

Ask HN: How are you hiring programmers? - virgil_disgr4ce

What have been your most successful approaches to finding and hiring programmers?  I&#x27;ve tried job sites (including Stack Overflow careers AND their candidate search), recruiters, social media, all with mixed results.  I&#x27;ve got a decent team now, but I still need more excellent devs.  What works for you all?
======
hkarthik
Work on having some inbound candidate flow by increasing awareness of your
engineering team's brand.

Start an engineering blog, and make sure you put out some high quality
content, with a "we're hiring" link at the bottom of every post. Make sure
that you measure and try to drive traffic to these posts. Have everyone on
your team that is interested help contribute a blog post or two.

Encourage open source contributions from your team. That will help them
connect with other talent that might be looking.

Keep prospects warm even while you have no headcount needs so keep your
pipeline from ever completely drying up.

And lastly, hire remote (or generously relocate) if you can't find enough
developers in your local area.

------
czbond
It's exactly like sales. Each of those channels work, bring a different type
of lead, and need to be nurtured differently. It is a constant, slow process
unless you blindly overpay. You're always working the talent pool - priming
candidates, vetting them even when you're not hiring. In house vs out of
house, remote vs local can all be managed.

------
lxfontes
Make it a team effort: "Guys, we need another front-end dev. Let me know if
you have someone in mind."

As a more general note: Finding the right candidate doesn't start when the job
post is up online.

You need to be constantly looking and vetting people ( don't need to tell them
;) ), so you'll have someone already in mind when the position is available.

