awwYeah - a fairytale of faulty tech-talent acquisition

By Wietse Boersma, Recruiter.

This post first appeared on LinkedIn on the 13th of November 2019.

Jeff DeGraff, innovation and organization consultant to c-suites of multiple Fortune 500 companies, compares the context in which Bill Clinton delivered his famous slogan ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ to today’s situation. Whereas the big, bad economy was the main cause of national unrest in the early nineties, the main causes of concern today are attracting talented people, motivating them, and keeping them. When we look at the world of software development, there’s little that stresses out the ‘big boys’ in the boardrooms more than the shrinking labor pool in the face of a growing need of epic proportions.

For most companies, talent management is top of their priority list. Let’s picture a chain of events that probably takes place in boardrooms every day. Imagine a fairytale company called ‘awwYeah’, which builds and markets a custom Chrome toolbar that sneaks into your plugins and never leaves without a fight.

Chief Information Officer Rachel tries to find out why so many developers are leaving the company. Retention is a right buzzkill to say the least, and awwYeah wants to attract the best developers and keep them interested, motivated, and thus ultimately high-performant. Rachel decides awwYeah needs to amp up on spending in the HR department. So far awwYeah only had HR-officer Markes blasting out the quarterly employee happiness interviews and consequent personal development plans, but now Rachel hires Richard. Richard will focus on talent management. Richard has a background in Human Resource Management but unfortunately has no experience with IT. However: attracting and recruiting talent is surely the same across the board? It’s sales-ey and marketing-ey, right?

Richard goes into awwYeah’s ‘trenches’, talks to developers and finds out what’s important for a developer working on awwYeah’s products. He discovers how the awwYeah toolbar is built with HTML, CSS and Vue.js. Richard whips up an employment ad for a ‘ROCK STAR DEVELOPER!’ Surprise: there’s not that many developers who are proficient in Vue.js in a big ole’ postcode parameter. But what’s this: after a week there’s a eureka moment! A Vue.js-adept developer applies and Richard is over the moon. Richard invites the developer to awwYeah’s offices, sits him down, floods the guy with promises of riches, splendor and a hip EV. A match made in heaven, right?

The story does not end well. The developer is overwhelmed. Richard invited the developer for a chat and a coffee, but instead the developer was immediately bombarded with urgency, terminology and Richard’s TA fish hook. The developer felt like he was being reeled in like a Devil’s Hole pupfish. So what went wrong? Richard found out some requirements, pinpointed his ‘target audience’, ‘caught’ the pupfish and tried to reel it in.

Unfortunately, Richard is no exception. In my years in tech recruitment I’ve met dozens of Richards who utilize similar tactics — often under the pressure of nasty key performance indicators. Attracting talent is not about pinpointing and firing your pistol. Attracting and retaining is about paying it forward; playing the long game. In the story above, both Mike and Richard fail to realize that attracting talent is, among other things, very much a networking thing. It takes investment; time. It takes countless occasions of listening to people. Should Richard have listened more carefully to awwYeah’s developers, he could’ve known a good JavaScript developer can be up and running with Vue.js in a short period of time, thereby broadening his search. Richard could also have known that the developer was really looking for a place of stability and flexibility — not everyone is swayed by promises of riches, especially in tech.

There’s no selling anything like listening and selling to a need. What do developers want? Who are these men and women? What makes them get up in the morning; what drives them? Perhaps the developer in our fairytale gets out of bed every morning because he wants to work in a team that seeks to disrupt and innovate in a particular field. Building trust with the best in your network is therefore of utmost importance if you’re going to get people to want to work with you. If that means meeting with someone without any direct commercial gain, so be it. This should never be the approach. You have to sincerely want to know about these people and about what they do. After all: we’re talking about human beings, not business commodities.

I would also kindly urge Richard to let go of the ‘ROCKSTAR DEVELOPER’ rhetoric. Think to yourself: does a SpaceX-calibre developer respond to someone screaming out for a ROCKSTAR DEVELOPER? Instead, in the best case you’ll get someone in your inbox who’s a little bit too convinced of themselves. Business and tech are different worlds; at least try to make the connection and let go of your idea of ‘what everyone thinks is cool’. In psychology, this phenomenon is called the ‘Dunning-Krueger effect’: a cognitive bias where one basically overestimates their cognitive ability and fails to recognize potential shortcomings or points of improvement. If you want SpaceX-calibre: be SpaceX calibre. Don’t be awwYeah.

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