How to post jobs and get more applicants using startup methods

The other day I was talking to a friend about hiring. She has been looking to hire a statistical programmer for over a year and a half. Her company like many others will post the jobs on all the major brand name job boards. I have read that the average time to find a good engineer is 9 months. She is already pushing 15 months and has not found an applicant. Can we improve on this situation?

Starting a side project or a startup these days has become all the trend. We hear all about people making millions with their idea. It’s very appealing, but the odds are not that great. This is a case of survivorship bias where we only hear about the winners. There are many more failed startups and side projects than there are those that succeeded. To improve these odds, various people have come up with a set of rules or systems to decrease the odds of failure.

My premise is that these rules or systems used in startups can also be applied in hiring to increase the chance of success. I recently received approval to hire two mid level programmers with 3 to 5 years of experience. Our system at work auto submits the job postings to a number of job boards. I do not sit idle and wait for applicants as everyone else does. What I do is apply a technique of finding a market. Amy Hoy calls it Sales Safari. Pat Flynn uses a similar technique in his book Will It Fly. The idea is that you search for areas online where people are talking about your topic. You get more specific with your audience as Seth Godin states.

Let’s illustrate this with a specific example. If your hiring for a Go programmer, you start this process by looking for “Go Programming Job” or “Golang programmer job” in your favorite search engine. These are just two example phrases, but you will want to come up with many different phrases that could possibly describe a job you are looking to hire for. As you are searching, keep a spreadsheet of each website that has a job similar to the one you want to hire for. Filter out any of the major job boards that your company already posts to. Now, post your job description along with a link to the online application or other steps needed to apply for the position.

Next, look for forums where people actively discuss the skill you are trying to hire for. Try searching terms like “Go forum”, “Golang forum”, or “Golang help”. Use the features of the search engine that will only show results in the last month. You want to find forums that are still active. Keep a list of these results in a spreadsheet. If you have results, you will need to investigate each site to see if they have any job postings. They may or may not have any. If they do have job postings, create an account and message the admin to see what the appropriate procedure is for posting a job. Some admins might require you to contribute to the forum before posting a job. If you do not see any job descriptions, but you do see advertisements, consider paying to advertise your job on the forum. Even if the forum only has a few hundred or a thousand active users, it will yield much better results because everyone on the forum has a specific interest in the skill you are hiring for.

I have applied this idea successfully in the past to hire developers with the specific skill sets. It does require a little bit of work initially, but applying this method can greatly increase your chances of finding high quality applicants.