Developer Hiring Blog

I’m willing to bet that you spent a lot of time writing (and rewriting) your tech job listings. It’s no secret that it takes a good amount of effort to create compelling job descriptions that resonate with developers. When you write a draft that you’re happy with, it’s understandable to assume that you’ll be able to reuse what you’ve written anytime you need to hire a developer in the future. However, even on the most consistent technical teams, every job you’re hiring for is unique. Although you won’t always need to start from scratch, here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t just copy and paste a job listing every time you need to hire developers.

In addition to including the requirements and skills needed for the open role, your developer job listings should include a brief look into your company’s culture.  After all, the job posting is often the first time the candidate is learning about your company (unless you’re a household name). Your job listing likely has a limit to the number of words you can include, so you’ll need to succinctly convey your culture in a paragraph or two. Not an easy task, right?

To help you get started, we’ve rounded up a few of the common mistakes we see in job listings when it comes to describing a company’s culture. Are you guilty of any of these?

Anyone who has written a technical job description has probably gotten a lot of advice on how to do it well. You know they shouldn’t be wordy, but you have so much to say about why candidates should want to work for your company. You want to use an inviting tone, but you also want to avoid using too many buzzwords. Those tips probably sound straightforward at first, but applying them to how you write a technical job description is much more complicated. To help you make sense of all the knowledge you’ve gathered, here are a few things that the most effective technical job descriptions all have in common.

When it comes down to it, recruiting is an awful lot like marketing. So if marketers are constantly A/B testing their landing pages or calls-to-action, shouldn’t recruiters be doing the same for their job listings?

According to a recent report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, employers anticipate hiring of recent college graduates to increase by 11 percent in 2016. Although this is only a slight bump from their findings a year earlier, the report also found that 42% of employers consider the current market “good or excellent” for new graduates. With the competition to hire talented developers at a fever pitch, it’s understandable if you aren’t particularly thrilled to hear that the overall hiring landscape is starting to tilt in favor of the candidates. However, to help you stand out in an increasingly challenging market to hire recent college graduates, here are a few tips to help you stand out.

Let’s face it – searching for a job isn’t exactly “fun.” This rings especially true for developers, who often have to go through a longer and more intensive interview process (*cough* whiteboard exercises) than other candidates. And while this declaration isn’t exactly breaking news, the topic of the broken developer interview process is still popping up on blogs, forums, and our annual survey.

Here’s a snapshot of what developers in 2016 thought were the most annoying aspects of the job search (and what you can do to fix that).

A recent report conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that nearly three million Americans voluntarily left their jobs in March 2016. However, the same report also found that out of those 3 million professionals, only 40,000 of them were in the information industry. It’s also important to note that the “quit rate” in that industry dropped between March 2015 and March of this year from 1.5 percent to 1.4 percent. With these statistics reemphasizing the fact that most developers told us they consider themselves gainfully employed, you might be wondering what this means for your company. Here are a few ways this reality will impact your developer hiring strategy, and some tips to help you adapt to the fact that developers don’t quit jobs as frequently as other professionals.

A well-written job description can make or break the technical hiring process. Since it’s typically the first thing an applicant sees in the hiring process, it’s crucial to make it the best it can be. I’ve read my fair share of technical job listings and noticed a few common mistakes coming up again and again. Here are my three of the common flaws of developer job descriptions.   

Staff retention would be much less concerning for employers if all it took was above-average compensation, top-of-the-line equipment, and office perks like free lunch and a day spa for puppies. However, even when the stars align, and you’ve created an incredible place for developers to learn and grow, it’s unrealistic to assume that you’ll retain all of your developers until the end of time. While that shouldn’t stop you from doing everything you can to make your company a great place for developers to work, here are some of the more painful truths about staff retention that you should understand.

Some may argue that companies don’t really “own” their brands. The best they can do is influence their brand’s perception by positioning the company in a certain light in the minds of current and prospective employees. This if often referred to as employer branding. (But you already knew that, right?)