Hiring Elixir Developers
Get to know the do's and don'ts for hiring the Elixir developers.
Training existing staff is only one way to build a team of skilled Elixir developers. Another way is to recruit them. It’s not easy. Finding good developers in any language is tough, and the pool of Elixir talent is still small, though it’s growing. All in all, it’s a deviously complex process, so let’s cover two topics. Since we’re Elixir programmers, let’s deal with that complexity the same way we deal with the complexity of our codebase, with function transformations. Here’s a good starting point:
candidate_pool → interview → offer
This pipeline starts with a pool of candidates. The interview process is fundamentally a filter and ends with an offer. The offer process is highly dependent on business parameters such as how much we can spend, where our candidates can live, job stability, and the growth that the company can offer. Such topics are beyond the scope of this course. Beyond the flippant “Paying more will improve your closing percentage,” we just can’t offer much.
The other two parts of the pipeline are very much front and center in an adoption story. We can improve hiring processes by either increasing the candidate pool or refining filters (or both). Let’s start at the top of the pipeline.
Expanding our pool
If our process has the right kinds of filters, improving our candidate pool will improve the quality of our hires. We’ll talk about two different ways to improve the candidate pool.
- Get involved in the community.
- Find good developers from other programming communities and train them.
Go where they go
As with all new languages, the total pool of programmers is relatively smaller, but don’t lose heart. They’re also often among the most motivated candidates to make a move. If we make ourselves visible in the Elixir community, we’ll often have opportunities that others don’t.
When we want to find Elixir developers, we should get ...