Leading Geeks
education + consulting
10 Costly
Mistakes When
Recruiting Geeks
By PAUL GLEN
Sponsored by:
Most organizations struggle to recruit technical people. It’s a frustrating
business.
In This Paper
10 biggest mistakes and
how to avoid them
What geeks really want at
work
Why free food and
foosball are not important
And more
The volume and variety of the advice written on the subject is the best
evidence of both the importance and difficulty of recruiting geeks. The
only thing that the writers agree on is that organizations need us. But
they have widely varying views of who we are and what we want. Some
seem to think of us geeks as rare, preening prima donnas who can be
captured with flattery, flexibility, and foosball. Some see us as bumbling
savants, who, unaware of the degree of employers’ neediness, can be
easily manipulated with fast computers and free food. And some portray
us as self-serving, hardball negotiators who must be controlled, constrained, or contracted away.
With all those conflicting ideas about who geeks are and what attracts
them to an employer, it’s no wonder that lots of recruiters do things that
backfire.
In this whitepaper, I’ll tell you the top 10 mistakes that prevent you
from finding and hiring perfect candidates.
Leading Geeks is an education and consulting firm dedicated to unlocking the value of
technical people. Leading Geeks taps this value by transforming the tricky relationships
between technical and non-technical groups, at the executive, management and project
level. You can contact them at paul@leadinggeeks.com.
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
1. Selling too hard
Lately, a lot of people have been talking about how hard it is to find good candidates. So when
they find someone that they are eager to recruit, they sell pretty hard. No one likes to lose a
good candidate.
But there are significant hazards in overselling during the recruiting process. While your
intentions may be to give candidates a feeling of being wanted, the result may be quite the
opposite, making them uneasy.
I had just such an experience as I was graduating from college. I was excited to score an
interview with one of the most prestigious companies recruiting on campus and felt good
about my first interview. When they offered to fly me to corporate headquarters for more
interviews, I was sure that I was on my way to an exciting career. At their headquarters, I was
put through a battery of interviews with
people at all levels of the organization.
But when I got my offer letter, something
didn’t feel right. I reflected on the entire
recruiting experience and realized what
was bothering me. I had been through 13
hours of interviews, and they had barely
asked me any questions at all. At the
initial interview they requested a copy of
my transcript and asked a few basic
questions, but after that, every encounter
I had was dominated by their telling me what a great company it was to work for or what a
great job I would be positioned for when I left. I realized that they were selling to me rather
than evaluating me. I realized that that meant that they didn’t care about the quality of their
employees. They were more interested in filling chairs than assessing fit. So I turned down the
job. And as I got older and learned more about the industry, I was glad I had. It turned out that
the company had a reputation for recruiting massive numbers of people and burning them
out, leading to a very high attrition rate.
If you sell too hard,
geeks wonder
what you’re hiding.
The other reason that selling too hard doesn’t work is that it usually demonstrates that you
don’t understand what’s really important to geeks. Most of the time when recruiters try to sell
hard to geeks, they focus on unimportant aspects of the job, compensation, or organization.
They focus on free food, casual dress, and the potential value of stock options—all of it nice to
have, but irrelevant if you aren’t giving geeks what they really want. And then the candidate
suspects that this can’t be a good place to work after all.
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
What geeks really want
The basics of what geeks want are really quite simple, and they’ve been consistent everywhere
I have worked around the globe. There are only four key things.
Cool work. Most geeks really want to enjoy their work. We don’t want to just punch a
time clock in order to get paid at the end of the week. We want to be engaged with the work
itself, and are drawn to it because we are problem-solvers by nature. We like to get up in the
morning and confront intriguing and challenging puzzles.
The types of puzzles each of us finds cool
vary widely. It might be thorny code. It
might be a challenging schedule, a new
technology, or the opportunity to make a
real difference in our organization or the
world. But what gets us out of bed in the
morning is not free food. We want to be
engaged with fascinating work.
Individuals decide
what’s cool work.
Of course, not all work needs to be great. We’ll do a lot of boring things if at least part of the
job is really fun.
Fair pay. As a group, geeks tend not to be particularly greedy. We’re not motivated to
maximize our income above all other things. Of course, we like making money as much as
anyone else, but we tend to be more concerned with the fairness of our pay than the extravagance of it. We want what we receive in exchange for our work to reflect the value that we
deliver, to feel that compared to other technical people and non-technical people, we’re not
underappreciated or taken advantage of.
I’ve never heard anyone say that he was
leaving a job that he loved, with cool work,
fair pay, and good relationships, to pursue
an extra 2% in income. When people say
that they are leaving for more money, it’s
usually because they feel unfairly paid or
because the other aspects of the job are
unfulfilling. They only point to the money
because it’s safer than saying they feel unloved or underappreciated.
Fairness is more
important than
winning
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Leading Geeks
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
Good relationships. Although most of us tend to be somewhat introverted, we still
want to go to work every day with people we respect and whose company we enjoy. Most
technical work involves teams, and the people we’re surrounded by every day are more
important than almost any other factor.
Reasonable expectation of more in the future. And finally, even if the
first three criteria are satisfied, we need to know that there’s a good probability that there’s
more of the same in the future. Once convinced that the things we love about a job are
unlikely to continue, we feel compelled to move on.
So when you are trying to convince a candidate to join your organization, you don’t want to
sound like a used-car salesman. It arouses our natural suspicions that you might just be lying.
2. Missing good candidates
The next major mistake that recruiters make is overlooking good candidates. There are three
common beliefs in technical recruiting that lead to this:
Only currently employed people are worth considering.
I’ve heard this a lot since the onset of the Great Recession . When unemployment surged and
hiring was a buyer’s market, recruiters came to believe that anyone who had been unemployed for more than six months was either a bad employee or had become technically out of
date and permanently damaged by the period of unemployment.
Of course, this was never true. Many
worthy candidates have been unemployed
due to circumstances beyond their control.
Some were victims of the economic
downturn. Some may have been excellent
employees but lacked the networking and
social skills to find new positions in a tight
market. Some may have quit their jobs due
to illnesses or family emergencies.
Unemployment is
not necessarily a
bad sign.
And if you’re concerned that six months
away from technical work renders a person permanently useless and forever out of touch,
then you’re looking at the wrong characteristics for hiring. In technology, there are always new
things, and when anything is new, no one has experience with it. You can’t rely on hiring only
people who have already done precisely what you want them to do.
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
If you’re planning to hire employees who are going to stick around for any length of time, their
ability to adapt and become productive with new things is more important than whether they
have used your technology in the last few months.
Only people who meet all the technical requirements get past the
résumé screening.
When writing requirements for technical positions, managers often generate a wish list of all
the experience they would like someone to have. Usually, they know that very few people
have all the experience on their list. And they also know that some items on that list are more
important than others. But when they turn those requirements over to résumé screeners,
those wish-list items get transformed from a description of a dream candidate to a set of
minimum requirements that few people can meet.
Inevitably, thousands of résumés get whittled down to a handful, and the manager wonders
why there are so few. It’s hard for the manager to see it at that point, but it’s usually because,
by including a lot of things in the requirements list that were not true requirements, the
manager had let the screeners bypass many strong candidates.
Only young people are productive in technical work.
There’s also a persistent belief that new technology can only be developed or supported by
people under 30. Somehow, our industry has decided that maturity equals inflexibility and an
inability to learn new things.
Of course, young people do have many
virtues. Many are enthusiastic, energetic,
and unjaded by experience. The best can
accomplish things that others thought
impossible, because they didn’t know that
it was impossible.
You can trust
people over 30.
But that doesn’t mean that experience
doesn’t have virtues as well. Let’s say it’s true that older people aren’t as energetic as younger
people or as willing to work an extraordinary number of hours. Even so, workers over 30 can
be a good investment because they tend to be more productive. Partly this is because more
experienced people just can get things done faster since they know what not to do. But it’s
also because a lot of youthful energy is wasted on things that needn’t be done or shouldn’t be
done.
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
And in this tight market, you may find many capable and loyal employees whom others are
overlooking just because their birthdate is a little farther back in the rear view mirror than
others.
The bottom line: don’t miss good candidates because of some simplistic, limiting rule.
3. Defining impossible jobs
Besides setting the job requirements bar too high, managers often define jobs that simply
can’t be done. They create positions
with conceptual flaws that doom their
occupants to failure.
If your job is a loser,
winners won’t take it.
The classic example of this is defining
a position in which one person is
expected to be both a software
developer and a project manager at
the same time. This can sound like a
good idea, especially on smaller
projects. You don’t really need a full-time project manager to handle a team of three or four
people, so why not have the senior developer also serve as the project manager?
Because it doesn’t work out well. It’s not that software developers can’t be good project
managers. Many of them make excellent project managers—just not at the same time that
they are developing software.
The conflict is not between the skills or personality of a software developer and a project
manager, but in the work style required to fill each role. Developers require long periods of
uninterrupted time to be productive. Every time they answer the phone or talk to someone,
their train of thought is interrupted and they lose anywhere from half an hour to three hours
of time trying to get back to where they were before the interruption. This takes a huge toll on
their productivity.
Project managers, on the other hand, have to allow for constant interruptions. Their job is to
coordinate the activities and information flow among numerous stakeholders. They can’t be
effective if they shut their doors for five hours at a time.
When you combine incompatible roles such as developer/manager, you create a job that’s
impossible to fill successfully. Candidates wise enough to see the impossibility of success
refuse jobs like these. Yet they are the people who you probably want filling at least one of the
roles. The people who do take the job are the ones who don’t understand the roles with
sufficient depth to see the incompatibility and only discover it after they’ve failed.
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
4. Ignoring cultural fit
Engineers like facts when making decisions. They don’t like to rely on subjective measures. So
when hiring, it’s easier to rely on objectively verifiable measures of a candidate’s fit for a
position. We are much more comfortable evaluating things that can be measured or observed,
such as:

Experience with particular technologies

Certifications

Educational degrees

Test scores

Accurate answers to questions posed in interviews
And there’s nothing wrong with evaluating these sorts of hard criteria. But
because we’re comfortable with these
more-than-subjective observations, we
tend to ignore subjective factors related
to cultural fit.
You must have
courage to insist
on cultural fit.
Unfortunately, often the people who
don’t work out after being hired fail not
because of their inadequate technical
skills, but because of their inability to
work effectively with colleagues. They prefer to work alone, whereas everyone else wants to
collaborate. They hide information, whereas the group is open. They insult other people with
their vociferous argumentative style, whereas the organization values civility.
To hire candidates with a good cultural fit, there are three things you have to do.

Be able to effectively articulate the important aspects of your culture.

Devise and ask questions that get to the heart of the candidate’s work persona.

Have the courage to reject candidates who fit the technical requirements, but
won’t fit in culturally.
Just because you can’t measure it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to it.
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
5. Lowballing recruiters
In tight markets like this, organizations often use the services of external headhunters. Recruiters can be a great asset if they have databases of candidates, integrity, and a thorough
understanding of your technical work and culture. But, since recruiters also charge a significant
sum for their services, managers often feel compelled to negotiate recruiting fees, fighting
hard to reduce the costs involved.
If you pay poor
commissions, you
get poor candidates.
Unfortunately, if you’re dealing with
recruiters who have a decent customer
base, this usually proves to be a false
economy. Any recruiter faced with two
or more customers seeking people for
similar positions is of course going to
send the best candidates to the client
that pays the highest commission.
So while the recruiters may agree to
work for a lower commission for you,
that is unlikely to get you the best candidates. When you’re paying a second- or third-tier
commission, you’re going to be sent the second- and third-tier candidates.
If you decide that you need the help of a recruiter to fill a position, think carefully before
lowballing the fees.
6. Pissing off current employees
Another hazard in recruiting technical people is the effect that recruiting efforts have on your
current employees. In their zeal to fill open positions,
some managers lavish candidates with higher pay,
larger bonuses, and better benefits than those
offered to current employees. They reason that it’s
what they have to do to snag top talent in a competitive market . And of course, they’re right. Offering
uncompetitive compensation is rarely a winning
strategy.
How you hire
effects existing
employees.
But there are significant risks to offering new
employees a substantially better deal than existing
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
ones. Your current employees will eventually figure out that the new recruits are being offered
superior compensation. Even if the disparity is small, this triggers a disproportionally emotional response in geeks. As a group, we are deeply committed to the concept of fairness, and
when we feel that those principles have been violated, our outrage can be powerful.
Some of your current employees will ask for the same treatment that you are giving new
recruits, and you’ll have to decide whether to grant their requests. Whatever you choose, your
current employees will resent that they were forced to ask to be treated fairly. And even if you
give them what they ask for, they
will have lingering mistrust for you.
Other employees will just leave,
looking for employers they believe
are more devoted to fairness. You
could make a counter offer, but
they will resent that they had to
threaten to leave to receive fair
treatment. Chances are that even if
they take your counter offer, they
will leave within a few years, feeling
that you have already broken their
trust.
Preempting
discontent is better
than responding to
it.
Perhaps worst of all, some of your employees will say and do nothing. They will stick around,
but they will be seething with anger, spreading low morale. They will perform substandard
work, feeling petulantly justified in returning poor work for unfair pay.
What can you do, then, if, on the one hand, you really can’t hire top-grade talent without
beefing up compensation, and on the other hand, you can’t give your current employees that
same compensation? Be honest. We geeks appreciate honesty, even when the truth hurts.
Explain the situation to them. They need to know that you are not trying to take advantage of
them and that you will offer them some path to reaching fair market compensation without
leaving.
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
7. Alienating candidates
Sometimes, in their zeal to vet candidates effectively, organizations inadvertently alienate the
precise candidates they most want to recruit. You need to treat geeks with professional
respect rather than unvarnished skepticism. They do expect to be evaluated fairly, but there
are a number of things that we commonly do that lead candidates to believe that even if we
offer them the job, they wouldn’t want to work for the organization. These include things like:

Personality tests

Background and credit checks

Demands for social media
passwords

Interviews with condescending tones

Excessive requests for school
transcripts

Invasive drug testing

Inaccessibility during the
recruiting process
The experience of
being recruited
should make
candidates feel
good.
You have to realize that geeks tend to be fairly independent and expect their privacy to be
respected. They prefer to be evaluated on their work and their ability to contribute rather
than seemingly irrelevant and invasive probes.
What may seem to be a perfectly reasonable approach to protecting your employers may
alienate the candidates that you are most interested in recruiting.
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
8. Relying on references
In my experience, personal references are a useless tool for evaluating candidates. I’m not
talking about referrals; those are great. And I’m not talking about phony references, like the
candidate’s college roommate. I’m talking about calling up a former colleague or boss of the
candidate, someone that the candidate handpicked, and asking that third party to tell you
about the candidate. The only time I felt
I got useful information doing this was
when the reference seemed surprised
by my call. Apparently, the candidate
hadn’t thought to inform this person
that he wanted to use him as a reference. The guy didn’t say anything
specifically negative, but it is the one
time that I hung up the phone with the feeling that the reference didn’t think too highly of the
candidate.
References are
useless.
People designated by a candidate as a
personal reference have no incentive to tell
you the unvarnished truth. Usually, the
people on the reference list have been
picked because there is some degree of
friendship between the two parties. Also,
quite often, HR warns an organization’s
managers never to say anything substantial
when they are called as a reference for a former employee. Given all this, references are a
terrible way to get a good cross-section of opinions about how other people respond to and
work with the candidate.
Referrals are like
gold.
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Leading Geeks
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
9. Having the wrong interviewers
Another problem comes up during the interview process when you put the wrong people in
the room to evaluate a candidate or entice the candidate to join the company.
Managers almost always think it’s important that they interview candidates and that they are
the best person to ensure that they get the right person. This might be true in a lot of professions, but it doesn’t necessarily work out well in the technology field. Let’s face it: from a
technical standpoint, most managers are unqualified to evaluate a candidate’s skills. True,
most technical managers came up through the ranks, but by the time they have settled into
their managerial role, they have lost much of their currency with technology. There’s nothing
wrong with this; it’s just the way things are, and managers need to develop an entirely
different set of skills. But if you want to get a good read on a candidate’s technical abilities, the
best evaluators are going to be the people who will be the candidate’s peers, the ones who
are truly conversant with the technology under discussion.
Evaluate only what
you are qualified
to assess.
This doesn’t mean that managers have
no role to play. They are, of course,
often very good at gauging soft skills,
which oftentimes should be a high
priority. But even here, peers of the
future employee can be of help. It’s
true that there’s a good likelihood that
they will not be particularly articulate about their observations about a candidate’s soft skills.
Still, you should pay attention to their instincts on the subject, keeping in mind that candidates
will often show a completely different side of themselves to peers than they will to managers.
So how do you find out what peers think about a candidate’s soft skills? Not by asking them a
lot of detailed questions about their attitudes and beliefs. Instead, just ask them, “Is this
someone you want to be in the trenches with? Is this someone you want next to you pulling all
-nighters in the final push to deliver a major system? Would you trust this person to fit in and
pull alongside everyone else?” They’ll let you know.
And having candidates evaluated by both managers and peers has value beyond finding the
right person for the job. It can also help you sell a candidate on joining your organization. If
candidates feel comfortable with both peers and managers, they are much more likely to join
than they would be if one of those groups remained an unknown quantity.
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
10. Passively posting advertisements
Over the past few years, organizations have gotten used to there being a buyer’s market for
recruiting. They’ve gotten a bit lazy about actively seeking and cultivating candidates. During
the Great Recession, you probably didn’t even need to post an advertisement to be overwhelmed with résumés. You just
needed to whisper in the aisle of a
grocery store that there was a position
available and you’d be flooded before
you got back to the office.
In fact, many recruiters were so overwhelmed by all of the résumés that
came in that they simply ignored the
responses and focused on candidates
who were referred by trusted sources.
The work to review the résumés wasn’t
worth the trouble.
You need to invest
in recruiting
whether you are
actively searching
or not.
Today, however, the market has
changed. Internet advertisements no longer receive thousands of responses for a single post.
You need to do more to ensure that you attract a manageable pool of quality candidates. You
need to invest in recruiting whether you are actively seeking a candidate or not in order to:

Build a reputation as a good employer in the technical community.

Maintain relationships with quality external recruiters whom you trust and who
understand what you look for.

Ensure that your current staff is inclined to refer quality candidates and vouch for
the benefits of working for you.

Maintain positive contacts with past employees who can serve as referral sources
for candidates or who may be willing to return to the organization under the right
circumstances.
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10 Costly Mistakes When Recruiting Geeks
Investigate the job migration patterns of people with the skills that you’re looking for. For
example, if you are installing a new package system and know that another company nearby
installed the same package several years ago, it’s now easy to search LinkedIn to see where
former employees of that company who worked on that technology have gone. Chances are,
you’ll find that a number of them have gone to the same place, and then you know where to
start your search.
If you can avoid many of the common pitfalls of geek recruiting, you can fill your staff with
capable and competent people.
Paul Glen is the award-winning author of
Leading Geeks, co-author of The Geek
Leader’s Handbook and long-time columnist
for Computerworld. He has worked with
geeks and the people who lead them for
over 20 years. Contact
paul@leadinggeeks.com.
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