The first step to hiring technical talent is understanding what’s important to them in a new job, and the Stack Overflow 2018 Global Developer Hiring Landscape Report provides a comprehensive look at what developers want and how they work in order to help companies attract the best talent. The report’s data comes from the 2018 Stack Overflow Global Developer Survey, an extensive survey of the programmer workforce, with over 100,000 responses from coders in 183 countries.
From this, we’ve found that hiring developers is becoming increasingly important in today’s business landscape, but there’s no denying it’s a difficult process. The demand for top tech talent is high and developers are notoriously passive when it comes to actually looking for new job opportunities. But here are 4 ways you might just get that developer you’ve always wanted.
1. Show them the money
What do developers look at when considering new jobs? It differs. Compensation was top of the list for men, but globally, women, gender non-binary and transgender developers rated the office environment and company culture as more important to them than salary when considering a new job. This is especially worth noting for companies looking to boost their demographic diversity.
What do they want to know about in terms of prospective jobs? Top of the list is salary and compensation, followed by details of which technologies they’d be working with, and opportunities for professional development coming in third.
2. Plan ahead
Over 94% of professional developers in the UK are employed at least part-time, making the developer employment rate much higher than those of other professions. Only 11% of developers in the UK are actively looking for a job, with 56% not actively looking, putting additional pressure on employers competing to hire tech talent.
But it’s not all bad news for recruiters. UK developers change jobs quite frequently with 33% of them having changed their jobs less than one year ago, while 21% changed jobs between 1 and 2 years ago.
What we’ve also found, is that it’s important to plan hires ahead as a third of developers think it takes new recruits at least one month to become fully productive, 45% think 1-3 months and 17% 3-6 months.
3. Give them a clear growth path
Coding is a young person profession with 30% of developers have only been working professionally for under two years, and 27% working between 3 to 5 years. What we’ve found is that they are hungry for change and progression as 34% of them see themselves working in a different or more specialized role in five years’ time. While actually, 26% want to start up their own company in the future.
4. Embrace AI
Developers are mostly optimistic about the future possibilities offered by AI with almost 3/4 of respondents saying that they are more excited than worried about it. Automation of jobs is the least significant danger of artificial intelligence according to developers, with over 80% saying that is not their biggest worry. The concerns that developers have depended on the kind of coding work they do. Data scientists are 1.5 times more likely to consider issues around algorithmic fairness dangerous.
Developers are just like every other specialist role, and finding ways to recruit and attract them will require the same basic principles as recruiting any other type of role. But Developers are a wanted commodity and a scarce resource, so recruiting them will be no easy task.
About the author: Sean Bave is the General Manager & Vice President of Stack Overflow Talent, helping employers engage with the worlds developers and developers find the right job.
