How to hire great software developers when you can't compete on salary

How we attracted top quality software developer candidates without offering Facebook, Amazon, or Google salary levels. We talk about how to write the job description and reveal the feedback we received from candidates.

Full Transcript:
Starr:              I was in my car. So there was no-

Josh:               There was no, it like it wasn't that creepy.

Announcer:          Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole lot nerdier. You're tuned in to Founder Quest.

Starr:              Yeah I mean ... but also like this is Seattle, so literally everyone here is a quasi-tech celebrity.

Josh:               That's true.

Starr:              Yeah, it's dime a dozen.

Starr:              So this week, we have been not getting much real work done. We've all been super distracted because we've been really focusing on hiring.

Josh:               When you say, "we've been working on hiring," I think what you mean is "Ben's been working on hiring."

Starr:              What's the point of being in management if you can't take credit for other people's work, right?

Josh:               Exactly.

Ben:                Exactly. That, and you got the whole royal "we" going for us, so gotta ... Yeah, it's been a bit of a slog, so. But it's been kind of fun too. Like, you know, we decided a few months ago, I guess, that we were about ready to hire and, you know, we've been thinking about this for a while. We've had contractors helping us from time to time. And we just decided it was time to have someone who could be around to the long haul. And so, we started the process of just thinking about who we wanted and what we wanted. And I had just ... it was pretty good timing ... I had just seen this blog post about hiring, and about what job posts should look like versus what they usually look like. You may have seen this on Twitter, but like there was an image where it was like colored red and green, and the red was ... it was mostly red ... and the red were parts about the business, and the green were parts about the candidate.

Starr:              No, I didn't see that.

Ben:                Oh yeah, yeah, it was really cool. So, like if you're a candidate, like, what do you care about when you look at a job post? What kind of technology are you playing with? Things like that. What kind of benefits are you going to get? And so this person was talking about how most job posts are all about the company and nothing at all about the candidate, right? And so, I had just read that and I thought, oh, that's, that's good to think about. And so, I wrote our job post in a way that was more approachable for a candidate, like, what would a candidate really wanna see? I guess it's like Marketing 101, right? Speak to your audience.

Starr:              Exactly.

Ben:                I think that was, that was really helpful in getting some great candidates coming in the door.

Starr:              I sent the job posting to Evie, my wife, and she was bowled over. She's like, nobody writes job applications like that ... er, I keep calling it an application ... she said, nobody writes job descriptions like this. Some of the responses we got from people were amazing, some people said things like, I can't believe a job like this exists in such an imperfect world.

Josh:               Yeah, it seems like we struck a nerve.

Ben:                Yeah, yeah. It was fun to write and it was fun to see those kind of responses come back from people. And I think that was critical because our budget was kind of low, and in fact, we even included the budget on the job posting. The trade off there was that even though the budget was kind of low, the benefits were pretty high. Specifically, people were very interested in having a 30 hour work week. That was-

Starr:              Oh, yeah. Maybe we should, maybe we should, go through some of the, the things we put in the job posting. Some of the benefits, some of the interesting things about the job that maybe drew people, because I know a lot of people are always wanting to know how you can more easily hire developers.

Ben:                That's true, yeah, you hear that a lot. And I think, one thing that makes it easy is you give developers what they want.

Starr:              That's ... no, that's too easy. That's too simple.

Ben:                We found that there are definitely a group of developers who have experience, because we said, we needed deep Ruby experience, and who are interested in playing with new technologies, because we said, yeah, we're looking at Elixir and playing with that, and who sometimes value their time over money because we basically said, we'll be happy to pay you a little less but we'll give you a lot more time, like you can have a day a week off, or you can work five hour days, or however you want to work that.

Starr:              Mm-hmm.

Ben:                And I think a lot of people underestimated just how much a developer values that flexibility and having some more time versus just always maximizing the dollar sign.

Starr:              It seems like a lot of the developers that we got who applied were a little bit more experience. I know, I know that we were really interested in experience in general, but we got a really good crop of candidates coming in with some real deep experience in Ops, in Ruby development, so forth. And it just surprised me. So it seems like maybe once you've ridden the startup rollercoaster a few times, once you've put in your 80 hour workweeks, you realize that maybe that's not the best way to live your life and start looking for something else. And surprisingly not many other companies are offering that sort of package.

Josh:               Yeah, one of the, one thing someone said during this whole process was um, the salary we were offering was actually a small pay cut for them. But based on like, the benefits and the actual, like money for time argument, they're actually getting a raise if they take this job offer. Because rather than like working 60 hour weeks for what they're making now they can work 30 hour weeks for a little less, but it's still a net win.

Starr:              And I guess a lot of the times people don't consider that when somebody is working for Facebook making 200 grand total comp that they're not necessarily working a 40 hour week for that. Maybe some of them can pull it off, but I think the whole focus on hours is kind of disingenuous because really when you work an 80 hour a week, you're not at your best for those 80 hours. Like personally, I find that I can get maybe two or three hours of really hard work done, uh, before I'm, I'm just kind of dead and have to move on to easier things.

Ben:                Yeah.

Josh:  &n...