Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

- There's a monthly "Who is hiring" thread on HN every 1st day of a month.

- Create a technical blog. When it gets popular and people see that it's high quality, brand awareness will increase. It takes time but it can bring massive gains. Extreme example: Cloudflare. But there are many smaller nice blogs. If your blog is good, it will naturally come up when people google for things etc.

- Create an RSS feed for the blog and a Twitter account ${Foobar}Engineering that RTs your blog posts. Just make sure the blog and Twitter are high quality and rare, and not random filler content every day.

- Do something unexpected, like: TikTok or YouTube channel. There's one small company in Poland that has a YouTube channel with basically short fun programming sketches (2-3 min), and this YT channel became huge. Everyone in IT in Poland knows them (https://www.youtube.com/c/HRejterzy).

- Relax your requirements, and post job offers to good job boards. Are you fine with people working remotely? Or 4 days a week? Check stuff like https://remoteok.com/ https://4dayweek.io/ etc.

- Include approx. salary data in job offer. No one likes this dance of "do they want seniors at half my current rate?".

- Perhaps become a sponsor of some underinvested opensource repos? The repo owners will likely give you some visibility on their website and top of the repo README.

PS: I'm a 30 year old dude from a 3rd world country learning how to code. I'm not good, yet, but I'm hard working and I learn fast. Just trying my luck, but do you guys take an apprentice? Or maybe in need of customer support? I'm just looking to learn. What's in for you is cost reduction and someone who would be grateful for life for giving him a chance.

This is the reason I don't even bother with permanent roles in startups anymore. Every time the budget ends up being disappointing and about half my current income.

Even worse when they approach me on a platform where they can see my profile & history and infer very well what I currently make and still proceed to pitch me their terrible role.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023343

The local labour market for engineers, technicians and developers is pretty much empty - as in, everybody with the skills required and the desire to live here already does.

Recruiting more often than not means sniping, or, if we're lucky - that someone has recently found a partner with desirable skills and coaxed them into moving up here.

Anyway, we've found that word of mouth is the most effective way; we simply let friends and associates, former colleagues and whatnot know that we're looking for X.

This is a hundred times more effective than LinkedIn for vetting candidates - people are quite unlikely to uncritically recommend someone when they will be reminded of their sell-in for years if it is a dud. (Much unlike LinkedIn endorsements...)

It turns out with friends&associates, friends&associates' friends&associates &c, you can cast a quite wide net - and also, the sell-in works better both ways; the candidates who do show up for interviews already have been told ours is a good place to be and are, more often than not, a good cultural fit.

(And, before someone asks - 'cultural fit' means 'Happy to work in a rather unstructured madhouse where the unofficial motto is 'We've never done that before, so we're probably quite good at it!') - we've assembled a motley crew from just about every nook and cranny of the planet, from Sri Lanka via Belarus to Argentina and Japan and lots inbetween. Oh, and the occasional Norwegian. All making world-class subsea equipment on a small islet way out in the boonies.