Chapter 17 -- Three Steps to Employment Heaven - How To Recruit And Retain Developers

Chapter 17

How To Recruit And Retain Developers

"The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it."

Theodore Roosevelt

Whenever you open a computing newspaper these days, you see more job advertisements than ever before and within them, a higher proportion of Visual Basic positions advertised than ever before. This trend will certainly continue with version 6 of Visual Basic. To date, 10 percent more jobs have been advertised in 1998 then there were during the same period in 1997. Big increases in salaries and contracting rates are evident. Three out of every 10 positions remain permanently vacant. So how does an organization differentiate itself so that it can attract and, more importantly, retain great developers?

The first thing to say is that it's very tricky! But an organization can take some practical steps to overcome some of the problems and difficulties of finding good developers. In this chapter, we will outline some of the techniques that we at The Mandelbrot Set (International) Limited (TMS) have used successfully over the years. This is not a classic Human Resources view, but more a summary of what works for us at the business end of the recruitment process. Perhaps some of our ideas will be useful to you.