Google announced recently how much investment they put into recruiting – how they handled their talent. If there’s anything to take away from that its that you have to work on your own startups branding in 3 ways:
1) founder story
2) compelling story
3) A job description that talks 90% about what you can offer your potential new employee not what skills you are demanding. Include a particularly challenging problem the person is likely to deal with, these guys want something to stick their teeth into. Talk about new tech they could be using and get exposure for.
Above all in these times, be flexible – you aren’t going to be able to poach someone awesome in a few weeks that will take months, even a year in some cases before they are willing to seriously talk about a career change. In the meantime don’t sit around and wait.
Not having a lead developer can hinder the chances of taking on some awesome newbies, out of school, out of bootcamps.
Startups with the resources are hiring a certain segment of dev bootcampers out of the gate – who are they picking?
1) Folks who have already been programming and have experience
2) folks who were say in more traditional roles such as regular engineering or a different vertical sector and took a career change and continued to code on their own, worked on side projects, wrote blogs on their experience. – these guys are being snapped up as interns by some big names, not all dev bootcampers were ex teachers, or accountants attempting to take a drastic career change. The most promising are those who go to expand their knowledge and you can see it as an educational and career progression not this leap into the unknown. The profiles look very difficult. I’ve often seen them return and also go further into entrepreneurial bootcamps. Great thing with these guys is to acknowledge and be ok that they may want to start their own company so why not learn on the job.
Im hiring right now for Ruby devs(which is actually constant – but differs from client to client, and i’ve got the toughest job because it is an immediate need and I have to juggle building a pipeline for the company as well as try and reactive recruit ruby which is fairly impossible. I don’t have a huge budget for this one.
What i’m going to do is push for a lead to be taken on, then thrown in some really bright, intelligent hard working and quick learning developers even with javascript, who have expressed a clear interest in working with Rails. I just have to rigorously check that they really are up for the challenge – this is a vertical learning curve. (and i have to run it past the founder – BUT be strong and confident and make them listen – otherwise that req is going to still be open in 6 months.
Its a great chance to shape the employees you have and grab them before they simply ignore any recruiting emails.
Last comment – don’t poo poo dev bootcamp just make your criteria selective, dev experience, contributions, blogs, dev bootcamp followed by side projects, and they are already in tech.
The trend is that if you have a lead, its likely to be that hiring experienced boot camp grads (if sourced properly) with the right background will still allow production deadlines to be met, they learn on the job and are shaped by you. Take 2 for the job of one – it’ll get done in time. They will want to work for you because few places can offer any training at all. I’ve noticed that once they’ve had 6 months interning, they end up getting snapped up by the big boys in series B and C – so this is a trend worth paying attention to
rubybhattacharya 