Almost every company employs software engineers or is planning to in the near future.

And the number of number of software developers employed is only growing. By 2030, the amount of software engineering roles is expected to have grown by 22%.

The demand is high for developers. But the supply of developers is not catching up fast enough. That means we can speak of a talent market scarcity; an insufficient supply (talent) to fill the demand (open jobs).

The result of this is that it has become harder and harder to find the right engineering talent and win them for you.

This guide serves as your practical playbook to learn new sourcing strategies and methods to find, reach and attract engineers.

Software engineer, who you’re talking to

Recruiting talent starts with understanding who you want to recruit in the first place.

A software engineer, sometimes called developer, coder or programmer, is typically a real problem solver who can work systematically through complex problems.

Some developers are focussed on building new things, and some are focussed on maintaining systems and making incremental improvements.

In this guide we primarily focus on the developers who build new software.

Characteristics of software developers:

• They are self learning (44% of developers are self-taught) and they are excited about complex problems
• Most of them code not only for work but also as a hobby: 57% of developers learned to code as kids
• Developers prioritize good work-life balance over salary and benefits
• They value the people they work with: developers mostly leave jobs because of poor management

Possible sourcing strategy for engineers

Software engineers are hard to find and hard to get. Experienced developers get a lot of messages from recruiters, in some cases five or ten messages per day.

What does NOT work anymore is doing what everyone is already doing; going on LinkedIn and relentlessly searching and sending InMails.

To find engineers and win them for you, you have to be searching for engineers in different sources, reach out based on their preferred contact details, personalize outreach and make an attractive offer.

This guide will help you based on these 5 steps:

Step 1. Explore your talent pool

Step 2. Search and select

Step 3. Find out more about the candidate

Step 4. Reach out and engage

Step 5. Make an attractive offer

Step 1. Explore your talent pool

To get a decent view on who you’re trying to find and how hard it is to attract them, it helps to map out the current talent market.

A talent mapping is an overview of the total addressable talent market for a given job compared to the demand for that talent.

Below is a summary of the steps to follow to do a talent mapping for engineers.

The outcome of a talent map for an engineering role is that you know how achievable the hiring goal is and what kind of limitations you can expect in the sourcing process.

Below is a summary of steps for a talent mapping (for a detailed guide refer to this complete guide to talent mapping).

1. The hiring goal.

Determine the hiring goal together with the hiring manager. Get the key questions answered before you deep dive into the actual search and analytics.

Questions to discuss with the hiring manager:

• What position does the hiring manager need to fill?
• Why does she need someone in the position?
• What is the number of hires that she needs?
• And in what time frame?

2. The profile.

Determine what the profile of the desired candidate should look like.

Translate the mental picture of the hiring manager of the ideal candidate to a set of job criteria.

The required high level profile can look like this:

• Job title - engineer (including synonyms like developer)
• Key words - required: Angular, JavaScript, Typescript, RxJS. Optional: Jest, Sass, Karma
• Seniority level: 8+ years experience with the mentioned required technologies

3. Exploratory search.

Do a search based on the defined job criteria.

Is the available talent pool big enough to achieve your hiring goal? If not, discuss the limitations with the hiring manager and remove or adjust job criteria.

You can use a tool to determine the size of the talent pool.

4. Validate.

Validate if the profiles resulting from your initial search are indeed within the envisioned position.

Make a randomized selection of profiles by selecting eg 10 - 20 profiles out of the entire set of found profiles.

Do this across all search results pages to adjust for bias by the algorithmic ranking (of eg LinkedIn).

5. Compare with demand

Enrich the talent mapping by including talent demand. How many organizations are looking for these talents?

Look on job boards for similar jobs to get an idea of how competitive the market is for these talents and how much demand has changed over time.

Don’t forget that a lot of recruiters are pro-actively sourcing and not necessarily posting on job boards.

If you can find data on searches, include that data in your analysis. If not, note that in your talent mapping.

Talent mapping result:

Step 2. Search and select

Now you have your talent map ready and you know in which talent pool you are recruiting in, you can start your actual search.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when you're searching for engineers. 

Choose your platforms and tools wisely

First you need to make a selection of platforms where your candidate can be found on.

There are many online places where engineers hang out and can be found.

This is an overview of some of the sources where engineers are active.

Overview of engineering platforms 📜

• GitHub, all engineers
• Stack Overflow, all engineers
• Reddit, all engineers
• HackerRank, all engineers
• AngelList, startup minded engineers
• Xing, German area engineers
• Kaggle, data (science) engineers
• Medium, engineers with a voice
• Tumblr, all engineers
• ResearchGate, (data) research focussed engineers
• GitLab, all engineers
• Coderwall, all engineers
• Dev.to, all engineers
• StackShare, all engineers

Your best bets are GitHub, Stack Overflow and LinkedIn.

Read more on how to source these platforms here:

How to recruit on GitHub

How to recruit on Stack Overflow

One search engine that searches all platforms