Quixey Has an App for That

Those were the questions Quixey employees were discussing over lunch one day last November. As the at the time 16 employees of the Palo Alto, Calif-based startup scarfed burgers, they as well chewed on the question of how they were possibly going to hire all of the software engineers they needed to build out their product: a search engine that makes it easier for people to find the smartphone and tablet apps for work and play. Though Quixey had raised $3.8 million in Series A funding in August, all the money in the world wasn't going to solve the ambitious startup's recruiting problem.

"A lot of companies are realizing how much impact software can have on their bottom line," says Matt Miller, CTO of CyberCoders, an Irvine, Calif.-based IT recruiting firm with customers in the San Francisco BayArea and Silicon Valley. "They're counting on software developers to automate and build out their business processes."

The shortage of software engineers is not just a problem for tech companies in the Bay-area and Silicon Valley. Tech vendors and enterprise IT departments throughout the U.S. are beating the bushes in search of programmers with an exacting mix of research and business skills. The stakes for finding these professionals are high: If companies can't hire the developers they need, they run the risk of not being able to bring new products to market just in time, which impacts revenue, customer retention and competition. They as well risk burning out their existing development team, says Shane Bernstein, managing director of Los Angeles-based IT staffing firm Q.

Using coding competitions to recruit software engineers may not be a new idea, nevertheless it is an effective one for Quixey and other companies. TopCoder, a research crowd sourcing company, began staging coding competitions to help customers across industries recruit top technologists in 2001. Actually, TopCoder ran Google's original Code Jam. TopCoder President Rob Hughes estimates that his company helped customers hire 1,000 technologists who won TopCoder challenges between 2002 and 2006. TopCoder has even patented the online system it developed to rate programmers on the basis of their skills to that end of hiring, he says. To boot to Google, Facebook, Sun and Intel are fans of coding competitions as recruiting tools.

Meridith Levinson covers Careers, Security and Cloud Computing for CIO.com. Follow Meridith on Twitter @meridith. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook. Email Meridith at mlevinson@cio.com.