Recruiting software engineers in DACH
Almost every engineer worth hiring is employed and not applying. The work is therefore identification and approach, not selection from an applicant pool: define the role as systems and problems rather than a keyword list, find the people who have built something comparable, and write to them as an engineer would want to be written to.
Published 2026-09-15 by tamo.ai.
What should a technical requirement list actually contain?
The problems the person will solve and the scale they will solve them at. A list of fifteen technologies filters out strong engineers and lets weak ones through, because listing a technology is free.
- The system they will own, and its scale: traffic, data volume, team size, uptime expectation.
- Two or three technologies that genuinely cannot be learned on the job in this context.
- Product versus infrastructure work — engineers self-select strongly here.
- Whether the role is greenfield or maintenance. Say which; it is not a weakness either way.
- Language of the team. This decides the candidate pool more than any framework.
What kind of outreach do developers answer?
Short, specific, technically literate and honest about the stack. Engineers reply when the message proves a human read their work and can describe the actual problem the role solves.
- Name the stack and the problem in the first two sentences.
- Reference something they built, not their job title.
- State salary range or say plainly that you will on the first call.
- Skip superlatives. 'Rocket ship', 'ninja' and 'disruptive' are filters against you.
- Remote and on-site expectations belong in the first message, not the third call.
How does tamo.ai run a technical role?
You describe the system, the stack and the seniority, and tamo maps the companies with comparable engineering problems, evaluates profiles against each requirement and returns a ranked shortlist with the evidence it relied on.
You decide who is worth approaching. Approved outreach goes out from your own LinkedIn account — ideally a hiring engineer’s — with follow-ups and replies in one inbox. The score orders the list; it never rejects anyone on its own.
Read next