Speaker 1: Let me give you some of my secret recruiting tips as a manager, one of the most challenging and time-consuming parts of your job will be hiring new people and attracting new people to your team, whether your team is growing or you need to replace people who have left for whatever reason. Odds are you're always going to be recruiting somebody and it's very, very hard these days to attract good talent. There's just not enough to go around. So here's some tips that have worked for me. It's still hard, but at least these will give you an advantage. First of all, make sure your company's recruiters are your best friends. So be nice to them, you know, talk to them a lot, spend a lot of time with them, make sure you, they know that you care about what they're doing and you appreciate what they're doing. If they're in a situation where some other team, uh, passes on a candidate that they think is actually very strong, maybe they'll think of you and send that candidate your way to be evaluated instead. All right. They can pay off. And, uh, most recruiters are pretty cool people actually. So I'm hanging out with them. Isn't a bad thing. Make sure you devote the necessary time to recruiting. This is a very important part of your job. Again, it's all about getting the right people on the bus and keeping them there, right? So make sure you're taking the time to make sure your team is full of a players and that you're taking the time to find them. If you bring on somebody who's dragging down the level of your team, your team is going to resent that you're not going to have a happy team. You're not going to have a productive team. So you do need to put in the time to take care of this. And furthermore, I can guarantee you that your boss is going to be very looking very closely at your own head count and how quickly you're filling it because they are evaluating you on your ability to attract talent to your team as well. So to attract that talent, you want to hone your sales pitch. Why is your team awesome? Why should somebody join your team? Right? So think about what that is, right? So how do you communicate very succinctly to somebody why they should join your group? Talented software engineers have a lot of choices and where they can work and maybe they just want to stay where they are. You need to present a really compelling reason for them to take the risk of leaving something else and going to work for you instead. So come up with a way to make that sound exciting. Hopefully you can do that. You know, if not, then you got a lot to think about. And the other thing too, is that if your team really is that awesome, maybe you should work to make it that way. Right? If it really is awesome, you won't have to recruit as much. So if people believe that their team is awesome and it really is awesome, they're not going to leave. Right? So the less attrition you have, the less recruiting you have to do. So it's kind of a double edged sword. Some ideas for getting creative with sourcing candidates. So the hardest part is just finding people to interview these days. There's just so few of them to go around, like I said, so you got to get creative and the more creative you are, the more chance you have of beating out your peers and landing good candidates. So look at unconventional sources for high, for finding good engineers that might want to come your way. And if you hit them with your sales pitch, they might at least come talk to you and do an interview. Interns and college hires are kind of the go-to these days. It's so hard to find experienced people that a lot of people are turning to intern programs. So if you don't have an intern program, maybe you should get one because a lot of interns do convert to full-time employees once they graduate. And since you've already had a chance to evaluate their performance and see how good they are and what their potential is, that's a pretty low risk hiring decision there if you had a good intern. So you might think interns are a big time suck and they do require a lot of management, but it can be worth it in the end. The time it takes to manage an intern is probably less than the time it takes you to try to hire an experienced person. Also provide incentives for employee referrals. Most jobs these days are just based on who you know, right? So make sure your employees have some reason to tell their friends why they should come work for you as well. And you can do whatever is within the bounds of legality there to promote that. Obviously, if you're going to be offering any sort of like monetary incentive or anything like that, you need to clear that with your management, maybe with HR, but any incentive you can provide for employees to refer people to work with you. That is usually one of the top sources of new candidates that I found on my own teams. Some other unconventional ideas, searching GitHub. If there are specific types of code or open source projects that are relevant to what you do, see who's contributing to them. Maybe they're looking for a full-time job, you know, it's a good way to find people. Academic papers, same thing. If you're doing some sort of specific area of research in your team, find who's writing the best papers in that field. Maybe they're looking to get out of academia and get an industry job. Social media, social media groups, where do your potential employees hang out online? Think about them. Where would you go to find them online? Go there. You know, you can't be too salesy obviously, but let your presence known that you're a hiring manager at whatever company it is, and this is what you're doing. And if somebody is interested in joining your team, they'll know how to find you at least. You can also host or sponsor a local technical events or hackathons. This is a good idea, right? So if you promote some sort of event that's related to what you do, people might come out of the woodwork just to do it for fun and people who do what you're hiring people to do for fun. Wow. That's a great hire. That's the kind of person you want working for your team, right? So hosting these events again, it takes some effort, but it can be a good source of leads. Internal hires as well. Some people view that as cheating, but if you are offering a better employment experience and other teams in your company, then I think it's totally fair game to allow people to transfer into your team if they want to. So again, if you're, if you're being a good manager and you have a team where people are happy and productive, word will spread and people will come your way. If you have an effective team, you will rarely have to hire externally because you'll have a steady supply of internal transfers beating on your door. That's where you want to be. So that comes down to being a good manager at the end of the day. Similar to the event idea is hosting internal or external tech talks. So one idea is to have sort of a weekly or monthly learning series where you talk about some new paper or some new technological development or some new technology that might be relevant to what you're doing. Open that up to the whole company, right? So this is really a trick for attracting internal transfers at the end of the day for internal talks. You can also host external talks as well. You know, you can do this externally and open it up to the entire community and get more leads that way as well. So just make sure that whatever your talk is, you're opening and closing it off with a pitch to apply to your team and make yourself available to talk to people who might be interested after the show. You can also go on tour. I had to do this a lot. Well, really takes a lot out of you, but sometimes you just have to go to local hiring events and your recruiting staff will usually orchestrate this for you. But if you're asked to take a trip to Milwaukee to attend some hiring event there, you got to go where you got to go. You know, not all the engineers are going to be living near you and you might have to go and find them yourself. So again, a lot of effort, a lot of expense, but I've had a lot of good hires that way where you go to, especially cities that people don't think about. I've heard a lot of great people from Minnesota actually from, from Minneapolis and a lot of people kind of forget that there's good engineers there, but there are. So take a trip to Minneapolis, you might find some good engineers. Also remember remote work is a thing now. So you know, for obvious reasons that we don't want to remember, remote working has become more popular than it used to be. So that opens up the whole world to you. Potentially, if your employer is on board with people working remotely permanently, then you are no longer geographically restricted or limited by people's ability to move where your job is. That opens up a huge pool of talent that wasn't there before. So use that to your advantage.