iOS developers are hugely in demand these days. And while others have questioned your tactics during the job posting phase, I'm willing to bet you've put as little thought into the phase before that as well. Are you blogging, speaking at conferences and meet ups or putting out open source projects? You need to be putting significant effort into making your engineering brand mean something to the candidates you're trying to reach so that in the brief moment when they're deciding whether to send you their resume, you've given them some reason to believe that you're an above average place to work.

It amazes me that in a field that preaches understanding the customer to build a product that resonates, we haven't bothered to look at the hiring process the same way. And it should be even easier to do considering our target market is made up of people very similar to ourselves. When I started hiring, I didn't have much success until I started to look at what type of ads resonated with me and the ways that I went about looking for work. I spent weeks going through job postings collecting ones that I felt I'd apply to if I didn't have a job and then started to look for themes.

One theme I found was that they didn't follow the 3-part format with a description of the company, description of the skills desired and description of the likely tasks of the position. And not one of them included the bit about "working closely with the product manager"...there's no surer sign of uninteresting work than that cliché.

But biggest theme I found was that I had heard of and formed a positive impression about the companies posting the ads I was interested in. A good example of a relatively small company that I feel has done a good job with this is Segment.io. They've discussed their transition from primarily NodeJS to Go very publicly as well as a few other technical topics which led me to investigate their Github repository a few months before. So when I saw one of their ads, it immediately registered as one I would have applied to if I needed work.

And lastly, I realized that I haven't found a job from a job posting in over a decade. It's really a pretty crappy way to connect with employers. Every job I've gotten since the downturn has been the result of either a referral from a former coworker or a pre-existing connection that I've made with others from the technical community. I realized during the downturn that if something like that happened again, I wanted to be prepared, so I started building connections that I could reach out to to find work. Those connections are such a better way to find work since it's essentially like sending a proxy you trust through the interview process to weed out the companies that aren't worth working for. And those connections are also a great way to bring find great people to bring into any work quality work environment.

Hiring is hard for people who aren't willing to put in the effort or want to see it as a process that you only put effort into during the hiring phase. It gets significantly easier when you view it as a continual process to position yourself (or, more accurately, whoever is your employer at the time) as an appealing place for your ideal candidates to work. Put yourself in their shoes and design your hiring process in the customer-centric process you're probably already using for your actual produce and you'll be a lot more successful.