7 Tips for

Winning the
Tech Talent
You Need makers.tech
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Contents
If you want to find the best
tech talent - it’s important
to remember:
•
•
Mindset matters more than experience
Get your JD to as many people as possible
• Be proactive in how you attract talent
• Move quickly when you find the right people
• Optimise your interview process
• Play the long game
• Consider retraining your own people
The author
Grant Jessup is passionate
about helping leading brands
build their dream technology
teams.
He is a senior leader at Makers, the premier
coding training provider in London. With a
background in education and employment,
Grant has worked for well-known companies
such as Capita PLC and Tes Global to lead
multi-million pound divisions.
He has nearly 15 years’ experience in human
capital solutions, specialising in the delivery
of talent models across multiple clients and
industries.
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Introduction
Is there really a ‘tech talent shortage?’ Or is the
reason you’re struggling to hire tech talent because
of something else?

developers into roles with leading brands

We’ve all seen the panicky stats:
like Vodafone, Deloitte and Tesco. From
our experience placing talented developers,
• Europe needs to find an extra 800,000
the problem isn’t a lack of talented people.
skilled tech workers in the next five
years.
The problem is that a lot
• 93% of CEOs admit they need to change
of companies don’t know
their IT hiring
how to go about hiring them.
• 90% of execs say they struggle to find
and keep tech talent. So many companies, despite all their good
intentions are actively dissuading talented
UK companies are desperate people to apply for their roles. They have
biases that they’re unaware of, they write
to find and retain great
job descriptions that accidentally filter out
developers, and yet, by all great people, they demand experience,
accounts, there simply isn’t but are unwilling to train.
enough talent to go around.

Could it be that we’re so preoccupied with

the problem, we’re losing sight of the
solutions right in front of our eyes? I’m
passionate about helping leading brands
build their dream technology teams.
Here at Makers, we’ve placed over 1600

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Anyone is capable of
posting a job ad, sifting
through resumes and doing
interviews, but just doing
those things doesn’t mean
you’re doing it in a way
that gets consistent and
successful results.
At Makers, we help shine a light on the
best recruitment practices, actively
working with our partners to find and
retain the right talent for them.
If you’re a company looking to hire
fantastic tech talent, but feel stuck in an
endless cycle of sticking up job ads only
for dusty hay bales to roll past, it’s time
to ask - what could you be doing better?
We’ll explain how the
following can hold you back:
• You’re saying you only want ‘senior
developers’
• You’re filling your job descriptions
with pointless stuff
• You’re waiting for great people to fall
into your lap
• When you do find great people,
you don’t move fast enough
• Your interview process can be
improved
• You’re ignoring the long game
• You’re not willing to retrain your own
people
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01

Mindset
matters
more than
experience

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You’re saying you only
want ‘senior’ developers.
Considering the old adage,
‘Code Is King’, what exactly
Stack Overflow reports...
is a senior developer? Do
you measure seniority in
That one eighth of all professional
terms of years of experience software engineers have been programming
or languages known? Is it professionally for under 2 years, and it’s

defined by the size of teams a number that is growing fast.

managed or success of
That means if your job description says
projects undertaken? “minimum 3 years of experience” you’re
missing out on a wave of fresh new talent.

Until a few years ago, there was no such

We place juniors into jobs with a lot
thing as juniors vs. senior developers.
less experience than that and we know
The options you had were self-taught
success depends much more on attitude to
engineers, who had grafted away in their
learning than years of experience.
bedrooms for years and years, or you had
those who studied computer science at
For example, before Makers, Kate Morris had
University. People who may have academic
found it impossible to break into tech and
qualifications, but not a lot of experience in
her queries to recruiters went unanswered.
the real world of software engineering.

Through training with us, she honed

The developers that are coming into the
valuable skills and when the time came
market now, simply didn’t exist before.
for finding a job, she ended up talking to
Now, we have a calibre of people who’ve
seven companies and had four face-to-face
completed courses in modern software
interviews, before landing multiple job offers
engineering; people who understand the
to choose from.
skills required, who know how to test-drive
their code, use design patterns and deliver
She accepted a job with Deloitte as a
software in an agile environment.
mid-level developer. As our careers team
reflected: “With Kate, it was super easy to
So let go of your assumptions about what a
link her up to a company that really wanted
junior can deliver and dispel this idea that a
to work with her. She’s proactive, positive,
‘junior’ can’t offer a solution to your current
and she knew what kind of place she wanted
needs. You don’t hire for concrete skills, you
to work for. This was a great fit because
hire for attitude and behaviours. You can
Deloitte is looking for active lifelong learners
always teach skills.
who jump in headfirst and take charge of
their own career trajectory.”

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02

Get your
JD to as
many people
as possible

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Make sure you’re
not filling your job
descriptions with
pointless stuff.
We all have biases, whether they’re
conscious or unconscious. And
sometimes we accidentally allow
these biases to create unnecessary
barriers to entry.

Recruiters love to specify number of years working

in a certain technology, for example. It’s been
proven that far fewer women tend to apply for
jobs for which they don’t have an exact experience
match. When we start asking these companies –
why do you need 3 years in PHP? Why not 2? Why
not 4? Most of the time they don’t have a reason,
it just feels like a sensible amount of experience to
ask for.

This survey was released by Stackoverflow

which shows that women with less than 2 years
experience make up 28% of the female software
engineers on StackOverflow, compared to 14.7%
for men.

And what about the type of experience you’re

looking for - can you drill down to what you really
need? Rather than an enormous list of languages
that your developers must work in, no doubt
excluding potentially fantastic candidates because
of a lack of experience with a single line item,
think about how long it would take to train up
competent developers in a specific language, and
how much value they might add in the long run.

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Generally speaking, the best developers are polyglots – they can
adapt and grow into new technologies fairly easily, but their skills lie
in solving problems and in learning fast, regardless of the specific
languages they’re working in right now.

When it comes to branding from a B2C

and a customer perspective, we often
hold a defined idea in our minds about the Before you write your
demographics or the age groups or particular job description, my advice
sectors of society that we’re targeting. to companies would be
to ask yourself:
This works well when selling a product.
But if you’re trying to throw your doors
• How do you describe your
wide open to encourage as many applicants
engineering culture?
as possible to apply to the role that you’re
advertising, you want to make sure that your
• What do you value in a software
employer branding is as inclusive as possible.
engineer?

When advertising the role, it’s worth thinking

• What kind of software
about the assumptions you’ve made about
engineering practices do you
your employer brand, and how that makes
follow (agile, SCRUM, Software
people or particular groups feel.
Craftsmanship, XP etc.)?

The more specific your job description is, the

• What kind of technologies do you
smaller the pool of talent that’s likely to apply.
currently use (so people know
According to a study by the Harvard Business
what to expect)?
Review, women don’t apply to a job if they
don’t believe they are 100% qualified. For
• What do you prioritise when
the average man - they only need to hit 60%
writing software: quality,
(something to bear in mind if you’re trying to
readability, scalability, speed,
attract more female applicants to diversify
cost etc.?
your tech team).

Think of it this way: every item on your list

of specifications has the potential to deter
a potential applicant. Do you really need to
include all those languages and frameworks?
From there, you can start to figure
Find a way to remove the bottleneck and
you should start to see volume pick up
out the type of person you need
immediately. to slot into your existing team.

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03

Be proactive
in how you
attract talent

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Some ways you can
strengthen your reputation
in the tech community:
• Develop content or speak publicly
about your engineering culture and
share it — what makes your workplace
different?
• Encourage developers to do open
source work and attend meet-ups.
• Organise or sponsor hackathons
(or craftathons).
If you’re
waiting for
great people
to fall into
your lap,
think again.
Today, when it comes to hiring
software developers, it is not a
business-driven market - it is a
candidate-driven market.
Companies searching for tech talent can
sometimes follow the mistaken assumption
that they hold the power since they’re doing
the hiring. Yet, when it comes to highly skilled
tech talent, that is no longer the case.
As specialized talent with technical expertise
is so hard to recruit, qualified candidates are
the ones who hold the power when it comes
to what job offers they respond to, which
companies they will work for, and how much
they should be paid.
Perhaps you want more diversity in your
company, more women, a wider mix of ages
and ethnicities - the question is, why should
these people come to you?
In order to find the right people, you have
to take action to strengthen your presence
in the tech community. One thing that can
really help with both quantity and quality of
applications is cultivating a strong employer
brand.
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Building your brand in the
community will raise your
profile amongst potential
applicants.

The result? Your company

will become front of mind
for candidates when they
are considering a job move.

Funmi, who’s one of our alumni, had done

an economics degree at university, worked
in finance for a few years then became
interested in software development. She
started to really enjoy writing code.

She went along to a

hackathon organised by
Starling Bank, and paired with
some of the developers there.

Through this experience, she gained an

awareness of their working culture, how
they write code, how they use technology
for their business.

Starling Bank ended up sponsoring her

through Makers Academy and at the end of
the course, they offered her a job as an iOS
developer. This was a couple of years ago,
and she now works at Yoyo Wallet - but at
the time, the hackathon was a key gateway
catalysing her attraction to Starling Bank.

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04

Move quickly
when you find
the right people

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What
is your
average
timescale
from job
opening to
job offer?
Research from Devskiller
shows that the average time
to hire a developer takes 45
days, and in many instances
can take a lot longer.
Good developers know their value and
they will not wait for you. It may not be
easy to limit the attraction stage of the
hiring funnel, but you can make sure that
the selection stage happens efficiently.
A common hiring mistake is
being too slow when it comes
to the hiring process.
Since this is a candidate-driven market,
the top applicants will easily keep going
with their job search if they don’t get a
response promptly or if the hiring process
stretches out for weeks and weeks.
It’s so important to
demonstrate to candidates
that they are the top priority.
And it’s frustrating to invest so much
time into interviewing various potential
candidates only to miss out because of
lengthy, drawn-out processes.
Compare the Market (CtM) have hired 18
Makers since they became a hiring partner.
They’ve adapted their recruitment approach
to make sure they never miss the best talent.
“Back in April, we had
a three-week process from
meeting people at the
recruitment fair to making
an offer… most recently we
got that down to ten days.
The demand on Makers was
so high, if we didn’t make
our process streamlined
for them, we lost them”.
Gary Stevens, Functional Lead,
Software Engineering at CtM
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05

Optimise
your interview
process

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Your
interview
process is
important.

Before we begin a partnership

with companies looking to
hire our software engineers,
we try and understand your
interview process.

From the length it takes you to interview

and make an offer, through to your
technical test, it’s often filled with problems
which may stop you from hiring the devs
you want.

Let’s take the technical interview as an

example. We’ve seen some companies
doing timed tech test sometimes using
apps like Codility. But when asked about
their software engineering culture, it’s rare As Aline Lerner says in her brilliant article
for companies to say they want their devs explaining how you can’t fix diversity in
to write code fast. tech without fixing the technical interview:

Often, hiring managers confess to us that

they use TDD and like to have great test
coverage. More often than not directors
of engineers say they want their software
developers to think about the product, why
a feature should be built, understand the
user experience and the business needs.
“It takes a while to internalize
the fact that the stuff you do
in technical interviews isn’t
actually the stuff you do at
work every day.”

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Make sure that your technical test mirrors
the sort of work your engineer will be doing
day-to-day. Otherwise, what you’re testing
for becomes irrelevant.
So what does qualify as a good tech test?
That depends on the role requirements.
Some examples of excellent technical
assessments:
Our entire education system
seems to be built on training
people to pass exams,
which doesn’t represent any
value in the long run. This
is something that needs to
change - and it can start with
your recruitment process.
If you’re hiring a software engineer, some
sort of technical assessment will form a
big part of your selection process. Testing
for the wrong things will result in talented
people slipping through the cracks. Here
are some examples of popular technical
tests and why they’re not optimised for
good selection strategy:
• Timed tech tests are irrelevant because
working to a time limit bears zero
resemblance to the working day.
• Logic puzzles test for the ability to
solve logic puzzles, not for the ability
to do the job.
• White-boarding may not get the best
out of everybody, especially introverts.
• Live pair programming session. This is
a great way to examine the candidate’s
ability to communicate and collaborate
on software with others.
• Take-home tech test. Trusting
candidates to choose for themselves
how long to spend on a tech test is a
good way to test for strong principles
of independent thinking.
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06

Play the
long game

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 The most important thing you can do to keep

After great people in your company is to allow them -

or better yet, encourage them - to keep learning.

all, this Engineers love learning, they want to improve,

they want to expand their skills, and they want to

is about work at a company that allows them to do that.

so much
more than The two biggest fears we see from
CIOs and CTOs when we suggest
ongoing on-boarding and training are:

filling that (a) that the engineers these

one senior
companies train up will immediately
fly the nest, taking all their valuable
skills with them.

developer (b) that it will “slow down” the

engineering team.

position.
This is about creating Our advice is to create a culture where every
a learning and training developer - no matter their experience level -

culture within our is mentored and is actively mentoring others,

businesses, that not only
saves time and money, but
means we stop complaining
advancing their skills and playing with new,
exciting technologies.
Focus on creating a culture like this, and not only

about the ‘skills gap’, and will you keep your talented developers, but other
talented developers will want to come and work
start developing a pipeline.
for you.

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07

Consider
retraining
your own
people

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When it
comes to
growing
your tech
talent
workforce,
your current
employees
can be an
important
pool of The Apprenticeship Levy gives
UK companies the opportunity

talent that to retrain existing staff in a

new way. At Makers, we’ve

is often been helping companies like

Vodafone, Deliveroo, KPMG

overlooked. and Credit Suisse to use their

Levy.

Together with Vodafone we launched

CodeReady, a new digital skills programme
for employees in Vodafone retail stores and
contact centres who are interested in a digital
career. This offered frontline employees the
opportunity to learn to code.

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Prashant Raniga was one of the
first Vodafone employees to go
through the programme.
When Prashant was at school, he was
involved in helping set up servers at school
and learning how to build computers. “A
lot of my friends and I liked tinkering with
computers a lot, from building our own
computers and setting them up to LAN
gaming,” he said.
“I also studied computing
at A-level.” He trained in
architecture then went into
Vodafone retail with the
intention to “have that as
a bridge until I got into
architecture”. He was a
technical expert — he’d resolve
technical issues in store:
training staff on the systems,
being able to know how to use
the systems, and constantly
updated with the new hardware,
phones, and gadgets.
“I ended up being in Vodafone
retail for almost seven years,”
he said. “While I was in
retail, I was working towards
becoming store manager but I
wanted something a little more
technically challenging.”
When he found out about the possibility of an
apprenticeship with Vodafone at Makers, he
was really eager to find out more. “I did Makers
because the possibilities seemed endless — to learn
all kinds of skills from meditation to test driven
development,” he said.
Now, he is a Software Developer at Vodafone UK.
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Summary
Finding tech talent in today’s
market is becoming increasingly
challenging because it is a
candidate-driven market.

However, there is plenty you can do

in-house to improve your ability to hire
top tech talent.

At the same time we recognise that every

business is different, each with its own set
of unique challenges. Partnering with an
expert who takes the time to understand
what you’re dealing with could give you
the jumpstart you need.

Here at Makers we can help.

Let’s chat

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