays. We need to employ marketing strategies in recruitment, too.

• This is how we get ahead of the competition, for example. Various marketing strategies help introduce and showcase your organization to potential candidates and begin a low-key conversation with them before your competitors arrive.
• Similarly, as a recruiter, being active on platforms like social media helps engage candidates who might not be considering moving jobs just yet. But they might do so in the future, and having that passive relationship with them pays off when that time comes.
• Finally, recruitment marketing is how you often stand out from all the potential employers that a candidate can choose from.

#3. Engage with tech communities

Aside from participating in tech events, become actively involved in the overall tech community. True, doing so can be quite time-intensive but at the same time, it’s one of the most effective ways to boost your employer brand. After all, it’s the easiest way to introduce your brand to potential candidates, engage them, and keep your brand top of their minds when they begin searching for new opportunities.

Here are just several ways to get involved:

• Participating in online forums and platforms like Reddit.
• Sponsoring tech events.
• Organizing local tech meetups or tech talks.
• Launching company-led open-source projects or developer challenges, etc.

#4. Create dedicated career microsites

Career microsites are dedicated sections of a website or even stand-alone websites that focus on showcasing your company’s value proposition to candidates. They also give them a glimpse of life at your organization. Finally, career microsites list all the positions available at your company.

For example, SEMrush runs a dedicated careers microsite as a subdomain on their main domain. The microsite lists all the benefits of joining the company, outlines the teams, showcases the company’s culture, and more.

#5. Speed up tech hiring with specialized recruitment platforms.

If there is one thread weaving across this entire guide, it’s that we recruiters struggle to reach tech candidates.

And it’s true. But there is another side to it; we often skip using a hugely powerful tool at our disposal - a tech hiring platform.

A tech hiring platform is a system that gives recruiters access to a vetted pool of candidates to hire.

With a tech hiring platform, instead of trying to attract potential developers through listings, ads, and social posts, you search for them directly in a database of highly qualified and vetted candidates.

The platform also allows you to shortlist candidates based on real-world projects and their work and reach out and engage the best ones.

(A search engine in a tech hiring platform.)

Example - Frontend Mentor Hiring (disclaimer—this is our platform) is a tech hiring platform built on top of Frontend Mentor, a highly successful developer learning platform.

The learning platform has over 900K registered users, many seeking job opportunities. Our hiring platform helps companies discover top talent within our large Frontend Mentor community.

What’s important about our hiring platform is that we require members of the learning community to reach a certain level of points before they’re eligible to create the talent profile.

As a result, any candidates you find on the platform have been vetted and proved themselves by working on actual projects.

Learn more about the Frontend Mentor hiring platform here.

#6. Involve your current tech team in the hiring process

Another challenge we face when recruiting tech talent is that we do not necessarily understand all the ins and outs of the tech world.

For one, hiring tech talent requires at least some knowledge to discern who’s a good fit. It also often requires having at least some presence in the industry.

Luckily, you can turn to absolute experts—others on the tech team- for help.

Here are some ideas on involving tech teams in the hiring process:

• Employee referrals. Your developers have many contacts in the tech community and can help spread the word about available positions directly to great candidates.
• Helping with job descriptions. Your tech team can also help develop job descriptions that accurately reflect the role and communicate the responsibilities to potential candidates.
• Peer interviews. Tech teams can help you interview potential candidates they’d be working with and assess fit in terms of skills, communication, and culture.
• Designing and conducting technical assessments. As a result, you can be certain that any coding challenges posed to candidates are relevant to the actual work and aligned with the team’s expectations.

#7. Have a clear retention strategy.

When I mention retention in the context of improving the hiring process, I usually get a couple of raised eyebrows.

So let me show you at least some examples of how having a strong retention strategy can positively impact your tech hiring process:

• For one, being known as a company that retains tech talent for a long time (meaning that these people enjoy and decide to stay working for you) is surely bound to strengthen your employer brand.
• Similarly, developers who feel valued and engaged in their jobs are more likely to speak positively about you within their networks. That, in turn, can lead to potential employee referrals and snatching the best talent.
• Retention will also reduce your hiring costs. With solid retention, after all, you hire not to fill gaps but to expand your organization's tech team.
• Retention also leads to stronger employee engagement in the hiring process. We’ve already discussed the benefits of getting your tech team involved. Needless to say, the more engaged those people are, the more likely they are to help you find more people like them.

And that’s it…

Although I do admit that it is a lot, unfortunately, hiring tech talent has always been challenging, and given today’s tech landscape, it’s even more problematic.

However, I hope the above advice will help you streamline and improve the process in your organization.

Good luck!