How we look for (and why we find) cool developers. HR experience and tips for job seekers

The Skyeng team is actively growing: over the past year only the staff of developers has increased almost five times. Like all other high-tech companies, we are constantly experiencing a shortage of personnel - simply because there are not enough high-class specialists on the market. Today we will tell how this problem is solved by our HR department, where and how it is looking for developers, well, we will share a couple of tips for those readers who for some reason cannot find a decent job in the IT industry.

Maximum "exhaust"

Our advantage on hh.ru is the absence of restrictions on geography: our work is remote, we can search for people in different parts of the country and the world. You should not rely on responses on such resources (devoid of industry specialization) - there will be few of them, and there are even fewer good ones, but there are developers there, so we set the filters and look for them ourselves. This also does not always help; we parse the HeadHunter base and do targeted mailing.


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For example, now we need specialists who know PHP and AngularJS: we set filters on these keywords plus experience from 6 years, find all the people who answer our request, and send them a beautiful letter about our cool Vimbox platform. The fact is that serious developers are scared away by the word “school”, they think that we have just a business card site and nothing interesting for them, so we need to tell them that we have really difficult and interesting tasks. On such an interest list, 20 recipients come to do a test task.

The same scheme on "My Circle". You can watch the responses and look for yourself. We had a wild experience when we manually wrote a letter to each applicant, even hired one of them.

Recommendations work very well. Recently we are trying to focus on this method. For example, a person from one startup came to us, where they work with approximately the same stack as ours and brought a friend - we paid the first one a bonus.

In general, getting people out of crumbling companies is quite constructive. For example, placement of vacancies on vc.ru is necessary for the company's HR image, but rarely gives a direct exhaust; However, this resource is being monitored for the start-ups that are going bust, and immediately begin to hunt for their heads. It is important to react in time and catch the right person.


Sample news on vc.ru, which is worth paying attention

Other sources

The above are the main, most productive ways to find the right people. But it is impossible to be limited to them: other sources may have a very small “exhaust”, but they also happen to find diamonds. Below are the resources with which we have experience.

* Target for FB and VK. We launched recently, we are targeting Ukraine, Belarus, Russia with PHP interests. • AngularJS • Symfony • PostgreSQL • Programming • Startups • IT, etc. for men 23-40 years old. While we cannot share the results, besides, the ad leads to our page on My Circle, which is not very good, since we cannot evaluate the effectiveness of this method. You need to make your landing page.

* It turns out to find employees through sites for freelancers like upwork.com , but this happens infrequently. On this and similar resources, applicants are sharpened for design work; there is a risk that the right person simply does not understand the specifics of global commercial projects. For such people, one has to look at whether a person worked in well-known companies: if so, then ok, if he was a freelancer all his life, he did not work in a team - probably he is not ours.

* Recently hosted on the platform ustart.pro , while not a particularly useful resource, it just starts. There you can place a page with information about the project , then to give links to it, but not very much as a tool to attract employees.



* Djinni - an anonymous job search for developers. This is a resume summary, we write to anyone who suits us. Someone more abruptly here can cost 500 euros, junior can be found for free. In general, the exhaust is small, but we managed to find one good developer here (spent $ 400).

* In social networks there are relevant groups on Facebook - “job openings”, “developers”, etc. - There are many such groups, but the developers themselves never hang out there. This is a useless thing, it is easier to find the “recommendations for a bonus” group and post a vacancy there: everyone's friends are Euchars, if you ask — if you bring in such a developer — you might succeed.

* There are specialized channels in Telegram and Slack, their heaps, but if a recruiter girl comes in and posts a job, she is immediately showered with tomatoes and loaded with technical issues. It is better to ask developers or team leads to throw fishing rods in their channels. This is not the main way of hiring, but as an extra can sometimes work.

* Meta-search engine AmazingHiring collects candidates and information about them from everywhere - LinkedIn, GitHub, StackOverflow, etc. - and offers contacts; our task is to write letters to them and add them to their social networks. Several times they took a free test week, while the exhaust is zero. But the project itself is very interesting (this search engine is a former internal product of GMS, the most adequate recruitment agency in the IT market), we must follow its development and continue to try.

* Another getcoder.io meta search engine is similar to AmazingHiring, only cheaper and fewer compatriots.



* Low-spad resources from neighboring countries - dev.by (very sad) and Ukrainian dou.ua (there are good responses, but in general, not quite for us).

And we choose potential employees among students. If a student indicates that he works in IT, we immediately offer him something.

Pros and cons

Udalenka - on the one hand, a huge advantage, because not everyone wants to go to the office. Developers are often introverts, easily experiencing a lack of communication. But there is also a minus: we often encounter a prejudice that the remoteness is a lie, a scam, etc. Personal letters with explanations of tasks help, with mentioning famous people in our company with whom to work. Of course, we are not Yandex, which often go to work because of the prestige of the name, but also have already earned some kind of reputation.

At the same time, the savings from the remote are minimal - only due to the workplace in the office and office equipment. After all, a senior developer in Krasnoyarsk knows how much it costs, and in the same way he will want from 150 thousand, as well as people of similar size in Moscow.

Where to find work for a programmer?

It is necessary to understand that good developers sit a little without work. They are attacked by a pack of recruiters at a time when they are just beginning to think about changing the place of application of their talents. Middle and Senior levels can just sit back - they will find themselves through dating, through linked-in, through leads; There is no situation where a good developer does not know where to go.

The paragraph above is almost a direct quote from our HR. It shows that for the senior-level asocial developer, the chance to find a job simply by placing a resume on hh.ru and not completing the test task is small — no one will look for it there, but if he finds it, he won't believe if his name is not heard. Meanwhile, there are cool developers in the world who don’t hang out at conferences, do not blog and don’t have thousands of Facebook followers: they just sit and make a cool product, for example, in a technology company from the dental industry known in the medical, but unknown in IT circles. How to be it?

The answer is quite simple: you need to make a list of companies in which I would like to work, and contact them. Send a resume, and even better, try to temporarily overcome your asociality and find some contacts outside the HR department through your friends. For example, in our case, we can safely write to co-founder Khariton Matveev on Facebook - he will be very happy, and if you are really cool, you will quickly agree, bypassing the “damaged phone”. Given the current very serious shortage of quality personnel, the probability of success of such an approach is close to 1.

As for less experienced people, they should, firstly, make sure that their resumes posted on sites like hh.ru contain all relevant keywords for search and parsing, and also outline the range of interesting vacancies and companies and write in their HR departments. Such candidates need to be prepared for an unpaid test task, usually without explaining the errors, because companies do not want to disclose the criteria for their assessments. In addition, it is important to soberly assess their qualifications. As already mentioned, recruiters communicate with each other, and if you fail tests, you can ruin your reputation right at the start of your career. Just learning some technology or tool? So write - these people are also often in demand.

And a couple of tips about the summary:



- do not forget to specify the mail and employment; Also, you make life easier for recruiters, if you immediately indicate the desired salary. A very useful link to the githab;



- when describing the experience: specify the duration and the company (project). Be sure to write what you did (what tasks you faced), what technologies you used, what tools / environment;



- do not forget about the section about me - it would be great if you briefly go through the tools and technologies you had to work with, say a few words about the most interesting projects, and write about what it would be interesting to work with and what expect from a new employer. In the end, you can write about the hobby and what you are interested in besides the development.

A separate topic is job search abroad. We are thinking of writing an article about this article; there is a blessing among our students who set this task for themselves and cope with it. Please leave a comment below if you want to read this text!