How do you find good technical people? If you’ve already read the how-to guide on hiring, you’ll know that it is predicated on having a bunch of resumes to pick from.

How do you get those? There’s no magic bullet, but here’s what I’ve found generally works the best. Note that this list might be slightly biased toward the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, where I work. If you have local resources for other areas of the country and the world, please add them to the comments field, or email me directly.

• Personal Referrals: This is always, always, always the best source. Its hard to tell how talented a programmer is without working with him or her, and so if you can get a referral from one of your existing staff, it’s a powerful thing. You should have a solid referral program established, with some reasonably large incentive (perhaps a few thousand dollars). There are also services that help you put together referral programs, such as Jobster.
• Less Personal Referrals: Of course, that requires that your firm be large enough to have enough programmers who have enough friends that they can recruit. If that isn’t the case yet, you can turn to some semi-automated referral programs and business networking sites, such as LinkedIn. These aren’t quite as good as a personal referral, but you can mine some of your contacts there.
• Job Boards: You can always post a job description yourself, on any of the many job boards. Here in the Bay Area, people swear by CraigsList, saying they get more qualified tech candidates there than anywhere else. I’ve heard that CraigsList isn’t as popular in the rest of the USA, but there are a number of national sites that are at least decent. Some focus on jobs of all types, such as Yahoo’s HotJobs and Monster, others are tech specific, such as Dice. I have no idea about Europe, Asia, or the rest of the world. Feel free to post a comment if you know of good resources.
  

  	Trying to write a good job description? A sample is available in the templates section!

  
  If you go this route, write a good job description. You’ll want to include a description of your company, a list of requirements, a list of responsibilities for the person, and contact info. You should write it truthfully (obviously) but make it sound as interesting as you can. If you’re a hot startup that’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal and just closed a $15mm round of financing, say so. You can use my job description template (at right) to get you started.
• Recruiters: Recruiters are always an option, although they can be expensive. If you go this route, be sure to find somebody that has a lot of technical knowledge. You should interview the recruiter with some of the same questions that you would ask the technical candidate, to see how they do. Keep the tech questions really simple, but if you’re hiring a Java programmer and your recruiter doesn’t know the difference between J2SE and J2EE, you’re going to be in trouble. Unfortunately, most recruiters these days are little more than glorified secretaries, and are just in the business of pushing bodies. I know this doesn’t describe ALL recruiters, but if the only thing your recruiter can do is filter out resumes that don’t say ‘Java’ anywhere, you’re paying a lot for not very much.
• Contractors: If you’re looking for a contractor rather than an employee, there are a few other options. ELance is dedicated to finding contractors, and CraigsList now has a gigs section, specifically for contracting. You’re liable to get a lot of offshore development companies using these services, but they can be a good starting point. Hiring a contractor can also be a good starting point to getting a fulltime employee: you get to find out if they are good by working with them. Check with your lawyers before you do this, though: you can't hire a contractor and treat them like an employee; they have to pass the IRS's 'contractor test'.

Once you’ve got the resumes, you should move onto the guide for hiring technical people.