Many open positions, few candidates
You will have noticed, DevOps profiles are very in demand on the IT profile market. There are far more vacant positions than candidates able to occupy them. This results in a serious deficit that forces falling back on less experienced profiles or simply not filling the position while waiting to find the rare gem.
Personally, I don’t complain about it, when I’m the “recruited”. I can choose the mission towards which I can head, and the covid period didn’t hit me as much as others might have been. Recruiters sometimes fight to be sure to make me sign, and all this clearly plays in my favor.
It’s not the same when I’m on the recruiter side, which is the case right now. Despite everything (and not alone, I don’t want to attribute all the merits to myself) I participated in the recruitment of 3 profiles (and their signing) in a few weeks, while some positions can remain open for more than a year without being filled. Despite everything, during this recruitment period, 2 other candidates stood us up at the last minute, having had a better offer.
The “junior” production-ready devops is a mirage
For lack of experienced candidates, many companies are looking for “junior” profiles, cheaper, to carry the DevOps question. You need to know what you’re exposing yourself to in this kind of case.
DevOps philosophy is based on being able to understand developers and system teams to be able to define solutions and methods that will allow these teams to work in harmony to make the service most effective for their clients, internal or external.
This implies having enough experience to have encountered the pitfalls on both sides and thus understand the expectations of different professions.
Targeted skills are only acquired through experience. It’s not enough to master tools often used in DevOps practices to understand their usefulness and the purpose of their use. We manipulate concepts and ideas. It will be utopian to expect from someone who doesn’t have large-scale production experience that they explain methods to ensure platform scalability, and that they anticipate problems you’re going to encounter both at the code and system level.
Asking a junior to take into account system security issues and guide developers’ technical choices in this direction will also be risky and this will have trouble giving expected results.
How to attract candidates?
Who says huge imbalance in supply and demand, says it’s the candidate who chooses their position. You then need to find the elements that will make them choose your company rather than another.
First, salary
This seems simplistic, but it’s the most obvious lever that will influence the candidate’s choice to join you. Who says strong demand, says leveling up of profile remuneration. Today, without me giving a range, this evolving a lot according to the period, DevOps salaries reach peaks that sometimes seem indecent.
However, a good recruitment on these very structuring profiles within the company can save years of evolution of development and infrastructure practices, and make up for a delay, or even get ahead, on competitors by improving team efficiency and reducing application time to market. Considering that good profiles will produce more with fewer people, their recruitment will finally quickly pay for itself.
Offer technical challenges
This is a necessary point, but not sufficient. We have passionate professions and a large part of what motivates is learning lots of new things. Having a stimulating technical environment is an asset for recruiting a curious and motivated profile.
You must not be afraid to set the bar high and business objectives forcing to surpass oneself, without falling into the excesses of perpetual best effort that would exhaust the team. Offering an environment where the candidate can give free rein to their curiosity and thirst to test new things and improve existing things ensures them that they can continue to evolve and grow their experiences and therefore, their skills. They will come more easily than if they perceive things that could slow them down in their evolution.
Then, you’ll need to leave them the technical choices of the perimeters they’ll have under their responsibility.
The work environment
We’ve mocked a lot “the startup spirit” with “chief happiness officers”, foosball, the bean-to-cup coffee machine or paintball outings between colleagues organized by the company. This can still make a difference during recruitment. As a recruit, coming to visit offices and discovering soulless premises, with dusty carpet and sad atmosphere is a no-go for a future mission. Conversely, discovering offices decorated by feng shui professionals, with an aquarium for the zen side and fatboys (large cushions filled with beads in which you sink with your computer on your knees, or for a little nap between noon and two) is a plus but doesn’t do everything.
The questions I ask when I’m recruited are certainly much focused on the technical aspect (it’s my job) but also much on the human functioning of the company. The essential work of DevOps philosophy bearers is less to evolve the technical part of the company than to evolve methods and mentalities of teams. I therefore try to capture weak and strong signals that will make me best understand what is the company’s will to evolve and accept the changes I can bring. Realizing that a company is not ready to evolve can make me turn my heels more surely than a salary that’s too low.
Other points will make me not follow up with a company. I can cite for example schedules. What need to force teams to come to the office at 8am every morning? This sentence may make me seem like a diva, but being a father, I will always prioritize being able to take my children to school. And since I can choose, this will clearly play against the company that wants to recruit me. I’ve, moreover, encountered this case recently and it’s often clearly counterproductive.
Another important point in choosing a future work environment: You need flexibility on telework. If I decide to work from home, I’ll do what’s necessary to be just as productive, or even more than if I were at the office. Not having to commute is an important comfort of life that shouldn’t be neglected.
Another advantage of telework: you’re no longer limited to recruiting in your region, or even in your country either.
Trust: probably the most important
In the same way, having people on my back to check the time I spend at work is infantilizing. I commit to results, and not to time spent at the office. When you’re a professional, you expect people to trust you on your abilities to carry out your missions well.
Taking the candidate for an executor is also to be avoided. The rare times my missions went badly, it’s when I didn’t have the possibility to bring my experience into the work. Technical choices were already made, and I didn’t have my say. My manager was content to tell me “do this”. All my remarks concerning disastrous choices made before my arrival or without consulting me remained dead letters. I was told “we’ll see that later” or “we don’t have the budget to set that up”. I left these companies telling them they had wasted budget by taking someone with experience, and they could have taken a junior, much cheaper.
When we talk about experienced profiles, we don’t hire someone to tell them what to do, but for them to tell us what to do.
How to improve your image with candidates?
The tech world is very small. Nothing is definitive, but bad feedback from people who have left the company or are still there can harm you when it’s time to recruit.
When I intervene in a company, I’m there to put it on the right tracks of DevOps philosophy. One of the first things I do is to put system and development teams back on the same level of communication. I then try to introduce methods and concepts that will bring them closer and give them back the desire to work together.
I communicate a lot on DevOps philosophy, techniques and everything this can bring to teams. When we explain to developers that thanks to certain methods, they’re going to stop being bored with tedious tool configurations to (finally!) devote themselves to what is their profession and what they’re passionate about, I’m often heard. When I explain to system teams that we can put in place methods to make their infrastructures reliable and free up time for them to improve existing things and work on new technologies, they’re also rather delighted!
We thus free up time for everyone. This time must thus be reinvested in communication. We’ll thus put everyone around the table from the start of projects, and we’ll save precious time at the end of the chain thanks to better thought systems, more maintainable and whose updates will be facilitated.
What’s the connection with recruitment, you’ll say?
Your structure’s brand image for employees.
You’ll be able to attract more easily the profiles everyone is looking for if you have a more attractive environment for candidates. You’ll be able to rely on your teams who feel good there to discuss with them and convince them that they have interest in coming to you. You’ll make candidates envious.
And if you’re looking for someone capable of accompanying you in this transformation, don’t hesitate to contact me.