To keep up with technology, you need the best and brightest from the world of development. Tech specialists with hands-on experience with the newest tech stacks and a passion for innovation. Now though, hiring developers has become a bigger and bigger challenge for companies so where should they be looking for talent?

Hiring developers means reviewing CVs and applications, conducting interviews, creating enticing benefits packages, and a whole host of other tasks. But before any of that, you need to find the tech talent that you want in your business. So today, we’re covering some of the best sites to source developers from – let us know if you think we missed any.

We’ve also included Direct-to-candidate (DTC), passive, and freelance recruitment labels to each platform to help you narrow down the one that best fits your business best.

Honeypot.io DTC

Honeypot is a Europe-focused job platform for developers and currently has over 1000 companies actively using it to find candidates. All candidates are pre-screened with relevant technical assessments and interviews and interested companies can then reach out directly to the candidates they feel are best suited to their roles.

Talent.io DTC

Talent.io focuses on companies having direct conversations with candidates to speed up the hiring process and make the recruitment process more personal for candidates and companies alike. Talent.io has built a system where communication with candidates is like opening a chat window on a website – quick and efficient.

HirePort Passive

Ok, ok, we know this is us, but hear us out first. We are the platform where you can find all the IT talent you need in one place. By putting you in touch with our network of the best niche recruiters you can receive perfectly matched applicants for the roles you’re looking to fill. This is great if you want to pick up the best people out there – who are more than likely passive candidates.

We take care of the recruiters so that you don’t have to. It’s all the benefits of external recruitment without any of the hassles so that you can focus on the people you want rather than how and where to find them.

Toptal Freelance

Toptal differs from the other sites on this list in that it is essentially a freelance platform where companies can build teams of developers from a distributed network. Toptal handles all of the customer comms and manages the developers who are needed on a project-by-project basis. Because of the difficulty in finding long-term employees in the tech industry, this is a flexible alternative that can be tapped into as needed.

Vanhack DTC

Vanhack positions itself as a recruitment platform dedicated to finding candidates quickly. This is certainly a good angle because companies everywhere are crying out for tech talent that they can onboard quickly and get to work. They also have a feature where companies can run hiring events and speak to multiple potential candidates at once to further explain roles and demonstrate their business’ values in a presentation rather than just a job description.

Visage DTC

Visage is a platform built candidate relationships. Their goal is to make recruiting simpler and take away a lot of the repetitive and time-intensive tasks that don’t actually add value for the company or the candidate. They’re also built around seeking passive candidates, which companies are increasingly interested in – particularly with the global shortage of tech talent.