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Primarily I would say use recruiters, either external ones (you'll have very mixed results here, be prepared to sift through a ton of barely relevant CVs), or h

Primarily I would say use recruiters, either external ones (you'll have very mixed results here, be prepared to sift through a ton of barely relevant CVs), or hire a recruiter as part of your core team. Either way as a small company you're going to get very few candidates who seek you out and decide to apply, the job of a recruiter is to go out and find good candidates for you and then sell them on applying for a job with your company. Even the very largest companies like Google and Amazon use recruiters, they just happen to have an army of them on payroll rather than going out and hiring them on a piecemeal basis from external agencies. You also say the best candidates don't call a random recruiter, and you're right, they don't. The best candidates know one or two really good recruiters who can get them interviews lined up in the next few days and an offer on the table by the end of next week. The only other thing I've seen have some level of success is going to recruitment events targeted at the sort of people you want to hire. If you're looking for junior developers your local university will run recruitment fairs, and if you're looking for more experienced people there are a few events such as Silicon Milkroundabout (the worst name ever) where you can pay to get a stand. Either way be ready to commit whatever time you're going to be at the event itself, plus a few days to follow up with people you've spoken to.

bradfa 5y ago
I second this, it's been my experience at smaller companies, too. If you can find a smaller recruiter company, generally they have seemed to perform better than the larger name-brand recruiter companies in my experience. At least in the US, expect to pay a good recruiter who finds you a candidate you hire somewhere in the 20-25% of first year salary for the hire (ie: you hire a candidate for $100k/year total comp, you pay the recruiter $20-25k in fee for that hire). No matter what you do, you're going to sift through a LOT of candidates who are definitely not the right fit. I also concur with going to local university recruiting days. It's a whirlwind and you'll likely lose your voice after the first day talking to so many students, but it costs less than hiring a recruiter and you'll likely get enough good resumes and enough first interactions with the humans behind those good resumes to justify it. But also, just offer to pay your existing employees a non-trivial referral bonus for finding someone (like multiple thousands of USD, as compared to paying a recruiter this is super cheap). Sure, the incentives aren't perfect, but if you have someone you already trust as an employee or partner or past coworker referring someone they want to work with, odds are that candidate is going to be pretty good.
fuzzy2 5y ago
Recruitment fairs are very important either way; if people know your company exists, they're more likely to take a look. Maybe also host some user group meetups or whatever. Word of mouth is very powerful. My current employer (same town as previous) is small, and it was even smaller when I joined. Still, I heard about it somewhere and applied.

bradfa 5y ago

I second this, it's been my experience at smaller companies, too. If you can find a smaller recruiter company, generally they have seemed to perform better than the larger name-brand recruiter companies in my experience. At least in the US, expect to pay a good recruiter who finds you a candidate you hire somewhere in the 20-25% of first year salary for the hire (ie: you hire a candidate for $100k/year total comp, you pay the recruiter $20-25k in fee for that hire). No matter what you do, you're going to sift through a LOT of candidates who are definitely not the right fit. I also concur with going to local university recruiting days. It's a whirlwind and you'll likely lose your voice after the first day talking to so many students, but it costs less than hiring a recruiter and you'll likely get enough good resumes and enough first interactions with the humans behind those good resumes to justify it. But also, just offer to pay your existing employees a non-trivial referral bonus for finding someone (like multiple thousands of USD, as compared to paying a recruiter this is super cheap). Sure, the incentives aren't perfect, but if you have someone you already trust as an employee or partner or past coworker referring someone they want to work with, odds are that candidate is going to be pretty good.

fuzzy2 5y ago

Recruitment fairs are very important either way; if people know your company exists, they're more likely to take a look. Maybe also host some user group meetups or whatever. Word of mouth is very powerful. My current employer (same town as previous) is small, and it was even smaller when I joined. Still, I heard about it somewhere and applied.