So You Want to Hire a Tech Evangelist

Hi! I'm Lauri, and I'm here to help you with that.

Aim of This Doc

This how-to is meant to help you as you think about hiring a tech evangelist. It's structured so that, whether you're a tiny startup or a gigantic company, you can think about which aspects of TE you can and want to incorporate into your offerings. If you're small now, you can scale up your evangelism efforts over time. If you're big enough to hire a full-time evangelist, this will hopefully help you approach that decision with greater confidence.

This doc encourages you to be agile in your approach. If you're not part of your company's tech team/org, and unfamiliar to agile methodologies, then this doc can hopefully show you a few approaches to hiring a tech evangelist that will make this effort a game changer for your tech org (and maybe your own). The Agile Manifesto informs this discussion via its emphasis on individuals and interactions, customer collaboration, and responding to change/adaptation. Hopefully this will become more apparent as we go.

If you're a tech evangelist yourself, please contribute to this doc! Let's get this party started ...

Who Am I

I got my start in tech evangelism at Gilt Groupe in NYC, after working in journalism, online media, law school, and PR. Working with an extremely savvy HR Director and anarchistically minded, empowering SVP of Engineering, I created a job description that took all my disparate skills together and created a cohesive role. (This approach to role creation is something all companies ought to be open to, IMO.)

My charge was two-fold:

• A) brand Gilt as an innovative, challenging tech employer;
• B) build community internally, to retain our technologists.

You might think of your evangelist's role scope in a similar way. But evangelism can mean so much more. As tech evangelist, I pursued goals for the organization that combined PR, community management (internal and external), candidate sourcing, tech-blogging, social media, and random other topics relevant to goals A+B. It was just up to me to prioritize, which I could do thanks to the high level of trust we gave to each other.

In Feburary 2015, I moved to Berlin to do tech evangelism at Zalando. In 2016, I decided to specialize in open source evangelism and promoting agile values and methodologies as a way to enhance team culture. So I became Zalando's open source evangelist, while taking on a second role as an agile coach in the Search department. These days I'm an agile program manager who consults others (including my colleagues) on hiring, interviewing, open source strategy, etc.

Before You Hire: Some Tips for Your Approach

Be Agile.

If you're hiring an evangelist primarily for tech employer branding purposes, be agile in your mindset/approach to recruiting and retention needs. The evangelist's role and priorities will change. Be flexible about your needs, and let them be flexible about how they prioritize.

You might need 10 Java developers this quarter, and none next quarter. In one quarter, you might want to hold a lot of meetups and do a lot of external outreach to raise your employer branding profile; in the next, you might want to make sure those devs you've hired stick around for a while and feel like part of a team.

Think beyond "hiring" and "retention."

To me, this point is a strategic goal and not a tactical one. The impact a passionate, engaged tech evangelist can have in terms of transforming your tech culture and empowering your technologists can be huge. For me, the best part of tech evangelizing was working with the many diverse members of our tech team to help them discover their own superpowers as communicators, innovators and thought leaders. People like Gregory Mazurek, author of this 5 Reasons Why Your Company Needs To Hire A Tech Evangelist, Now post. With my assistance (but not much, as he knew what to do), Greg started giving tech talks and writing more blog posts—transmitting his energy and humility out into the NYC tech universe.

On a personal level, having any sort of role in empowering the people I looked up to and learned from was inspiring and made the job infinitely rewarding. On a team level, tapping the knowledge and energies of the team in creating content and being the public faces of our tech organization kept our employer branding rich and authentic.

A tech evangelist can help you think of your tech organization more holistically by bridging the differences and communication gaps between engineers and managers, engineering and product, data and front-end, etc. The evangelist is the champion for all, and can help others in the team think less about "my functional team" and more about "my team, the big aggregation of all these complex and diverse personalities." Celebration is key to building culture: work with your evangelist to do it meaningfully, and often.

Before You Hire: Practical Stuff

You'll need to think about a few key ingredients upfront.

Can You Actually Hire Someone?

Advance buy-in among tech execs and leads on this point is key.

• Can you afford a tech evangelist?
• Has your leadership team reached consensus on the need to hire an evangelist? And are they willing to lend institutional support so that the person can be effective? It's not responsible to hire an evangelist, then expect them to operate in a silo or fix other cultural and organizational/team issues that might be plaguing your team. Make sure they have at least a few dedicated sponsors or champions at the leadership level.
• Is your organization generally prepared for what the tech evangelist will aim to do? If nobody on your team is available (whether literally or psychologically) to give talks, write blog posts, etc., then you're not ready. At the same time, you won't reach 100% on this. That's fine.
• Have you reached consensus with your non-tech key stakeholders about hiring an evangelist? This could include execs/leads from HR, Marketing, PR/Communications, or satellite/hub offices. PR/Comms and HR are likely to work with the tech evangelist most closely, but this depends on what your evangelist is primarily aiming to achieve.

What makes you so special?

This is hard to answer nowadays. Just about every tech company has "exciting challenges," open offices, perks, "cutting edge technologies," etc. Probably the only best solution is to "be yourself" and "show, don't tell." Talk to your own team about why they work for you. Ask newbies why they picked you and not Companies X, Y and Z. Collect that data and figure out what the patterns are in the responses. That's probably your tech brand, at least for now. It will change over time, as your priorities shift and your team expands or reconfigures itself. Worry about changes then.

Whatever you do, don't forget to involve your own engineers heavily in the process.

Budget to cover activities and related expenses

In addition to salary, make sure to reserve funds for evangelism activities. How much? That depends on your overall budget and ambition. Typical expenses that fall within the evangelism budget include:

• Meetups: Food, staffing, signage, swag
• Swag: pens, t-shirts, pins, stickers, other stuff
• Conference sponsorships: These range from a few hundred dollars/Euros/pounds to several thousand. The biggest events often cost five-figures.
• Sending technologists to conferences: If one of your people is speaking out of town, you'll have to cover that. How many times per year can you send someone to a conference? What's your budget cap?
• Parties: Everybody loves a good party.

Regardless of your total available spend, frugality is always a good idea. Make sure your efforts align to your purpose. And always ask "why we're doing this" before doing something. A one-page answer to "why," for some review and second-opinioning, never hurts.

Clarity on where this role fits within the organization – who does the evangelist report to?

You might prefer your tech evangelist to be part of HR, but reporting into tech has lots of advantages for the evangelist. Being part of the tech team and having that affiliation, sitting with tech and overhearing conversations, etc., will help them feel aligned with the team they're serving.

Clarity on the career trajectory

Because the tech evangelist role is kind of new and not always clearly understood, it's important for you and your evangelist to have some sort of track in place. Otherwise, after a few years they might feel like there's "nowhere to go but somewhere else." Don't allow that to happen! The key here is working with your evangelist to create a coherent career trajectory that they're excited about, and helping them to move up when the time comes.

• Are they passionate about working with your dev teams, like a coach? Possibly some role in professional development/training makes sense.
• Do they love agile? Being an agile project manager is a sensible next step.
• Do they love the sourcing and hiring part of their job? Then maybe they want to become some kind of tech super-recruiter who does both formal hiring as well as the branding stuff.
• Do they love the thrill of a big media hit? Tech PR could be a good choice.
• Do they love branding? Maybe you want to include them in your company's marketing efforts, leveraging their tech expertise to ensure that the company brand and the tech brand don't diverge.
• Do they want to stay a tech evangelist? Collaborate with them to understand differences between “evangelist” and “senior evangelist,” “director of evangelism,” et al.

How is success in the role/effectiveness measured?

For this, you might create some KPIs that measure things like:

• event attendance
• number of applications received as a result of evangelism activities
• number of views to your tech blog
• new followers on social media channels
• new mentions in the press

None of these are slam-dunk KPIs you should adopt. Each is flawed. Measuring evangelism effectiveness can be pretty difficult.

Table That Attempts to Weigh the Pros and Cons of Different Outreach Efforts

This isn't scientific — a lot depends on your team's preferences, needs, and budget. This chart is possibly most helpful for the company that's new to all of this and trying to be frugal.

Opportunity	Description	Advantages	Things to consider
Blog posts + podcasts (and social media)	Post, podcast, video with/about/by a team member	Content remains online; can promote several times via social media; helpful onboarding tool; low-cost; if you own the platforms you can collect metrics (visits, inbound links)	Long-tail so impact can be unclear; if content is not great will detract from reputation/requires prep time and vetting
Meetup — speaker	Team member speaks at meetup you don’t host	Low-cost; good for speaker’s personal devpt and reputation; others can go and mingle; legitimacy-builder	Requires good speaking skills/training, audience limited unless it’s recorded; audience might be mismatch/small/not target
Meetup — Host	Company hosts the meetup	You own the event; curation; good for company to support community; your devs are more likely to join if it's also in your office; can pitch your jobs at the start; can work with small local food businesses to bring their goods for offer (folks get sick of pizza)	Need to select reputable meetups popular with strong candidates; some meetups attend the same regulars over time => hiring pool decreases; not as effective if you don’t get attendee info for follow-up emails about jobs (and some attendees won’t want to give info); hiring pitch needs to be subtle; team-attendees should be trained on networking to work crowd effectively; upfront prep time competes with other priorities; can be costly (in my experience, investing in quality food that is not pizza and beer really matters and creates a lot of buzz -- but this gets expensive)
Conferences — Speaker	See meetup info ^^	Depending on event, audience can be large and high-quality; reach (promotion done by event, recordings, media); could be good for hiring remotes	Audience may not match to hiring offices/locations; lots of other companies promoting jobs/competing; can be even harder than other opportunities to measure impact/value of doing the event
Conferences — Booth	Staffed booth at a conference	Can be a good way to meet lots of different developers and test messaging; a lot of room for creativity that can generate buzz (make a game, do prize giveaways, offer fun activities); good for devs to network; good for recruiting to visit other booths for future ideas	Requires investment in sponsorship; requires investment in booth design/swag/setup; usually several days/lost dev time; long periods of quiet as attendees are in talks; lots of other competitors; can be seen as “noise” if offering isn’t valuable; can be expensive (thousands of Euros/dollars)
Conferences (or Community Day, or Hackathon) — Host	See meetup info ^^	See meetup host + conference booth ^^; offering a full day of content makes a big impact on attendees/prospective attendees; first event can generate much buzz; can select speakers and curate the event (sends a message to the industry about company values, priorities); can also be a community day or hackathon	Requires a lot of investment and coordination: money, people time, design, website hosting, social media, event scouting/confirmation, catering, Q&A with speakers and attendees, way to collect fees for tickets (unless free); hackathons tend to attract a lot of very green developers
Email/LinkedIn	Personal message to candidate	Direct, quick, targeted	Often ignored as people get lots of such emails so they need to be thoughtful; can also seem creepy or aggressive if not done tactfully
Job ad boards	Ads posted on tech job portals	Can be targeted to local markets; platform is explicitly hiring-related	Can be costly; need someone to monitor ads and evaluate for impact; competing with everyone else’s jobs; can generate a lot of iffy applications
Swag	Branded collateral	If useful or cool, people will use it, talk about it with others	Requires monetary investment; needs to be updated when branding changes; if boring or cheesy, no one will like or use it
White Papers	Position papers, data/research findings, or technical how-to content	Can be internal work turned into external content/value; can reflect well on company if novel and authoritative; can get lots of buzz (free marketing)	Wouldn’t do it for the sake of doing it; if data-focused, need to think about its shelf life; inaccuracies will cost
Courses and Workshops	Offering instruction/training on technical skills	Great for establishing legitimacy; great for community brand awareness (goodwill factor => buzz); can ask people to “apply” for the course and optimize attendance to select likely/attractive job candidates; follow-up content reflects well on company	Time to prepare course content; need to train inexperienced team members on teaching skills; need to run through course internally to get user feedback (could cost developer days); if people don’t learn anything, they might complain publicly or to friends

If your goal is hiring tech talent

• What are your short- and long-term hiring goals?
• What is your recruitment infrastructure? Do you have a sourcer? Do you plan on this person doing sourcing and follow-up (candidate research, outreach, reviewing applications for fit, etc.)? I strongly suggest hiring a coordinator to handle logistics and admin tasks related to internal and external evangelism activities; this coordinator could also help recruiting and marketing teams (work cross-departmentally).

Internal evangelism/culture-building

• Create biweekly tech newsletter highlighting news and upcoming events
• Work closely with team leads and managers to ID opportunities for specific teams and individuals to self-promote
• Work closely with team leads, HR, managers to ensure team evangelism efforts are acknowledged during performance review and/or even integrate them into list of job responsibilities
• Survey team on regular (monthly or quarterly) basis to take the temperature on certain initiatives and developments
• Organize team tech talks featuring outside industry leaders
• Create a plan for team activities: outings, contests, talent shows, team quizzes and games
• Acknowledge new hires with desk decorations, monthly meet-the-newbies lunch (would organize a welcoming committee to strategize around this)

Blogging and Social Media

• Create, write for, edit, and promote a tech blog. You want a nice combination of technical posts, reviews of your team's meetup and conference experiences (keep the focus on substance), reporting on OS projects your team is working on, Q&A's with your team about different aspects of your culture, think pieces by your execs and technologists about industry trends ... and more. Be creative.
• Ensure a diversity of voices.
• Tag appropriately and run your tech blog to make it easy to search by subject matter. Your UX audience is not going to read that post about load balancing; make sure they can find the relevant stuff.

Open Source Evangelism

For a comprehensive how-to on open-source evangelism, read the TODO Group's guides. You can also find some useful templates here. Evangelizing your open source projects and contributions is a compelling, authentic way to share information about your tech team's efforts with the world. It's code, it's actual work, and it offers a window into the way your teams operate. It gives you a substantive way to engage devs on subjects and ideas.

Some of you might want to consider hiring an open source evangelist instead of a tech evangelist. This depends on how much open source work your team is doing or using. If you're working with open source a lot, or generating a lot of projects that are being used by other companies, then you're doing your own organization as well as your project users a huge favor by having someone knowledgeable on the ground who can answer technical questions and work with/help/guide external communities of practice.

I wouldn't combine this role with hiring/recruitment. That would feel like a scam, and some people might even find it unethical. Instead, think of this role in alignment with your general culture-building efforts. I do a lot of talking to engineers about product design, usability, writing docs, and building communities. None of it has to do with recruiting. Ideally, the work eventually speaks for itself, engineers start talking about your useful contributions, and decide they want to work on your projects.

• Open Source: work with engineering team to create streamlined process for project development, release and marketing (hopefully decentralized)
• Choose appropriate licensing
• Work with creative to develop logos for projects
• Edit documentation
• Promote projects in tech community, to related media (e-newsletters, DZone, etc.)
• Community-manage: respond to PRs and Issues to ensure your team is responding/being responsible project stewards, thank people for their contributions, etc. — Create in-house open source retreat (1-2 weeks) initiatives for engineers working on OS projects. Call it the FOSSpital.

Meetups and Conferences

Some overall pointers: — When hosting meetups, produce high-quality technical events of interest to your own team as well as peers in the community — Inform your team of upcoming meetups of interest (through “evangelism” HipChat room or Slack channel) and ask them to join — Conferences: monitor Twitter and other popular tech event info-sources to prospect for opportunities for team to promote their work — Edit tech team members’ conference proposals, bios, presentations, blog posts, articles, any other materials so that their meetup and conference appearances look professional; write and brainstorm topics with them when necessary

Social media: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube

— B2B outreach: seek case-study coverage from companies whose products we use (possible examples: Atlassian, Optimizely, Looker) — Media outreach: promote tech team/achievements to tech media

• Scholarship-related outreach: contact healthcare tech authors, startup/business authors, academics, tech freelance writers to pitch them stories about work culture, data, company culture/history, tech team organization/ideology — Industry outreach: promote team work to relevant industry leaders using social media and, when possible, make introductions

Tech skills/professional development

• Host tech courses open to the community, w/subjects chosen based on team interests. This way, your team learns essential new skills, and others in the community also benefit.
• Work with team leads to develop your own courses, taught by own team (courses can be taught to public but are also very useful for onboarding)
• Ideally offer this content on online learning platforms to promote tech brand externally
• Work with team leads to ID skills blind spots and organize learning sessions to address those areas

Public policy-related evangelism

• Outreach to relevant advocates, educators, nonprofits, and other entities to form strategic partnerships and alliances
• Stay up-to-date on industry trends and legislative developments relevant to company’s interest/mission
• Create one-pagers and reports on your team's cutting-edge work/research
• Represent the company at relevant policy discussions, legislative hearings, lobbying days, press conferences
• Write op-eds stating company position
• Work with legal team to drive policy-related initiatives company engages in—direct cross-functional team (marketing, creative, tech, legal)
• Work with legal team to develop a quarterly/annual plan for engagement
• Work with creative team to create infographics and visuals related to company goals

Company-wide evangelism

• Work with social media/communications, PR and marketing team to ensure messaging is consistent across organization
• Collaborate with non-tech teams to share tips on new social media/outreach tools, brainstorm social media campaign ideas, ID opportunities for outreach
• Manage/co-manage PR campaigns if necessary

Recruitment-related

• Help streamline recruitment process: tech screen; candidate correspondence; onsite interviews; post-interview correspondence
• Help recruiting form Recruiting Committee made up of tech team members who are interested in process
• Research recruiting best practices and new trends and share research with others
• Help standardize recruitment messaging in job descriptions, ads (Hired, StackOverflow, etc.) and ensure language is clear, human
• Support recruiting team’s long-term efforts to launch internship program, attend campus/career fairs (support = research opportunities, help assemble plan of action, help draft/choose/create swag/signage & booth design/collateral)
• Help develop referral program with rewards and events to celebrate milestones/achievements
• Help recruiting team create innovative strategies to spread the word about our job opportunities (videos, social media campaigns, visuals)