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by zintinio5 3030 days ago
First, what does your careers page look like? Sometimes the job description is unclear or you might be filtering out qualified people. Second, mid-senior is really tough to hire for, I just experienced it first-hand while hiring for my last employer. Regardless of experience level, you are forced to compete on two fronts: interesting work, or high compensation. Mid-senior devs can afford to be very picky and if something seems a little bit off, they'll look elsewhere.

Have you partnered yet with a recruiting company? I personally just went through TripleByte and they could use a few more NYC partners. They do their own pre-selection of candidates to save everyone involved a lot of time. Another good one is FunctionalWorks. Meetups are also pretty good for making organic connections with higher-quality devs. Every time I go to a tech meetup at least 3 or 4 employers are represented and hiring.

2 comments

Our careers page is https://www.sevenfifty.com/careers/full_stack, but we really only use it as a link our team members can send personal referrals. Our main pipelines are Hired, Vettery, HN who's hiring post, recruiters, and referrals. Posting on job boards has historically never led to anyone stellar and a disproportionate number of candidates who couldn't pass fizzbuzz.

Recruiters have been a mixed bag. They're very time consuming, but tend to have better access to people who are currently employed and passively looking, which is where most of the best mid-senior people are.

I've done some speaking at meetups and we made a junior hire off of one. I've found the more niche meetups to be more likely to have stronger people, the more general web / rails / ruby ones are dominated by recent boot camp grads looking for their first gig (nothing against those people, we hire them, but we also desire more senior people too).

HN's who's hiring has been great for finding sharp junior people with high potential.

The job description is to-the-point and doesn't ask for anything out of the ordinary. Other than mentioning a CS degree, I give it two-thumbs up.

Hiring is definitely a tough nut to crack. Personal referrals are by far the best source to get solid people quickly, but it's also a finite pool. Recruiters are definitely a mixed bag. I would suggest also sending a representative to a job fair (face-to-face still works!). It sounds like you're doing the best you can besides creating some really unique opportunity.

We had some luck bringing in people interested in functional programming, but ended up having to go heavy on junior devs since that's what's easy to hire for. We had some mid-level and a couple senior people which were hard to come by.

It's going to be a grind no matter how you approach it. All I can suggest is to make a really compelling offer, technologically, financially, or otherwise. Also consider finding older developers interested in part-time or remote work.

>what does your careers page look like?

This also applies to all the companies in general. If a company uses Applicant Tracking Systems like Taleo, Workday you can rest assured anyone with an existing job would not apply. It's really time consuming.

Also, mid-senior is definitely rare, like it means they have a good job already and unless there are really good perks like flexible WFH etc apart from the compensation, it's definitely hard.