Developing Tech PR: How And Why You Should Hold Developer Meetups

Attracting IT specialists is an urgent issue that concerns companies from various industries. It is impossible to endlessly raise wages and improve the social package in the fight for the professionals, so brands are increasingly seeking to build relationships with potential employees systematically, developing the direction of technical PR.

Meetups for technical specialists are one of its main tools. Leading companies tell us how to organize such an event for the benefit of the HR brand with a relatively small budget. Virtual reality devices can now create the atmosphere of a land-based casino. Now they create a sense of real presence in the gambling establishment. It’s amazing. The same situation with sports betting is in the United States, where most players do not bet on sports in land-based PPS, but through a mobile phone or the websites of betting companies, if they are legal. A special approach to clients at Gclub is being implemented: operators are trying to attract users by age group.

What are meetups for?

The goal of technical PR is to show the audience the technical expertise of the brand. Since the salaries and social package of companies at the same level are approximately the same today, experts compare employers by other parameters: by the presence of interesting tasks, current technologies, and strong specialists in the team, under whose guidance it will be possible to develop in the profession.

It is meetups that allow you to show this expertise to potential employees. Meetups are primarily about sharing experiences with the community. Here you can find out who in the industry is currently facing the same problems and challenges and how to solve them. This helps all participants to “calibrate” against each other and move on.

Meetup also allows you to run a report before a larger conference, show the office to potential employees, and gather useful contacts.

Meetups clearly demonstrate the level of tasks being solved in the company and the expertise of the team. It is also a powerful intellectual consolidation: discussing a technical problem in a wide range of specialists allows you to find the optimal solution. And the more intelligent people gather, the more likely it will be to solve the problem.

Companies that regularly gather developers for meetups note that building an HR brand is a slow process, and you should not expect an instant effect from the event in the form of a flurry of resumes to the mail. However, in the long term, meetups always have a positive effect on recruitment.

There is a “candidate’s journey” by analogy with the “buyer’s path”. It starts from the moment when a person first heard about your company. At this point, it is very important that this information leaves a pleasant memory, so it should be comfortable on the meetup.

Interesting reports, a tour of a beautiful office — it can stay in the memory of the candidate as an interesting option for employment. Later, when a person is looking for a job, they are more likely to give priority to your company — at least, they will come for an interview.

Also, the meetup is a good opportunity to introduce developers to the company’s managers who are engaged in hiring, Nadezhda Lanina notes: a candidate would rather consider an interview with a manager he saw at a meetup or conference.

How to get the maximum

• The most popular format of an IT meetup is an event with partners, which may include both other companies and communities of programmers. Meetup usually consists of three technical presentations with a coffee break. The average duration of the event is 2-3 hours.
• Even a small company can hold a meetup for developers. The minimum required is a platform that can accommodate at least 50 people, catering for coffee breaks and interesting presentations. The community of programmers will help with the registration of guests and the promotion of the meetup. If necessary, it will attract interesting speakers and help your employees prepare for the report.
• It is bad form to hunt developers directly on the meetup. If you really want to talk about hiring, you need to warn in advance that this will be a Hiring Event.
• If you want to formulate a topic for the report, you need to start from the most complex and unusual tasks that have been solved in the company over the past three months.
• An interesting report is built like a good detective novel: “Start with the problem, then search unsuccessfully for a solution and find it only the third time, as if completely by accident.”
• Encourage personal brand development for employees, especially those who hire managers. Give them the opportunity to write articles and give presentations. The candidate is more likely to consider an interview with a manager that they have already read on the Internet or listened to at a meetup.
• Meetups increase the loyalty of not only candidates but also the team. Holding meetups in your office makes the internal life of the company more interesting and shows developers that the company’s management values their expertise.
• One of the metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of meetups is brand loyalty. You can measure it using surveys of developers and studying open ratings of employers in it.

Collaboration with the programming community is also useful because its leaders can give the company valuable advice on choosing the topic of the report, Evgenia Goleva (Lamoda) says. An up-to-date report will allow the brand to show its best side and attract maximum attention. The community can also invite hyped speakers with HYIP reports to the meetup, Mark Shevchenko (Moscow club of programmers) says.

Another important advantage of partnering with the community is direct access to the target audience associated with a particular technology.