Actual salary range. Important. A "competitive salary" in 2010 for an embedded systems designer is not the 50th percentile for HTML coders from a 1996 salary su

Actual salary range. Important. A "competitive salary" in 2010 for an embedded systems designer is not the 50th percentile for HTML coders from a 1996 salary survey. If you have incredibly specialized skills that you've been unable to hire for, competitive is going to be 6 figures and not the low end. No long lists of very narrow technologies each which really only require a few days to get up to speed. Brief description of work environment such as offices with doors that close, book account or some sort of library, reasonably modern computers with dual monitors each at least 1920x1080 plus a laptop, and no complaints about getting whatever text editor and tools the developer prefers to work with. Relocation paid. If you are looking to hire someone who is good and with specific skills, he is not in your weird city nor does he wish to subsidize your cost of hiring. Pay for cost of interviewing for final candidates that you need to come to site interviews. For those ones you'll want to sell the area as well since they have no idea why anyone would want to live there, wherever 'there' is. Not paying the above two tells the candidate you probably won't be able to make payroll either. Be very willing to receive screening calls that ask lots of personal specific questions and answer them enthusiastically, just like you are trying to sell an expensive item to a very important customer. And finally, don't rely only on ads. For specialized skills you need recruitment, and there's no way to figure out who you want to woo unless the recruiting is done by someone who knows development, not some know-nothing recruiter from an agency, nor some HR drone. Again, recruitment has nothing to do with recruiters. Recruitment is saying you need someone with the ability to build System X, then you find someone who is already doing that and pay him $20 million to buy his company as a talent acquisition. I am no longer an employee but an owner. When I was an employee I looked at ads but found them useless for many of the above reasons. As an owner I write ads and do recruitment and we have little difficulty hiring exactly the talent we need. Pretty much all companies that have problems finding talent aren't offering enough money and are not good places to work in many ways. Places that pay competitive and are good places to work have no shortage of highly qualified applicants. Yes, you'll also get a lot of unqualified applicants, but how to tell the difference is a topic for another day. (In short, if you can't tell the difference you're doomed since you'll hire a bunch of duds and then the few with actual talent will leave because of the clustering effect: very talented people hate to work with idiots.)