5 tips for hiring the best developers

I have been recruiting developers for 13 years now and although the technology has changed during that time, what candidates want has largely remained unchanged.

1 — Salary

There’s no getting away from it, salary still comes top.

If you want the best developers, you have to pay well.

2 — Use the latest tech

The sad fact is that no employee will stay with you forever (ok, there may be the odd one that does), therefore they will always have one eye on the next role and what will appear on their CV.

Let’s face it, no one wants to spend their days working on legacy systems in old code frameworks that take a lot of effort to maintain.

3 — Provide decent hardware

Not such an obvious one this, but having good equipment that is responsive will not only improve productivity it will also improve employee morale.

The days of a developer justifying their youtube view history as “I was waiting for my code to compile” will be a thing of the past.

4 — Reduce red tape

Good developers want to solve complex problems, they don’t want to be tied down with company politics that prevent them from getting the job done.

I would also add to this one, limit meetings.

Whilst meetings and sprint kick-offs / retros / stand-ups are all positive things to ensure a project keeps ticking along, if these dominate the day (rather than writing awesome code) then developers will get frustrated and ultimately leave.

5 — Be flexible

Pre-Covid-19 we always had a policy of no remote working. One thing the pandemic has taught us, is that remote working can work well.

I know in our organisation, we have a real mix of people that love it and people that can’t wait to be back in the office.

When the world does return to some sort of normality, I am hopeful we can be flexible and support our employees whether they prefer to be in the office / at home / a mix of both.

Being flexible not only with work location, but working hours also helps.

Personally, I work a lot better first thing in the morning (I’ll probably end up writing an article about how I manage my day soon), whereas I know others are night owls that work into the evening.

If you can be flexible with work hours, you can often get the best out of people.

What works for us, is setting some “core” hours that everyone needs to be online working, and then be flexible about when they start / take a break / finish.

Good luck recruiting and retaining! Here’s a thought….what if now I have given all my best tips, I can no longer recruit the best….what have I done?!