Finding talent through open source

We talked earlier in this chapter about how software development and technology jobs, in general, have become more specialized in many cases as the breadth of technology grows. Add this to the fact that technology jobs are shifting more and more to remote opportunities (meaning employees working from home rather than within a traditional office). This has made it tremendously difficult to find talent to fill the roles companies have, as well as to retain that talent. We’ll talk more about the retention part in the next section, but first, let’s look at ways that employers can leverage the open source communities they work with to find talent to fill open roles.

Participating in communities

The easiest way to find talent in open source communities is…show up in the communities. Isn’t it obvious? Well, not always. As we talked about in Chapter 6, Making Your Project Feel Welcoming, sometimes these open source communities...