Finding good hires is hard. Finding great ones - and keeping them - is even harder. Devtools is no exception: It’s a huge industry with a global talent pool, and none of that makes hiring any easier. If you want to meaningfully increase your chances of attracting the developers who are right for your company, you need to get better at employer branding.
Why the hiring game is so challenging
If you post your devtools job ad on LinkedIn and a few well-selected job boards, you’ll get plenty of applicants, and many of them will be a bad fit for the role. If you hire an external recruiter and pay handsomely for a developer search, you’ll get a higher number of qualified candidates but no greater guarantee of cultural fit.
When you reach out directly to passive candidates (those currently in employment and not applying), you have to re-explain to every engineer why your offer beats the job they already have. Hiring in tech can work this way, but the process is inefficient and often exhausting..
What’s missing in the developer hiring process?
The underlying problem is a lack of shared context. Outreach to prospective candidates always starts from a position of zero trust.
You differentiate yourself to the candidate, but neither side has developed any reason to trust the other yet. This kind of recruiting is inherently one-to-one, so it doesn’t scale. If you want more candidates, you need to invest more recruiting hours in outreach.
The most successful engineering organizations go about this from a different angle. Ask any engineer what they think of working at Meta, and they’ll probably say something like “ethically questionable, but technically excellent and very well paid.”
That’s an employer brand at work, and most companies don’t have one built to attract and engage talent.
The fix is to apply brand-building techniques to hiring: Market your company to your future applicants, and let them get to know you over time so that they know what you stand for before you ever schedule a screening interview. For engineering roles, that means creating technical content.
Why choose technical content for technical employer branding?
Engineers already read articles to learn and explore new topics, so technical content meets your potential hires in a format they already consume. More importantly, it builds shared context before you ever make contact. Someone who reads your post already understands your engineering values, what your product does, and how your team thinks.
Some readers will reach out about a role on their own. Most aren’t job-hunting right now at all, but your content keeps working for you, catching their interest for when they are. And unlike direct outreach, technical content can attract candidates on its own through SEO or community sharing, which is what finally lets recruiting scale.
Create the right technical content for employer branding
Your technical content has to not only show potential candidates the vision and value of your product but also a look into what it’s like to build it.
Demonstrate your mission and impact
Most devtools candidates are drawn in by product vision and purpose. For a devtools company, that means explaining how your product improves developer workflows, saves time, removes friction, or makes engineering teams more effective. But anyone can claim their workflow is great. Wherever possible, show customer proof that your solution works.
Define a clear EVP
Your employee value proposition (EVP) should answer one simple question: Why should a strong engineer join your startup instead of staying where they are? The answer needs to be honest and specific, grounded in what the company actually offers today rather than what it hopes to offer later.
That might mean high ownership, low bureaucracy, a decent technical stack, a functional way of making decisions as an organization, colleagues who are genuinely kind and supportive, flexible work if it’s truly offered, and the chance to shape a product at an early stage.
Be clear about the engineering reality
Devtools candidates care about the work itself, so show what the team builds and how it builds it: your stack, your product architecture, the engineering challenges you run into, your release process, how you think about developer experience.
Publish technical blog posts that share architecture lessons. Show prototypes and demos, highlight open-source contributions, and explain how engineers actually influence product direction.
Use founders and engineers as voices
Startups have an advantage bigger companies often lack: direct, human storytelling from the people actually building the company. A lot of startups make the mistake of not crediting an author behind the blog. Avoid this. Posts should credit members of the team and their actual ideas. You are here to build as much human connection as possible with your potential candidates.
Use founder posts, engineer spotlights, and short videos to make the brand feel real instead of too polished and distant. Think engineer stories about hard problems rather than just product vision. We also recommend posts about launches and lessons learned, authored by the engineers who worked on them. Show how the team actually works and solves problems — this gives you a real opportunity to stand out. Support good writing with short clips, GIFs, or screenshots to communicate with clarity and depth.
The goal throughout is to communicate both the engineering reality and the people behind it.
Build visibility in the right places
Devtools startups need a presence where technical candidates already spend their time: LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and community events can all support the brand, provided the content is tailored to the audience.
Share engineering content on LinkedIn, contribute to GitHub and open-source communities, and post practical discussions in developer forums. Niche communities are especially valuable for targeted credibility. If you use Clojure, being known in the Clojurians Slack pays off. Though a marketer or recruiter posting there does raise red flags, an engineer showing up and sharing genuinely does not.
Turn employees into advocates
Employees’ experiences are one of the strongest signals of whether a startup is a good place to work. Use your own team to give positive accounts of growth, ownership, and team culture. Candidates develop far more trust from reading informative posts than from a corporate landing page or a job description. Ask employees to share their own experiences, highlight first hires and early team members, feature career-growth stories tied to real technical challenges someone helped solve, and favor honest, human content over anything scripted.
The biggest mistake in hiring
The biggest mistake in hiring is running a talent acquisition strategy that isn’t present 365 days a year. Some earlier-stage CEOs perceive this as a waste of resources, but done right, the ROI is much better than that of shorter, labor-intensive hiring campaigns.
Keeping a permanent hiring presence running means developers are engaged with your company months before they become available, and they come to your roles through a steadier, more established process.
Make your hiring process part of your brand
If your goal is to hire more and better engineers, the recruiting process itself still needs to be a great experience. If it isn’t, your technical content brings good candidates in at the top of the funnel only to lose them later in the process. Hiring is part of the employer brand, not separate from it.
Keep job descriptions specific and honest, move quickly and communicate clearly, use structured interviews, send respectful rejection messages, and make onboarding feel welcoming and organized. Make the most of your developer marketing articles by sending candidates relevant links to read at each stage of the hiring process.
None of this replaces the rest of your recruiting. Technical content supports and enhances it. Build shared context through technical content, show the reality of the work and the people behind it, and the right engineers will start finding you before you ever have to pitch them.
If you want to learn more about how to engage a developer audience using technical content, contact us here.
