Mohammad Forouzani

Hiring Web Developers

Posted on 06. May, 2011 by forouzani in Management, Web Development

When it comes to health they say, “you are what you eat” – if you translate this into the business world, you end up with “you’re potential is only capped by the talent you hire”. I know this all too well as the CTO of a web development company based in London – for Virvo, hiring the best web developers is a critical component for being successful.

During my day job, I also come across clients which start working with us as the tech arm of their startup, but eventually become big enough to justify an in-house tech team. At this stage, I often get asked how they can hire web developers (although this conversation usually occurs after they have already tried and failed to hire multiple times already).

As unfortunate as it is, the IT job industry in the UK is run by recruitment companies – if you want to hire, you turn to one of the many recruitment agents serving your industry. If you cant stomach the 33% or similar referral fee, or just want to hussle (i.e. not pay huge recruitment agent fees), you need to post on job boards manually: reed.co.uk, cwjobs.co.uk, planetrecruit.co.uk are some of the main job boards frequented by IT experts. The job boards are not cheap, but they are much cheaper than recruitment agents (a typical job costs £100-£500 per month on each of these boards). There are some companies trying to change the dominance of recruitment agents in the job scene, but they are still a minority. There are also company specific job boards – some good startup ones are the Techcrunch job board or the 37 Signals job board too – if your a startup and want developers who are really hungry – these boards are much better sources for entrepreneurial minded developers.

Job boards are good, and they bring in many CVs, but if you really want to get talented developers – you need to headhunt and be willing to pay above market rates, because talented developers are always employed, and rarely looking for work. The best tool I have found for headhunting is Linkedin, although face-to-face encounters such as tech conferences and meetups often allow for a level of acquainting that simply cant be achieved through digital means alone. Linkedin is good for introducing yourself, making coffee appointments, and generally getting into contact with developers – this can also be applied to github, stackoverflow, or any other developer community.

Of course if your a company like Google or Facebook, you dont really need to seek top talent as much – everyone wants to work for these companies, including all the top talent. They have other problems – like how to detect the best talent from thousands of applicants.

Tags: headhunting, hiring, Hiring Web Developers, tech team