About two weeks ago, I posted a vacancy in the monthly “Who’s hiring” thread for our legal drafting SaaS company.
To be honest, I really didn’t know what to expect. There were a few anecdotal stories that talked about a “hiring filter”, i.e. that the amount of available Clojure-developers was small, but that the quality of those developers tends to be very high when compared to other languages. I also assumed that our 100% Clojure(Script) stack and our completely remote working policy would help. At the same time, I realise that we are a small company in the legal sector, which many developers probably (incorrectly!) do not associate with cool work.
So I was hoping for a few interesting reactions, but the amount of reactions that I actually got, was far, far better than what I had expected.
- In total we got 27 reactions, in a matter of a few days, from all over the world.
- None — literally none — of the reactions were a mismatch. Of course some developers were a better match for us than others, but based on the CVs, I could have hired every single developer that applied. We honestly had a hard time choosing.
- For about 60% of the reactions, the accompanying email or cover letter went into specific detail as to why the developer in question would be a good match.
- Only one woman replied.
Our company exclusively consists of lawyers (we all worked at these large law firms in our previous life), so we can only compare these results to a recent hiring process for a lawyer, where we applied equally flexible hiring criteria (remote, anywhere from the world, having credentials or experience in a relevat legal subject matter), and got the following results:
- About 15 reactions.
- 12 out of 15 had no, or only limited, relevant experience.
- Limited cover letters.
- A nice mix of gender.
And please take into account that, unlike what I guess many developers think, “legal tech” is seen as very hot among lawyers nowadays.
So if any company, or investor, is doubting Clojure based on the talent pool, I can assure you: a non-issue.
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The “hiring problem” is when headhunters try to sell 10 Clojure devs into the same some company with a 50% marge as they are used to from reselling Spring and React CVs.
That’s great to hear :-)
It’s also my experience. Back then, I wrote a single message into the #remote-jobs Slack channel of Clojurians. Afterward, I was busy for two weeks doing interviews. In the end, we hired two instead of one Clojure freelancer.
I’m curious. Do you have to throw a high salary package to attract candidates? I’m looking at employer side … throwing high pay to attract… not all companies have such budgets though especially those non US or Europe base. Or people on clojure are more open to salaries or they only aim for high paying ones? Mind to share.