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Employer Branding
Must-Haves to Engage
Developers

Introduction
Finding ways to stand out from the competition to hire developers is incredibly
difficult. Not only that, but the top candidates have a lot of job options. In
today’s market, a strong employer brand could be the difference between
hiring the programmers you need and losing them to another company. And
yet, many companies struggle to build attention-grabbing employer branding
content. According to a recent study by Jibe, 50% of employers think creating
employer branding content is a major challenge.
That raises an obvious question: What on Earth can you do to make your
employer brand stand out to developers?
Creating a rich employer brand doesn’t mean that you have to spend a fortune.
In fact, the biggest must-haves for a compelling employer brand won’t cost you
a dime of your recruitment budget this year.
Ultimately, an effective employer brand consists of the following components:
• A strong employer branding strategy
• A library of compelling employer branding content
• A developer-centric approach to promoting your employer brand
To address all of these components, here are the 8 things you need to create
employer branding materials that grab developers’ attention and inspire them
to apply for your open technical jobs.

Must-Haves for Developing Your
Employer Branding Strategy
A shiny careers website or Company Page on
Stack Overflow isn’t very effective without a compelling
“why.” Why is your company a great place for developers
to work? Why are you hiring developers—and what
goals are you hoping they’ll help you accomplish?
The answers to these questions are critical, which is
why we’ll start by discussing the things you need to
think about before you create any employer branding
content or promote your company to developers.

Employer Branding Must-Haves to Engage Developers
Alignment Around
Your Company’s Needs
Your engineering team doesn’t want to hire more developers just for
the sake of hiring them. They have tangible goals that they want to
hit in the short and long-term—and they need additional hands to
help achieve them. Developers always want to know more about
the projects your company is working on, so aligning your employer
brand with the things your tech team (and the entire company)
needs is fairly straightforward.
The folks at Built In suggest answering the following questions
about your company’s objectives in order to guide your entire
approach to employer branding:
1. What objectives will the business pursue over the next
12-36 months?
2. What new products and services are in the pipeline?
3. What talent gaps exist that could prevent us from meeting
our obligations?
An example of this might be that you want to launch an Android
version of your mobile app by the end of this year—and you need
two to three more Android developers to help you do it. Whatever
the answer is for you, identify how you can align your employer
brand to your company’s current and future business needs before
you do anything else.
01

Clarity Around What You
Stand for as a Company
The employer brand that you advertise to developers should
be driven by your core values as a company. Of course, defining
these values isn’t something you can (or should have to) do on
your own. But without clarity around what your organization
stands for—and how it treats its employees—it’s nearly
impossible to create anything that gets developers excited
about the possibility of joining the team.
Even if you’re not starting from scratch, make sure that you’re
getting regular input from leaders on your tech team and
across the entire organization to identify (and reconfirm) your
company’s core values. If you work for a smaller company, don’t
be afraid to ask other managers for their impression of what
the organization stands for. But if you don’t have the luxury of
regularly-scheduled chats with leadership, try asking during
more casual conversations around the office. Doing this work
at the beginning of the process will save you the headache
of having to convince your CTO or other executives at your
company that your mission effectively captures what makes
your company stand out.
02

Aggressive, Yet Achievable
KPIs and Hiring Objectives
It would be easy to say, “We’re creating an employer brand
that will generate more applications!” But developer hiring is a
process that’s often much slower than it is when you’re hiring for
non-technical roles. So while we don’t want to discourage you
from keeping a close eye on application numbers, sit down and
think about the other KPIs that you can measure throughout your
hiring campaign.
When you’re launching or revamping your employer brand, you
might not be immediately inundated by hundreds of developer
applications. Instead, consider tracking the following over the first
month or two of your next employer branding campaign:
• % increase in developer engagement on organic social
media channels
• % increase in tech recruitment email response rate
• % increase in qualified developer applicants
Of course, your goals might be different. That’s OK! No matter
what you’re trying to achieve through your employer branding
campaign, make it a point to meet with your team to identify your
most important KPIs—and don’t focus too much on application
volume alone.
03

Must-Have Employer Branding
Content for Developers
Your employer branding content is the end-result of
all that hard work you did to identify your company’s
core values and mission statement. These materials
are often your first (and only) opportunity to make a
positive first impression on developer candidates.
Take a look at these next must-haves for creating
employer branding content that resonates with the
types of developers you want to hire.

A Library of Photos
(and Videos) That Highlight
Your Engineering Culture
There’s no need to make candidates wait until an
in-person interview to get a glimpse of your work
environment. Photos of your office and workstations
are a great start, but they really come to life when
they include actual employees. If your team has
the bandwidth, consider interviewing a few of your
developers and creating short videos to give candidates
an even more in-depth look into your company culture.
This might sound like a time-consuming and expensive
effort, but you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars
to start creating this content. In fact, many smartphones
have cameras that are capable of taking the types of
photos that you can use on your careers website or
Company Page.
04

Clear, Concise Job Listing
Copy That Addresses What
Developers Want
Developers are used to reading long and poorly-written job
listings. While it would be easy to dismiss your technical job
listings as nothing more than a requirement to generate
applications, the truth is that they’re a great boost to your
employer brand if they’re written with a developer audience
in mind.
Instead of long lists of requirements, tell developers about
your company and the projects you’re working on right
now. And avoid the temptation of listing out every single
programming language under the sun as a “requirement.” If
there are languages that would be nice for candidates to
know, list those out separately.
05
As a PHP Developer with a DevOps mentality you know there’s no such thing as “it works
on my machine”.
What you tell your friends you do
“I’m like an auto mechanic. I may work under the hood and need to get my hands dirty every
once in a while, but without me we’d be stranded on the highway.”
What you will really be doing
• Work on the software that powers Coolblue by writing PHP code and tests.
• Identify and keep track of metrics that tell you how your software is performing.
• Make improvements to the deployment pipeline to ensure smooth and frequent releases.
• Keep your eyes and ears open for ways we can further streamline our development process.
• Evangelise and spread your DevOps mentality to your colleagues.
How will you be doing this
• You’re part of an agile, multidisciplinary team. You bring your own unique skill set to the
table and collaborate with others to accomplish your goals.
• You prioritise your work with the team and its product owner, weighing both the business
and technical value of each task.
• You experiment, test, try, fail and learn all the time - with one thing at a time.
• You don’t do things just because they were always done that way. You don’t ignore the
lessons learned, however - even those learned by others.
What have we worked on last quarter
• Continuous deployment. Implemented an improved pipeline allowing us to do
continuous deployment.
• New Infrastructure. Set up a new infrastructure fully managed by Puppet.
• Coolblue API. Created the first new RESTful services in Node.js as part of our new
Coolblue API.
Team
• You’ll become part of an agile, multidisciplinary team. You get your own team room, a scrum
master to help guide the process and a product owner to represent the business’ needs.
Skills & Requirements
• You’re smart and can find a way to show us.
• Awesome with at least PHP (okay, fine: or JavaScript or C#) and willing to work
with it (at least sometimes).
• You know monitoring tools, like; StatsD, Nagios and Graphite.
• You have used continuous integration tools, like; Puppet, Bash, Jenkins, and TeamCity.
• You’ve done something similar for around 5 years.
• You take automation over documentation any day of the week.
We offer
• Money.
• To help you keep your money, we also chip in on your pension, pay for your travels and offer
a discount on all the stuff we sell.
• Room for you to do things your way.
• Lots of things you can learn through our Coolcademy & skilled sparring partners.
• 25 days of paid leave, so long as you promise to come back!
• We like to inspire your passion giving you the opportunity to visit events.
• And yes, we also have the industry standard perks such as free beer, ping pong tables,
great lunch, team activities and awesome parties.
Job Title
PHP Developer
Who Loves DevOps

A Company Page That Brings
Your Employer Branding
Assets to Life for Developers
Many careers pages are geared towards attracting candidates for
a wide variety of roles. But it’s important to show developers how
your company supports its technical employees and what makes
your engineering culture unique.
Overhauling your company’s careers page to address what
developers want might be a daunting task. For a quick win, create
a Company Page on Stack Overflow. Company Pages make it
easy to showcase your approach to software development and
promote your employer brand on the platform developers trust
to help them do their jobs.
Whether you create a Company Page on Stack Overflow or add
a developer-specific section to your careers page, make sure to
include the following points:
• Your company’s mission statement
• Your development team’s tech stack
• A brief statement about what your engineers are working on—
and what the team hopes to accomplish in the future
• A list of relevant perks that grab developer’s attention, such
as flex time to work on side projects and equipment budgets
06

Must-Haves for Promoting
Your Employer Brand
Now that you’ve created employer branding
content designed to attract developers, the next
step is knowing how to get those materials in front
of the right people, at the right time. Here are some
tips to consider when you start promoting your
employer brand to a developer audience.

A Candidate-Focused
Social Media Presence
It would be easy to use your social media accounts solely as
recruitment tools. In fact, how many times have you seen
Twitter accounts that have nothing but links to open positions?
However, this should be done sparingly—and often times,
providing developer candidates with additional insights that
are relevant to them can help you attract more applicants.
Here are a few more ways you can provide value to applicants
on social media:
• Ask your current employees to chip in. Many
developers maintain personal blogs on which they
write about the latest programming trends. Giving them
the opportunity to do so on your official social media
channels is a great way to encourage them to become
brand ambassadors.
• Monitor your brand mentions. By proactively searching
for what others are saying about you on social media, you
have the chance to respond yourself and either fix or help
supplement the message.
07

Knowledge of Where Developers
Actually Spend Their Time
Only 11% of the developers who responded to the 2017 Developer
Hiring Landscape said that they found their current jobs through a
general job board. On top of that only 13% of developers are actively
searching for new jobs.
You could use all of your employer branding resources on every site
under the sun, but you’d likely be unhappy with the results. Instead,
ask yourself the following two questions:
1. What types of developers am I trying to hire?
2. Where are those developers spending their free time online?
This list might look similar to what you explored when you were
creating your employer branding strategy, but the answers are also a
good indicator of where you should be promoting your employer brand.
Since you already know that developers aren’t spending their time on
general job boards, a less traditional approach can actually help you
engage with a larger developer audience.
Sites like Stack Overflow, Github, and Hacker News are popular
amongst programmers of all developers and are ideal places to engage
with a large developer audience. But if you want to know more about
what your top candidates are interested in, where they’re located,
and how they evaluate jobs—we have the data you need to create
employer branding campaigns that are targeted to the right people,
at the right time.
08

Conclusion
Your employer brand what educates developer candidates
about what makes your company a great place to work.
Considering the intense competition to hire programmers,
you need to make sure that your employer branding content
addresses what developers want, when they decide to dig
around for a little more information about your company.
An employer brand is much more than a concept—it’s
the integration of a lot of planning, content creation, and
promotion that will drive applications to your open tech roles.
Follow these guidelines and you’ll see higher engagement
levels with passive and active developer candidates. But don’t
stop there. Your employer brand is always evolving, and your
employer branding materials should evolve with it.

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