BusinessTech

Four DevOps recruiting tips: How to find and hire DevOps engineers

Four DevOps recruiting tips

There are plenty of reasons why you might want to recruit DevOps engineers in 2022. A DevOps engineer introduces processes, tools, and methodologies to balance your development needs during your product’s development life cycle. Everything from coding to deployment to maintenance and updates. If you don’t hire DevOps engineers, your entire system may collapse.

How to Recruit DevOps Engineers in 2022

As important as their role is, it’s hard to find DevOps engineers. In the US, only about 11,000 DevOps are currently employed in the industry, and only 40% of them will stay in their jobs for more than a year. This low availability and constant churn make it hard to find suitable candidates.

To hire a DevOps developer, you need to think outside the box.

1.  Go where the Developers are

Firstly, you must get yourself (and your project) out there. It could include going to industry events, like the Developer Week Virtual, the DevOps Conference, DevOps Days, and the annual DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas. Don’t worry about traveling costs – most of these events have virtual ops. On the downside, it’s hard to network virtually. If you can’t attend an event, host your own. Hackathons, meetups, mini-conferences, or even career fairs can help you find great candidates and build a network of supporters. Make sure to follow up on leads and add them to LinkedIn. Aside from in-person events, you should also hang out where developers hang out online! It includes Reddit, Github, LinkedIn, and other forums. Q&A sites like Quora are also a great way to get in touch with developers.

2.  Build a Talent Pipeline

We’ve already said that DevOps engineers don’t stay in their jobs long. You may need to find a DevOps engineer every few years, so build a talent pipeline. It means keeping the resumes you receive, contacting developers on LinkedIn, and reaching out to colleges about talented graduates and students. Ideally, this should be a searchable form that you can consult from time to time. Many companies also create job ads for DevOps engineers, even if they aren’t actively hiring. That way, they can gather even more resumes for a bank when needed.

3.  Ask the right questions

Sometimes you come across talented young developers that don’t have the credentials or experience you are specifically looking for, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them as DevOps engineers. Plenty of developers have side projects and interests that cannot be used in a work context but become their passion project after hours. Who knows – they may have picked up DevOps skills working on projects with friends? Ask everyone a few pointed questions about DevOps, if they express an interest, like:

  • What do you know about DevOps?
  • How is DevOps different from agile?
  • What are the most popular DevOps tools?
  • What are the different DevOps phases?
  • How would you tackle projects that need to implement DevOps?

4.  Look beyond the borders

If you’ve tried everything possible but are still struggling to hire a DevOps engineer, it’s time to look a little further than the backyard. There are only 11,000 DevOps engineers in the US, but there are many more in countries like Ukraine or China. You can hire a DevOps engineer freelance or work through a dedicated offshore agency to fill your vacant roles. It has several benefits. Firstly, you’ll pay a lot less for these professionals (even though they have vast experience), but you also don’t have the hassle of hiring, vetting, and administrating the contracts. They will move on to a new project when you no longer need their services.

Conclusion

That is our top four recruiting tips for hiring highly sought-after DevOps engineers. Now you know how to recruit DevOps engineers for your business – all you need to do is get started. It’s as easy as going where the developers are, asking the right questions, building a talent pipeline you can mine, or just looking beyond the borders.