Attracting world-class development talent can be one of the hardest challenges facing any technical team in 2017. These days developers are in such high demand that the best will have a seemingly unlimited number of opportunities to choose from, and many developers I speak to have 10+ approaches per day about new roles. With this much demand, how do companies ensure they stand out from the crowd?

Sure, the Facebook’s, Google’s and Amazon’s are all well-renowned for attracting world-class talent, and more often than not a brand name in itself can bring a flock of CVs to your door. But what about the start-ups of the world? Or the charities? The lesser known companies that need to be at the bleeding edge of tech just to survive? Arguably, for them attracting the best talent can be the difference between failure and success. So how do they attract the best?

With this is mind, I put together a short survey to send out to over 1000 leading developers, across all tech stacks, contract and perm, to answer one simple question:

What really attracts developers to new opportunities?

Interestingly enough, whilst Tech Stack was the overall winner, this largely depended on the level of the developer; Junior Developers were more likely to factor in Location, whilst at the other end of the scale, CTO’s and Development Managers cared more about the Level of the Role.

When asked ‘How important is it when moving roles to move up the development career ladder?’, Lead Developers found this most important, with CTO’s caring the least about moving on up.

When asked what technologies developers would like to be working with, here are the top 8:

  • Machine Learning
  • Big Data
  • AWS
  • Scala
  • .Net
  • AI
  • Apache Spark
  • MongoDB

Other high-performers included ElasticSearch, Haskell, React, NodeJS, Hadoop, IoT and Python.

​With Flexible and Home Working as clear winners, this also varied greatly by level, with the most important to each being:

  • Junior Developers – Holidays
  • Developers – Flexible Hours
  • Senior Developers – Work from Home
  • Development Managers – Flexible Hours
  • CTO’s – Pension

Funnily enough, you can’t just put out office food and drinks and expect millennials to flock to your desks – it was actually Senior Devs and above that this bonus appealed to most!

CTO’s and Development managers certainly think so – however everyone below either chose ‘Important, but just to feel like I’m progressing’ or ‘It’d be nice, but not necessary’. What’s important to remember though, is that no one said they were ‘not bothered’ about a pay increase.

Finally, something that can’t often be summarised by a chart, What Is Your Ideal Company Culture?

In one word, here’s what we had back:

​

​