I interviewed 500+ people in tech, this is what I learned

On telling signal from noise, from the candidate’s perspective

The battle for talent in tech is hard, this is what I learned over the last few years as a Startup CTO.

Nothing is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies. — Lawrence Bossidy

As a startup Founder, CTO and Tech Advisor, my job over the past 4 years has been to grow and nurture teams, mostly tech teams. As such, I’ve interviewed a lot of people in tech, mostly Software Engineers, Data Scientists, Designers, Product Managers, and such tech-heavy positions. Last year I decided to track all my interviews with more detail than before, so that I could look back and find interesting patterns and correlations.

Now, as I look back to my notes and draw some conclusions, I feel compelled to share my learnings, so that other people can learn from them too.

In tech, no one is looking for a job

Period. In tech, everyone who is good enough to fill your role, is already working elsewhere. Odds are they have a perfectly fair pay and enough of a challenging and fun work environment. That’s the real challenge, you need to convince the right candidate to give up his current employer and accept your offer. I’ve used different types of job boards, and my take is that listing open positions works very differently for tech position than it works for non-tech positions. Non-tech candidates will look up a job board and search for positions in their realm of qualifications. Conversely, in tech, people have such high demand that open positions actually come after them, they just need to pick which inbound messages they’ll reply to. Maybe while they decide to reply or not, they will look up the open positions, mostly to learn more about the company, the challenge, the tech stack, etc. That’s why in tech no one needs to look for a job.

Most people are fed up with void HR approaches

If you want to piss someone off, just treat them as a commodity. The imbalance between demand and supply for tech talent creates this awkward chase, where recruiters send bulk messages to every Software Developer under the sun. Most of these messages say things like “Are you a Java Developer? Join us”, as if people walked around with tags on their forehead. From the Developer’s perspective, these messages are devoid of meaningful hooks that help them understand what are the challenges, what’s the stack, what’s the fun. And if they don’t know the sender, and can’t tell what’s exciting from the first impression… why should they care anyway?

Everyone listens to exciting new challenges

It is a common place to say that people are triggered by stuff that sounds exciting. In tech that’s certainly the case. There’s no shortage of boring stuff to do, and everyone has been involved with projects where it was run-of-the-mill development day in and day out, without any clear source of excitement. That’s why most of the times people listen to approaches that don’t seem to fit the status quo. I learned that most people want to hear about highly ambitious innovations that are meant to change the world. In tech, specifically, everyone wants to hear about cutting edge tech stacks, world class teams, well crafted Agile methodologies. The companies who can articulate these kinds of arguments in a concise and compelling, have a clear edge above most of the tech recruiting scene.

Everyone wants to be early on the next big thing

In tech, the hype cycles tends to be very fast. What we worked on 5 years ago is likely irrelevant today, and whatever we’re doing right now is meant to be disrupted sooner than later. Most people start working on a new technology only when it gets to mainstream. At that point, that skill becomes more common and differentiation fades away a bit. Conversely, if people start on a new trend before it gets to mainstream, they will be specialists on it and have a clear edge in the market when it gets big. That’s why it is so important to articulate clearly what the innovation is and why it matters, because candidates will immediate frame it from their perspective and evaluate if the risk of jumping on something unproven and early can actually have a disproportionately positive reward by being early on the next big thing.

Everyone is open to increase their pay, but most people value other benefits more than money

There’s no rule of thumb here, different people will think differently all the time, that’s how it is. Certainly everyone would be open to earn more money, any day. However, one thing that I’ve noticed over time is that most people value other benefits more than money. There’s the intangibles, like being surrounded by top performers, working under methodologies that promote creativity and productivity, not being bossed around, etc. But there are also some more tangible benefits that people value as well, such as allowing remote work whenever that doesn’t impact productivity, allowing each one to pick their laptop, operative system and toolset as they will, etc. Some of these cost barely any money, and are valued above money for some people.

This post was originally published here.