The engineering talent war is real. It has been for some time — but with a pandemic that pushed businesses in all industries to focus on e-commerce and virtual products and services, demand for skilled engineers skyrocketed.
In June, more than 365,000 tech jobs in the U.S. were vacant, with software developers, IT support specialists, systems engineers and architects among the most coveted workers by employers.
Yet, we are hiring 10 to 15 engineers a month, far above the industry average. What’s our secret?
First, it’s important to acknowledge that engineers — and most knowledge workers — have choice and bargaining power in today’s job market. An employer needs to not only respect that but take it as an opportunity to create a more attractive workplace — and remain agile long after the hiring tides change.
You can’t overlook the elephant in the room — money talks. Today, you can’t just offer the standard “competitive salary” — you must do better.
Overall, we have learned that It is much harder to hire top-tier talent than it is to generate revenue. This is one of our guiding principles, and we remind our team of that all the time. It’s incumbent upon everyone in the company to focus their energies on helping us find — and retain — great people. With this commitment in place, we know the rest will take care of itself.
Granted, we are fortunate that cryptocurrency and blockchain have a certain cachet and come with unique engineering needs that will keep the most ambitious engineers challenged and rewarded in their day-to-day work. However, we still had to make concerted efforts to appeal to today’s in-demand engineers. Here are a few ways we are winning the war for engineering talent.
Have a strong cash position
You can’t overlook the elephant in the room — money talks. Today, you can’t just offer the standard “competitive salary” — you must do better. We make sure our offers stand out and are hard to turn down. This approach is driven by our strong cash position (yes, we recognize our good fortune).
Ultimately, innovation is our lifeblood, so everything we do is measured with quality and speed before considering cost.
Review salaries at least every six months
We don’t review salaries annually; the industry is too fast-paced and competitive for that antiquated approach. At least every six months, we review salary bands across the organization relative to employee performance and market trends and adjust employee compensation on a more flexible, ad-hoc basis.
This helps build a meritocratic and less bureaucratic culture and ensures our team reaps the benefits commensurate with their work product.
Consider compensation at the end of the hiring process
A strong cash position brings us to our next point. When we are considering a candidate for a key developer role, we do our best to push compensation considerations out to the very last hurdle. Instead, we prioritize finding the very best candidates in the world to join us as fast as possible, without considering the cost. Once an excellent candidate has been identified and is ready for an offer, we know we are up against competition to hire them and are ready to be aggressive with terms, particularly cash compensation.
We’ve also found that candidates are eager to join us because we have a lot to offer them beyond just compensation — they know they will have a great experience here with high growth, opportunity to have an impact and an overall healthy culture, so we have yet to have this backfire with unreasonable payment demands.
How about $100,000 referral bonuses for recruiters?
One of the most aggressive things we did in Q3 2021 was offer a $100,000 bounty for any recruiter who could bring us a qualified Ethereum 2 developer who then joined and stayed on for at least 90 days.
There was no contentious strategy session to come to these terms. The CEO and COO, along with the chief of staff, recognized a need to grab the attention of our qualified but very busy recruiters, and this was agreed on unanimously. The email was sent that same week — we don’t let grass grow under our feet. Here’s a copy of what we sent to our most engaged recruiters:
You are getting this email because we are meaningfully impressed with the recruiting support you have provided Blockdaemon to date. Thank you.
There are a few key roles that we seek to fill ASAP so we are hoping to additionally incentivize you to support our finding the right candidates (2 JDs attached):
ETH Engineer — this is for expert-level Ethereum Engineer who will lead our ETH2 developments. Senior Developer — this is for top tier / layer 2 engineers (named sample target companies for talent).
In an effort to accelerate and advance efforts, we are offering an additional $100k USD bounty for individual recruiters who help us fill these roles ($100k USD each) assuming the talent comes onboard and stays with us for at least 90 days. This offer stands until the roles are filled.
Please send only qualified candidates through standard channels and a direct note to the people on this email so that we can track accordingly.
We are happy to accommodate additional paperwork, at your request, as needed, within reason.
Meetings with recruiters started with a new vigor the following week, and naturally the reaction was quite positive. Of course, we had to follow up with others to assure them this was no joke. Today, the offer still stands and we continue to benefit from it in the form of our white-hot hiring streak.
Cash may be king, but it goes without saying that we are constantly refining hiring, retention and training policies to reflect a welcoming, rewarding and long-term workplace for some of the blockchain industry’s most talented people.
Of course, culture is extremely important to us (yes everyone says that) but we look at what our workers really want beyond compensation. This is why we are all remote and will remain that way — it’s a highly popular and flexible option for our global team.
To win the war on engineering talent, or any talent, ask yourselves if you are providing the most attractive financial package and the kind of work environment your people truly want.
Did I mention that we’re hiring?