Where startups and scaleups find software engineers

Ask where to find engineers and you get the standard list: job boards, agencies, referrals, a few niche platforms. The list isn't wrong. It's just ordered by what's easiest to start, not by what works when the person you want isn't looking for a job.

That's the catch with almost every channel. The best engineers already have work they don't hate, so they're not refreshing job boards or firing off applications. If your plan depends on them coming to you, you've quietly ruled them out before you've begun.

What a job board actually gets you

A job board is an advert. You post the role and wait for the right person to find it, read it, and decide today is the day they act. That works for people actively job-hunting. It does nothing for the engineer who'd move for the right thing but isn't scanning listings to find it.

So a board fills the top of your pipeline with the people most available, which is not the same as the people you most want.

What an agency actually gets you

An agency solves the reaching problem by doing the messaging for you, and charges 15 to 30% of first-year salary for it. There's a subtler cost too. You brief a person who then re-explains your role to engineers you never speak to, so the pitch that lands is a copy of a copy. For a startup selling a vision, that telephone game is where a lot of the appeal leaks out.

Reaching them directly

The channel that reaches a busy engineer is the one that goes to them, in their words, from the person they'd actually work with. No advert to stumble on, no agency in the middle rewriting the story.

You can see what that does in the numbers. Startups on cord fill engineering roles in a median of 28 days, and there are more than 250,000 verified engineers to reach, most of whom would never have seen a job post. Because the hiring manager messages directly, the average hire costs around £940 rather than a five-figure agency fee. The pitch never leaves the room, which is exactly why it lands.

Does the channel change as you scale?

Not really, and that surprises people. A 200-person company has more process and more roles, but the engineers it wants are just as passive as the ones a five-person startup is chasing. The direct approach holds: scaleups on cord fill engineering roles in a median of 33 days, a few days more than startups and still a fraction of the usual cycle. Granola grew headcount 425% this way, and Dwelly 355%. The volume changed. The method didn't.

The bottom line

The right place to find engineers isn't a place at all. It's a move: reach the people who aren't looking, directly, before an agency or a job board decides who you get to talk to. The engineers who'd never see your advert are the ones worth reaching, and you can see who's open to moving on cord right now.