Employer as an employee: how to recruit for tech, software, dev and MINT in the war for talent?

Recruiting in technology, software, DevOps and MINT can be a very easy job for well-established Silicon Valley companies like Tesla, Google, Facebook, Uber and others. But what do you do if your company is not as hip as Google? Digitalization and webification are affecting are the processes of the sectors and industries, from finance to manufacturing – and it is much harder for them to approach this issue.
Tech recruiting processes are far away from the traditional HR practices: you have to be fast in recruiting, creative in sourcing, you have to consider other options such as outsourcing, working with recruiters, starting an incubator. “Employer as an employee” sums up the main issues with the tech rec quite accurately. The market value of the developers is very high and the tendency is – it will keep growing. The gap between the increasing demand and relatively scarce supply is increasing. So the real competition is not one between engineers for a position – but between the companies for an engineer. When it comes to finding the best talent, you as a recruiter are not necessarily the one deciding. All you can do is to create the conditions in which the developer would enjoy working in.
The question is – what do developers and engineers want? Is it high salaries? (the AI engineers’ jobs in Silicon Valley go up to $400 k, Alan Ohnsman says here) Is it the flexible working model? Or maybe simply to work on something that’s interesting for them?
Moreover, what can you as a recruiter do to make sure the candidates you’d like to hire do not slip away? Where do you advertise? How can you make sure the hiring process is swift and efficient? Do you hire yourself or do you use help from recruiters?
There are no definite answers to these questions, and every company, be it a start-up or a 100 year-old pharma company, develop their own approaches and best practices to the recruiting. Tech Rec 2017 (November 30 – December 1, 2017, Berlin) is the first conference fully dedicated to the subject of recruiting in tech, software, DevOps and MINT, and it is also a place where more than 200 senior recruiters will gather for over 2.5 days to share these best practices in an interactive setting. As the programme coordinator for the event, I would like to invite you to share your story or come and ask these – and many more questions yourselves.