Back in 2007, I’ve started a small outsourcing company, serving US-based tech startups. The first engineers we hired were us, the co-founders.
We trusted each other because we worked for the same company, in the same project, before deciding to start our own dev shop.
Once we reached the point where we needed more engineers, our first instinct was to reach out to our network (past colleagues.).
We posted offers to the job boards. We built recruiting landing pages. We built a Machine-Learning platform that will use positive/negative feedback for past hires to score new potential candidates.
We never used recruiters. We were the recruiters. Our secret was that we never thought of ourselves as recruiters, and that’s how we were approaching engineers.
We, engineers, don’t trust recruiters. We see recruiters as a commission-seeking salesperson who doesn’t understand us, who don’t care about what we care about.
We, engineers, are the best recruiters, and while we might not be spending most of the time recruiting, we will get x10 better results than the average recruiter when we do.
