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How to hire a software engineer in 2026
Hiring a software engineer meant a job board and a lot of waiting. The process has changed at every step, so here's what it looks like now.

How to reduce time to hire
The usual advice trims days off the interview loop. The weeks are somewhere else.

The State of UK Tech Hiring: Summer 2026
AI took over the growth rankings this summer, the odds of getting hired vary fourfold by sector, and growing fast earns a company almost no attention. cord's quarterly read on UK tech hiring, built from 306 growth-ranked and 391 demand-ranked companies.

Where startups and scaleups find software engineers
The engineers worth hiring are rarely the ones applying. That single fact reorders the whole list of places to look.

Cost per hire: cord vs recruitment agencies
A recruitment agency charges a percentage of the salary for every hire. A direct platform charges a flat fee. On an engineer, the gap runs to thousands of pounds.

Applications to interviews ratio: cord vs Indeed
The application-to-interview rate is the number that decides whether a job posting was worth it. On general job boards it is low by design.
Changelog
Fixes and reliability (early October 2026)
Five fixes went out this week, from the order of your Boolean search results to a scrollbar you can drag again. For companies Boolean searches that rank by relevance: With the Recommended sort, a Boolean decided who appeared but not in what order, so a search for "AEM" put popular engineers with one passing mention above genuine specialists. The candidates who match your Boolean best now come first. Popularity and recent activity still count, but they can no longer lift a weak match above a much stronger one. No more crashing position pages: A position crashed instead of loading if a hidden account was on its hiring team. Up to 45 live positions across 14 companies were affected, and they all open now. For job seekers Keyword searches from discover now work for everyone: If you had no saved searches, a keyword search typed from Discover lost its keyword on the way to the results. The page showed your search as its title, then listed all 19,107 positions. It now shows only the matching roles, with the keyword as a filter you can remove. A scrollbar you can drag: When you opened a role from a results list, dragging the scrollbar or clicking its track did nothing. It scrolls now, which matters if you use a touchscreen or a mouse without a wheel. For everyone Hiring Leaders rankings: The Summer '25 and Spring '25 rankings crashed instead of opening when a company in them had no record for that season. They load now, and season names no longer carry a month range after them.
October 5, 2026
Intros inside every position
Intros used to be a page of its own, with a dropdown to switch between roles. It now sits on each position as a tab, next to everything else you do on that role, and every set is twice the size. Additional Features Intros on the position page: Each position now has its own header and tabs, with Intros next to the position's analytics and settings. You switch roles from the sidebar rather than a dropdown. Ten intros per set: Each set now brings you 10 candidates instead of 5. The same person can no longer turn up twice in one set. Start a position's intros yourself: A new position used to wait for the overnight run, and that doesn't run at weekends. If you're on the hiring team and a position has no intros yet, you can now start them from the position page. Analytics for one position: The Analytics tab shows views, requests sent and received, how fast you reply and conversations started, for that position alone, from the day it was posted. Improvements Candidates matched to the job description: About 90% of live positions had no qualities set, so a new role had little to rank candidates against. cord now reads them from the job description. Saved and Not right per position: Both lists now belong to the position they came from, and they stay after the role is filled. A closed position's intros are read-only. A wider pool: Intros can now reach passive candidates and people with adjacent skills, who were left out before. Fixes Unreviewed intros stay in play: Every candidate you'd been shown was kept out of later sets, including the ones you never got to. Now only the candidates you acted on are left out. Passive candidates stay in your lists: When a candidate went passive, they were removed from intros on every position, and your saves and messages went with them. That no longer happens.
October 1, 2026
Recommended jobs at your level
Your recommended jobs were ranked almost entirely on skills and job title, so a junior engineer could open the page and find it full of senior and lead roles. Seniority now counts, and a fault that left some people with an empty page is fixed. Improvements Roles at your level: Seniority carried one of the lightest weights in how recommended jobs were ranked, so it barely changed what you saw. Recommended jobs now only show roles within one level of yours, so someone at junior sees entry, junior and mid roles. If you've picked more than one level, you see exactly those. Roles with no level set still show, and if the filter would leave you with nothing, you get the wider list instead of an empty page. Fixes Recommended jobs no longer come up empty: If part of your profile was missing, such as your secondary skills or the region behind your location, the page could fail and show "No relevant positions found" even when roles matched. One person had around 1,372 matching listings and saw none. A missing detail is now skipped and matching carries on with everything else.
September 25, 2026
Fixes and reliability (end of September 2026)
Four smaller fixes went out this week, from the location filter in candidate search to what you see when a password is turned down. For companies Cities now return correctly in the location filter: Typing "Berlin" into the Current location filter offered "Berlin Road" and "Berliner Strasse 12", never Berlin itself, so there was no way to pick the place you meant. The filter now offers cities and countries, in candidate search and in streams. No more broken candidate profile photos: Photos brought in from LinkedIn were saved as links that LinkedIn expires, so after a while they turned into broken images. cord now keeps its own copy of a photo when it comes in. For everyone US locations now read properly: A location saved as just "United States" showed as "United States, undefined, USA", and Texas showed as "Texas, Texas, USA". They now read "USA" and "Texas, USA". Before the fix, 767 US profiles had "undefined" in their location. Password errors are now visible: When company signup or a password reset turned a password down, the form showed nothing, so it just looked broken. The reason now appears on the form. Every signup and reset also refuses passwords that have turned up in known data breaches, where before only two of the five places you can set a password checked.
September 24, 2026
Company spotlight

What companies say about their time to hire on cord
Twenty-five companies on how long it actually took them to fill a role.

What companies say about their cost per hire on cord
Twenty-five companies on what happened to their cost per hire once the agency fee came out of it.

What companies say about candidate quality on cord
Twenty-five companies on the people they ended up hiring.

What companies say about using cord day to day
Twenty-five companies on how much of the week sourcing on cord actually takes.

What companies say about response rates on cord
Twenty-five companies on what happens when you message people who are actually looking for work.

Highlighted company: Pod
Six live roles, 67 conversations started in the last 30 days, every one of them with the salary on the front.
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