How to source hard-to-fill programming positions

Zack Burt Contributor

Zack Burt is an American computer programmer. He founded Code For Cash, the tech recruiting firm.

The competition is intense for great tech talent, and it’s even harder to find the most qualified people who are also the right fit for your company

This article shares some practical processes that you can add to your human resources function in order to accelerate the programmer pipeline, based on the years I have spent as a hiring focused software engineer at growing startups and now running my own recruiting firm.

Our recruiting strategy is surprisingly simple, and boils down to optimizing various segments of the sourcing funnel: awareness, pageviews, and application submits.

What ties these tactics together, though, is you, your company, what you’re offering, and how you approach the people you want to hire. If you want to build a strong, diverse team, you need to develop a thoughtful, empathetic and proactive approach before you can optimize.

Within the article we cover:

The mixed value of tech meetups
Cold outreach
- Deciding who you’re targeting
- Prospecting through developer sites like Github
Channels
- LinkedIn (yes) and LinkedIn ads (probably not)
- Reddit ads (yes)
- Craigslist (really, yes)
Alumni networking
Techniques for improving conversion rates