Attracting Tech Top Talent: 5 Irresistible Content Ideas for Tech Companies

? TL;DR: We list 5 employer branding content ideas for tech companies looking to attract candidates in the tech space. If your target audience is developers and engineers, you should consider:

• technical blogs
• employee Q&As
• recapping your hackathons
• promoting your tech talks
• and showcasing open-source contributions.

If you’re a software company vying for the attention of tech talent, how would you like to introduce your company?

Glossy social media accounts and #PizzaFriday posts don’t cut it anymore. Neither do generic statements about integrity and accountability.

To impress tech professionals, you need helpful and practical content. 

That means showing real-world examples, innovative coding practices, practical debugging techniques, or emerging technologies. 

We’ve found five such content ideas that you can easily embed into your employer branding content strategy. 

Here’s how to show off all the cool stuff you work on.

#1 Engage Employees in Q&As

Encourage your team members to participate in Question and Answer sessions (Q&As). 

Other names for these events are Ask-Me-Anything (AMA), or, simply, interviews. But whatever you decide to call it, the essence is the same. It allows potential candidates to ask what they want to know about the company.

These events are highly effective in the tech space for a few reasons. 

First, they provide insights into your employees’ lives, work, and thoughts, putting a human touch to your brand.

But more importantly, candidates can ask questions about the tech stack and the daily work of a specific role.

To show an example, here’s a video where Lillian Chiu shares her day as a business analyst at Spotify.

Chiu answers questions about business analytics, her recent promotion, and even her ergonomic keyboard setup. 

That way, potential candidates can learn about the working conditions and growth opportunities. Also, they get a glimpse of the team dynamics within a company.

Interviews and Q&As show first-hand what it’s like to work somewhere, which candidates are always curious about.

Another example comes from Kiwi, a flight booking app. 

Kiwi hosted an AMA for interested candidates with the VP of Engineering and Chief Architect:

Someone looking at your open engineering roles would appreciate the chance to meet potential colleagues or team leads. 

Interviews and daily life videos are versatile types of content. They’re relatively easy to host and implement in your employer branding content marketing. 

Lastly, don’t forget to record the sessions. 

Repurpose the recordings into bite-sized video content for social media posts. You can also turn interviews into longer blog posts, or even use them in newsletters.

#2 Promote Your Tech Talks

Tech talks are interactive events where experts, professionals, or tech enthusiasts discuss a hot topic or demonstrate new methods.

Like Q&As, tech talks can take multiple forms or names. Sometimes they resemble webinars. Other times they’re live streams on social media channels or podcasts. 

Tech talks help you highlight your company’s active involvement and expertise in the tech industry. 

For instance, Stripe holds a yearly conference called Stripe Sessions. 

Attendees learn about new technologies and ideas shaping the Internet economy. Stripe later uploads many sessions, guides, and practical tutorials to YouTube.

Now, what does this have to do with great employer branding?

Well, tech talks or webinars position a company as a place where people can learn, grow, and boost their careers.

Tech talks don’t only serve to impress potential candidates. They also engage your existing developers and engineers eager to share knowledge and ideas. 

For instance, at Auriga, a software development service provider, the idea for a tech talk came from employees. From there, it grew into a company tradition: 

“Interestingly, the engineers themselves gave us the idea of organizing internal TechTalks at Auriga Baltics.

Back in 2013, some of our developers contributed code to open-source projects in their spare time and wanted to share their experience; their enthusiasm was hard to miss and happily contagious.

Their presentations were such a success that other developers willingly supported the initiative and our tech meetups became a regular event.”

As you can learn from Auriga’s experience, give your team the resources to show their skills. This boosts their confidence and their personal brand too.

Most companies don’t necessarily host talks to boost their employer brand, but doing so can have a huge positive effect. You’ll attract candidates passionate about learning and continuous improvement.

After the tech talks, you can reuse, repurpose, and promote related content in many ways. Some ideas include thought leadership pieces or exciting social media content.

#3 Publish Your Hackathon Highlights

Organizing a hackathon is no small feat. Among other things, you have to decide on the structure. Should you only involve internal teams, invite external participants, or combine both?

If you do decide to include external participants, you’ll also open the door to potential future employees.

Think about it. Hackathons are a great opportunity to see participants in action. 

They’ll use their creativity, wit, and skills to solve real-world problems. And you’ll easily spot standout candidates who could be a great fit for your organization.

However, hosting a hackathon is just part of the task.

After you wrap up the hackathon, fill your career pages with real-life experiences and fun stuff your team gets to do.

Use the momentum and post the highlights, main takeaway, or a wrap-up. 

For instance, Container Solutions wrote a blog post about a fun hackathon that took place simultaneously in Berlin and London.

Next time job seekers look up your company, they’ll find engaging stories representing your company’s innovative spirit.

All in all, you can get a lot of great content out of your hackathon. So don’t forget to support your employer brand with this strategy as well.

#4 Showcase Your Open Source Contributions

Initially, you might think sharing your code means giving away something for free. But it’s a clever move for your employer brand.

For instance, if you develop an awesome solution internally, why not share some of that code with the world? 

That’s precisely what Trello did. The company has created an internal solution for removing sensitive data from logs and shared the library on GitHub. 

The open-source approach didn’t cost them money. Instead, it brought them a significant branding advantage.

By putting their code out there for the world to see, Trello showcased the quality of their development work. 

They’ve also squeezed in a touch of humor with creative and appropriate imagery for a library called Mr. Clean.

This transparency shows potential candidates that skilled devs can thrive at the company. As future employees, they’ll grow and collaborate alongside some of the best minds in the industry.

See, the principle of show, don’t tell works in the software industry, too!

#5 Blog About Your Tech

Now that you’ve seen how to showcase your open-source contributions, let’s consider another similar method. 

Start blogging about the technologies you use while building your product or service. This can help to position your developers as authorities in the field.

Deeply technical blogs directly address the challenges and solutions your tech teams encounter.

This approach is as far from corporate fluff as possible. Blogging about specific, real-world problems resonates strongly with a technical audience.

Your blog posts don’t need to be literary or artistic masterpieces. What matters is that they offer insight into how your organization solves technical challenges.

Yelp’s Engineering Blog is a good example. 

Yelp’s developers write about the tech they use and share code and explanations with fellow engineers.

Conveniently, blog posts end with a call to action linking to the job application for engineering roles.

These CTAs bridge the gap between knowledge-sharing and recruiting talent, which is always a plus for employer branding.

So, if your tech team has developed a neat solution to a problem that’s been bugging them, don’t keep it to yourselves.

Unique, authentic, and practical content is increasingly hard to find. So use it well to propel your employer branding content strategy forward.

Looking for More Content Ideas for Tech Companies?

If these five ideas are not enough, don’t worry, we included plenty more in our previous articles on employer branding.

But our goal here was to shift your perspective in content creation. 

The ideas we included here don’t aim to appeal to mass audiences. Instead, they attract people who stay up to date on the latest trends, tech, and the companies that use it.

Those are the people you’d want to work at your company. 

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

• Best Employer Branding Content Types for All Candidate Journey Stages
• 9 Great Employer Branding Content Examples From Fast-Growing Tech Companies

Are you thinking about enhancing your employer branding content but don’t know where to start or how to capture these moments?

We’re here to help. Let’s audit the content you’ve created so far and lay out new ideas.

Together, we can craft a fresh content strategy to draw in the skilled talent you’re looking for.