How to find and recruit a developer for your long-term project, startup or business without paying recruiters or outsource companies.
Alexandru Acea @alexacea "Office Vides" Unsplash

How to find and recruit a developer for your long-term project, startup or business without paying recruiters or outsource companies.

To save you time on research I made this guide. The techniques explained here have always worked for me. Enjoy!

How I learned this - through trial and error. 

Why I learned this - because I was building a project and was in desperate need to speed things up.

Why would you do this yourself - because then you don’t have to pay recruiters. 

Why Eastern Europe - because you get more value than when you hire locals in the US, UK or EU. Also they have the same mentality. 

Why not use freelance website - because devs who spend hours looking for job on a freelance website will be doing the same when they should be writing your code, freelancers are good for short term projects.

Why it’s not enough to just post a job offer on a website like glassdoor or similar? - because it's faster if you take initiative and reach out to them and not wait. It’s best if you take time to learn about them and show you did your homework when you approached them. 

Here is what you will need to prepare:

Photo by Ichio on Unsplash

1.CTO 

If you are not CTO yourself you probably know CTOs are busy people. The busiest of all. But also CTO is probably the person who will be interviewing new candidates. They may see this as waste of their precious time unless they know that candidates shown to them are carefully shortlisted - it’s your job to get the message across. 

For this reason it is important to make sure CTO sets some time aside to review new candidates while they are still “warm” as their CVs come in. Good developers who are ready to consider a new job are not going to wait around for long. CTO or the person conducting the interviews should be ready to give professional feedback to candidates who were invited to the interview but did not get the offer. 

2. Job description 

You can download it here. Make a copy, erase the example descriptions and write your own. 

Once you get a positive reply from a candidate you will send him the link to this job description. 

But first you should provide as many details as possible.

I will explain why each part of the job description is important. 

Offering candidate a job is like cold selling. In order to build trust it’s not enough just to say what technology stack the person will be working with. They make a decision on a number of different factors which you may consider obvious or unimportant. What matters to them is: the project, the mission, long term perspectives (to grow, to relocate etc), the people they will be working with, the kinds of functionality they will be implementing, some people like figuring out difficult issues and some like to work with what they are already very good at.

  • Remote or Office? 

Remote option is much more attractive for majority of candidates. 

If it’s an office position you should mention the office location.

e.g. if you don’t want to show entire address say something like “Kiev. Good, downtown location” but it’s best to provide full address preferably with pictures. 

  • Team. 

How many people are there in the team the developer will be working in? What are their roles? 

Provide links to the CTO’s linkedin profile and maybe other team members.

  • Daily tasks. 

Please take time to describe what the candidate will be working on.

Examples: “develop new functionality”, “integrate payment systems”, “planning architecture” 

  • Project progress. 

If it’s a project from scratch it’s worth highlighting, it’s usually the most compelling factor. If it’s not a new project you should say at what stage it is. e.g. “After successful launch of our MVP we need to rewrite existing functionality in a scalable way etc” 

  • Equipment. 

Are you offering your own equipment or candidate con use his own computer? This is sometimes done for security and copy right reasons.

  • Schedule. 

If this is a remote position and you are in a very different time zone you should mention that the candidate would need to have at least 4-6 hours overlap with your time zone.

If it’s an office position you should say what is a standard working day for you and whether it’s flexible or not. By flexible I mean candidates can start and finish their work day whenever they want as long as they work 8 hours a day.

  • Perks.

Sick leaves, Medical insurance, Vacations. 

e.g. 21 paid days of vacation. Trips.

  • Technologies. 

Technologies used on the project, 

Technologies candidate will be working with (those are tho ones he has to be proficient at), 

Technologies that would be a plus - either because they are used on the project by other team members so it would be easier to communicate if candidate is familiar with them, either because he should be able to learn them in the nearest future. 

  • Salary expectations

This information may go or may not on the Job description, but you should be ready for question. Here is the reference with average salaries for different technologies, professions and years of experience and regions of Ukraine: https://jobs.dou.ua/salaries/ you can change language to English at the bottom left corner of the page. 

3.Register at Turbohiring 

Monthly subscription is like 20$ so it’s worth it.

You will need this website to search for developers and their skype, email, phone number, linkedin, and maybe other social network profiles like twitter.

Lifehack: trial version is sometimes enough to fill in a position. 

You can filter them by:

  • technologies
  • years of experience 
  • location 

4.Register at Djinni (Optional)

Djinni is an anonymous job search for developers. It’s a very convenient service for developers who don’t want to reveal their name and surname and be able to search for a job. There you can see their profiles with lists of skills but without names. Once a developer receives an invite to a project he/she is ready to discuss he/she will open his/her contact details to you.

Fill in your company details and job description. 

Beware! Djinni’s monetization works is based on successful hires. Once a developer is hired by you, he will report this hire to Djinni and you will have to pay them a certain fee. Around one third of developer’s salary. You can get away with this once, but they call it Karma, so I personally avoid using this website, but only because I am a strong believer in efficiency of direct out reach. 


5.Register at DOU (Optional)

Fill in your company profile.

This is optional, but you should have it if you recruit for your office in Ukraine.

You might want to post a job description on this website. Not because you expect people to see it and immediately reach out to you, but because this place is respected by developers in Ukraine. 

If a company has a profile on DOU people tend to have more trust in it. So when a candidate says “ok, tell me more about this offer” you will send them a job description posted on this website, instead of just a google doc. Although google doc is ok. 

Job post will cost you 20$ on this website. 

Beware! DOU is strong dev community, the way you treat candidates will be reflected on this website, any comments, likes or dislikes cannot be deleted. If you operate in Ukraine you better make sure you treat your candidates well otherwise one of them can leave a nasty comment about your company on this website.

6.Prepare a text. 

Skype: skype only allows a short intro text 60 characters long. You will send this text when you reach out to a candidate via skype;

Linkeid: same as skype message. 

Email: can be any length.

See examples

Now that you are ready, let’s take action!

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Follow these simple steps to find your ideal candidate:

  1. Login to your account on Turbohiring.
  2. Apply filters to find the right candidate pool:
  3. Years of experience - if you are looking for a senior developer then pay attention to the difference in years of commercial experience and education, this is often the case with the technologies like Java, Java dev can be junior but with 6 years of experience because 5 of them he spent studying Java at University. Whereas JavaScript devs with 6 years of experience are probably senior devs because all 6 years they spent working with this technology on real projects. 
  4. Technologies - you may need to play around with it because some technologies can be spelled differently, e.g. react.js, reactjs, react js.
  5. Location - if you are looking for someone who could work at your office in Kiev you should not only look for people in Kiev, because you can miss out on great talents who would consider relocation if they like your project.
  6. Scan the list of candidates, check out their Linkedin profiles. 
  7. Send a skype invite message. 
  8. Send a linkedin invite with personalized message. 
  9. Send a eamil message. 
  10. When they say “Tell me more” - send them a link to the full job description on the google doc or on dou website. 
  11. When interested candidate has enough information and ready to schedule an interview make a group chat with the CTO or the interviewer. Agree on specific time and send calendar invites to both of them the candidate and the interviewer.
  12. It’s good practice to have a short interview first, if all is good, schedule a proper long technical interview. 
  13. When you feel like you found a perfect fit - send them an offer. 


Good Luck!

Jay S.

I help experienced Techies land sponsorship jobs abroad???? ???? | Ex Solutions Consultant | Founder @ Sponsored Techies

5 年

Valuable read, I couldn't have put this any better! Thanks man.?

Max Filippov

Managing Partner at GR Capital

5 年

Very comprehensive guide!) You must be very brave to steal a job from at least half of "recruiters" with this))

John Greenacre

Gaming Consultant at iGAM Consulting

5 年

Alex Hermann I can whole-heartedly agree with this part "you probably know CTOs are busy people. The busiest of all." ;)

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