When I was doing a lot of hiring, the pool of Mac Admins was smaller. And it was in a way easier for me to recruit people, because I knew a lot of them. As the pool has grown and a lot of the talent has matured, keeping your finger on the pulse of the hiring market around Apple has become much more challenging. Also, I’ve recruited far more developers and marketing professionals than Apple engineers in the past couple of years. But, there are still a number of places that you can look to find good Mac and iOS engineers looking for a gig. Here’s a quick and dirty list (which can be used to find jobs as well, I suppose) of a few of the better places to look for people you might choose to try and hire:
- One of the best places to find someone is whatever site or email list appeals to the administrators of products you run. For example, this could be the Studio SysAdmins list if you’re in the film industry, JAMF Nation if you run the Casper Suite, or the Munki forums if you use Munki. If your target is to hire someone with a specific skillset, then looking where the people who have those skills lurk is never a terrible idea. Do be gentle there, though, and know what the protocol is for posting a job (e.g. many have specific threads for job and employee seekers). But nothing is as legitimate as flexing your knowledge of a product on the products own forums. This is more challenging if you’re looking for a generalist. There you likely have more people suitable, so opening your net to a job board isn’t terrible idea. I’d also include the Mac Enterprise email list, and all the Mac conferences. Having said that, protocol is important. For example, in my opinion, it is crass to actively recruit someone at a conference if their employer paid for them to be there. Grab a card, do it when you get home if you need to.
- Indeed.com. It’s cheap, it’s easy to post, and I see a lot more people using this site than I see for some of the larger sites. They do aggregate data from some of the larger sites, so a lot of candidates might start their searches there.
- Craigslist. I’ve found some of my best employees on Craigslist. You get a lot more resumes that aren’t appropriate, so you’ll spend a little more time weeding through them. It’s the cheapest place to post a job, and you’ll spend more time vetting candidates, but it’s not a bad place if you’re looking for local generalist talent and have the time to spend.
- Monster.com is one of the oldest of the recruiting sites. It’s not a terrible place to post a job. You get fewer candidates than many other places, but they’re often more qualified than you might think. I do find you get people waaaaay outside your geography, which is always hard, especially for a smaller company who can’t pull the trigger on a Visa as quickly as they’d like to fill a vacancy.
- CareerBuilder is similar to Monster, so most of the things there apply to it as well. Pick one of these sites, if you’re looking fora good generalist. If you have a specialty, you can search their resumes but aren’t likely to find a ton of candidates in the Apple space.
- Dice.com is another big job board.
- LinkedIn. It’s the professional social network, right? I found many really good candidates. I got a response per maybe 10 messages I sent, and of those, most were qualified on paper at a minimum. It can take some time to sort through people, but do yourself a favor and get a Premium account. It will cost less than posting a job to many of the big sites, and you’ll have much better search and communication tools at your disposal! You can also post a job there, but it only amplifies by your social network, so you’ll need a good number of connections for this to pan out well for you.
- Headhunter.com. This site used to have more normal techie jobs. These days they’ve gone into more executive and management, which sometimes you’ll need to hire.
- If you need interns, check out AfterCollege.
- Peercisely. A peer-based job board that rewards referrals. ‘Cause referrals are the best way to find employees, after all!
- snagajob.com is a great spot for hourly employees. Which most Mac engineers are not. But some are…
- glassdoor.com is one of the most important tools many potential employees have in their job hunting arsenal. And you can post your job there. Chances are, they’ll look you up there, btw, so review what the reviews on you say.
- Superuser, stackoverflow, (you can post jobs to these), github (who wrote the cool projects you like or contributes to them), Twitter, etc. A good strategy I used was to Google for the answer to a question I had. Sometimes I’d pick a juicy trouble ticket from the previous week and copy the text and paste it into a browser. If someone answered that question, then I might very well want them on my team. This worked best when I was after employees who could live anywhere in the US or world. It’s harder when you need an onsite engineer.
- Slack. It’s not often that something comes along and really changes an entire community. Launched maybe a year ago, the MacAdmins Slack channel, accessible at https://macadmins.herokuapp.com has become a great place to find talented Mac Admins, and see what else they have have posted previously!
- Grow your own. I’m sure this isn’t what anyone who finds this post with a Google search is going to want to find. But consider giving someone on your team a chance to become a good Mac Admin. They may surprise you!
- Finally, The community is still small enough that you can search for speakers at the various Mac Conferences and look into whether some of them are local to you. This is kinda’ funny, because they might not even remotely be the best talent, but they might – or they might know someone looking!
Good luck. Good people make your company and you more successful. A bad hire has the opposite impact. Choose wisely! And if you found a job and think you have a good add, post a comment. I’m always interested in how people found their gigs!