Exercises to craft an employer brand that makes engineers want to work for you

I have never been paid by the hour. I get paid for producing acceptable code by the deadline.

Pay good money. Moreover, provide meaningful raises as experience and expertise increases, and in line with the external job market. Don't hire in new hires above the salaries of your experienced employees that have to then train and babysit the new folks for six months to a year and clean up their messes.

Provide a private workspace (ideally private offices) where your knowledge workers can do their job without distraction. Don't cheap out on equipment and tooling and learning materials - it's moronic to quibble about buying an SSD or a monitor or a piece of software or a book that costs a couple of hours of your employee's hourly rate.

Provide clear direction, without micromanagement or silly infantile circle-time processes. Don't engage in ad-hoc walking-around status checks, don't demand immediate responses to asynchronous communications. Don't waste time in superfluous meetings.

Don't vacillate or chase after every customer request. When one of your employees says that something is unwise, and provides solid reasons, listen, and don't go around them to find a stooge who will obey your whims and slag in a big pile of technical debt.

Don't try to push any culty workplace culture stuff. Treat your employees like the highly paid professionals they are. Respect their time and other obligations.

> Basically, don't hate the players, hate the game.

What's wrong with hating both?

I can add a few things here. (I'm a cofounder at Job Portraits[1], an employer branding studio in SF.)

In our experience, successful employer brands turn on a startup's willingness to be transparent. Everyone in the Bay Area (not just engineers) has a bloodhound's nose for bullshit. I can't overemphasize this—the norm is vicious, laugh-in-your-face skepticism.

Our best projects are with startups who get this, and the solution isn't rocket science: you have to address your struggles.

Marketing teams are most likely to balk at revealing their company's flaws, but what's surprised us is how often technical leaders also refuse to address their team's shortcomings. In part this is because technical folks are deeply skeptical of anything their recruiting teams want (that's another story), but it's also a function of embarrassment...or even outright shame.

The classic case is the eng leader at a small startup who was previously at a FAANG company. They've spent the last few years as part of a well-oiled machine—but now everything is broken! Processes aren't just inefficient—they don't exist! The mobile app doesn't just suck—nobody knows how to fix it because that one guy who built it ditched for a FAANG job! (Oops.)

A huge part of our job, as an agency, is coaching leaders to see transparency as a competitive advantage. We say something like, "This isn't about confessing your sins. It's about revealing challenges that the right engineers will be THRILLED to solve." It's not that [thing] is broken; instead tell candidates that "this is an opportunity to implement [thing] the way you've always wanted." It's not that your failure to build [blah] is hurting the business; instead tell candidates to "come build mission-critical infrastructure." And the more specific you are, the better.

This is a mindset shift more than anything, and when we're able to pull it off it opens the door to an employer brand that candidates will trust.

Oh, and a quick note for any product marketing people who are reading this: Jobs are not products. You can't return them to the store or ask for a refund. Every person your company hires is taking a huge gamble on you. If you only 'put your best face forward' with an employer branding project, you risk emotional apocalypse if, during the person's first 30 days, they realize they were misled by a rosy employer brand. Tread carefully!

As we like to say, assume your audience (candidates) is as smart, or smarter, than you are. Even if they don't trust you, you need to trust them to self-select in—or self-select out—and the only way they can do that is with the truth.

[1] https://www.jobportraits.com/

So, when you produce the acceptable code faster you can go home earlier? No more work in a week? If not, you are paid by the hour, you just wish you would be paid for producing acceptable code by the deadline (me too btw).