The Silicon Roundabout tech community is the largest of its kind in Europe. We have been around since 2011, and all throughout this time we have organised live events to interconnect the tech ecosystem. Part of this meant we often organised events to connect startups with engineers.
These days the tech industry has grown and its requirements for tech workers has increased correspondingly. So, we have taken our years of experience connecting tech professionals with prospective employers and organised a community event to provide some insights on how startups can hire the tech talent they need.
One of the biggest challenges, especially for early stage startups, is having to compete with the big established tech companies that can dangle insane offers and snatch top-notch tech talent from startups. But even on the other side of the fence, tech workers and professionals also have the need to connect to startup tech companies that need the expertise they can offer.
Mustafa Shreet, a partner at the Silicon Roundabout’s recruitment-support arm shared the following tips on tech hiring on a workshop held online a couple of months back (you can also watch the recording here).
About Hiring
It’s important to always keep the cost-quality-and time triangle in mind when hiring.
You need to be able to find the sweet spot that balances the cost of hiring, the time It takes you to hire, and the quality of the talent you hire. Of course, each organisation will have a particular sweet spot that’s different from that of other companies. There is no single formula that applies to everyone. But what is true for all is that if you focus on one leg of the triangle, you will have to sacrifice the others. For example, if you must absolutely have the highest quality recruit, be prepared to spend a bit more and wait a little longer to find that perfect person to hire. Likewise, if you are constrained by your budget, you probably will not be able to attract the best talent, or it may take you longer to find that person.
The process of hiring is hard. You need to diligently pore through all the resumés, then you need to schedule the interviews before you finally select the person to hire. And then there are the numerous negotiations that happen all throughout the process. Even when you outsource this requirement, it’s still a laborious, time-consuming, and expensive process.
Headcount Planning
The first and most important step in the hiring process is headcount planning. As the term suggests, it involves planning for your hires so that the startup can respond more strategically and efficiently to changes in the marketplace and the needs of the business. This calls for preparing a comprehensive Job Description (JD). The effective JD identifies what the organisation needs and highlighting the skills, experience, and cost of hiring the right person. This allows you to assess if the company can afford the hire, or if not, explore other options that will allow you to have the needed expertise at a more affordable cost. Also determine when people need to be hired, factoring in such details as notice periods and other factors that can affect the timing of the hire.
The Mindset of a Developer
One of the reasons Silicon Roundabout have been successful at connecting people and facilitating hires is that we ourselves are developers, we understand how developers think, and we take on the developer mindset in recruiting. What does that even mean?
- Developers are not always motivated by money.
- Developers like to decompose things and break them down into simpler, more understandable components to understand how they work.
- They are compulsive problem solvers. Tech professionals love taking on challenges.
- They are suckers for efficiency and hate anything that is inefficient and wastes time. If a developer feels that a task will recur, they will find a way to automate the process, so they don’t have to do it themselves.
- Each developer is individually unique. They will hate it if you stereotype them into pre-conceived categories.
It’s important that you understand and consider all of these points when you communicate with developers.
Ways of Hiring
- Direct sourcing – This is us reaching out to individuals through job boards, social media, headhunting, and your internal team. When using job boards, keep in mind that each one has specific strengths and advantages and may specialise in a specific type of candidate. If you are looking for tech candidates, be aware of which ones cater to these skillsets.
- Job adverts – If you use job ads, make sure they are not boring and that they stand out from the rest. Don’t copy and paste from someone else’s JD. Also refrain from being self-centred. Candidates want to be assured that the opportunity is about them. And keep things brief and direct. It’s a job ad, not an essay.
- Referrals – This route is highly desirable because it saves you time and money. You can reach out to your contacts to ask for referrals. You can also set up a referral scheme. Just make sure it doesn’t degenerate into a culture of blame if the hiring doesn’t work out.
- Outsourcing – This involves engaging an external source to recruit people for you. These external sources include independent recruiters, contractors, and recruitment agencies. The hiring decision will still be yours. They will merely connect you with qualified candidates. A word of caution: If you sign an agreement with an agency or an independent recruiter, don’t try to be clever and attempt to not honour the agreement. It is a legally binding contract and trying to skirt around your obligation could land you in court.
Another thing you must not do when dealing with agencies or independent recruiters is to simultaneously engage several of them. You will be literally dragging your name through the mud. What will happen is that every one of the agencies or recruiters will take your JDs and start the search process, most likely placing job ads on the job boards. The same people will be seeing and responding to these ads and quite soon things can get messy and you may find yourself in a lawsuit with all the agencies and recruiters you made a deal with. So, don’t do it!
Candidate Experience and Employer Branding
Candidate experience is how the jobseeker perceives your company based on what happens during the recruitment process. It is closely related to employer branding, which does not refer to your company’s market positioning and perception. It is about how people feel about working in your organisation.
Research indicates that 54% of the candidate’s negative experience during the recruitment process impacts their decision to join the company. 69% of candidates whose recruitment experience was negative will not reapply. 64% of those who did not like the experience are not likely to purchase goods and services from the employer. (These are real statistics, by the way. Get in touch with us for sources.)
4 Pillars of Candidate Experience
- Candidate is King. You have to treat them well because you’re not doing the world any favours by maintaining the vacancy.
- Filling the vacancy. The process is supposed to make it easy and efficient for us to find people. It isn’t there to have candidates comply blindly with it.
- Efficiency. As earlier mentioned, tech professionals tend to favour efficiency. If they suspect, in the slightest, that you are wasting their time, they will walk away.
- Feedback. 75% of applicants never hear back from the company they applied to. This affects the candidate experience.
5 Phases of Recruitment
- Attraction. This is the initial contact between the applicant and the employer. If you want to attract the right people you need to use the right “bait.” You need to sell the job. Because your startup most likely does not have the pull of a tech giant like Apple or Google, you need to appeal to prospective hires and communicate the challenge and the prospects for development you can offer them.
- Application Feedback. 95% of prospective candidates require an understanding of how they can follow up on their application. If you can’t provide them with this, they may not push through with their application. It may be difficult to reply to all those who apply, but you must provide feedback to those who do reach out about their application.
- Selection. 39% of HR managers spend less than 1 minute looking at a CV. You need to spend time REALLY reading what the candidates are saying through this document. Otherwise, it would be no different from someone with absolutely no tech understanding skimming the CV for keywords.
- On-boarding. This allows new employees to be productive quickly, allows them to understand their roles in the company, and reduces the new employee’s anxiety.
- Retention. You’ve just spent a lot of time and money searching for the right person to fill a vacant position. You’ll want to make sure that they stay happy and productive working with you. If they enjoy what they do and if they like the culture and environment they are in, they will most likely remain with your company longer.