Imagine, if you will, a course with 10 obstacles. A bunch of runners stand at the beginning. There’s a two-story wall you have to jump over, there’s some kind of rope bridge, snakes on a plane, whatever.

For simplicity, assume that each obstacle successfully stops 50% of the runners. So if 12 runners start out, after the very first obstacle, six of them will somehow find themselves defeated. You will see them piled in a heap at the bottom of the two-story wall.

The remaining six will move on to the rope bridge, where three will fall through the ropes in a humorous way, eventually finding themselves dangling by one foot in the air, with all kinds of silly things falling out of their pockets. Keys, wallets, coins etc.

Nobody, really, will make it past all 10 obstacles. In fact, if you want to get just one person to pass all ten, you are going to have to start out with 210 runners on the start line. That’s 1,024 runners.

The process of hiring great technical talent is an elimination course. A lot of people have never heard of your company. A lot of the people who are left don’t know that you’re hiring. Others live in the wrong city. Still others don’t have the right visas. Others send in the resume but John, who reads them all, tends to throw away the resumes from schools who beat him when he was on the football team at Columbia. Still others came in for the interview and bombed. Of the remainder, some were pretty good but had other job offers. Those who didn’t have other job offers were so distressed by the peeling, gray paint on the walls and the nasty fluorescent lighting that they stayed at their current job. And a few who didn’t mind the cubicles decided that they really didn’t want to program bunker-buster bombs for a living. Not that there’s anything wrong with bunker-buster bombs; it just wasn’t for them. 

This obstacle-course reality of hiring sounds depressing. It really does. Does it mean we have to start with 3,000 candidates to hire three programmers?

But there’s a silver lining, if you will: a bright side to all this meandering mathematical moroseness. And that is this: if you can eliminate one obstacle — just one! — you can double the number of people you hire. Eliminate two obstacles, and you quadruple the number that make it past the remaining obstacles. And so on, and so forth.

But there is no silver bullet. There is no magical single thing you can do to solve all your hiring problems and get great developers working for you tomorrow. What you have to do is look at the whole process as an obstacle course and start to think about how to eliminate as many obstacles as possible. Work on all of them, because they’re all equally important.

If your title is “technical recruiter” or something in Human Resources, you might notice a small problem beginning to emerge. In fact, if your title is anything other than “Lord High Supreme Ruler, Commander of the Empire and Queen of All Bees,” you might have this problem: sometimes the obstacles to recruiting are not your fault and they’re not under your control. If people don’t want to work for your company because they’d be working in a loud, dark, windowless room with cubicles, flickering lighting, old ratty carpets, and a distinct smell of mildew, well, that’s a facilities problem, not a recruiting problem, right? Sorry, I know it’s not your fault, but it is your problem. A lot of the things I’m going to be talking about that you need to do to recruit great developers are outside of the scope of the normal recruiter. Heck, many of them are things that even the CEO can’t control.

All is not lost. You should at least have an awareness of what these issues are, so you know what to lobby for. If you’re having trouble recruiting because the office space is awful, well, even though it’s not traditionally a recruiter’s job, you’re going to have to inject yourself forcefully into the next office planning session. If the company is located in a place that doesn’t attract bright college graduates, that’s something to talk to your CEO about the next time he yells at you for not filling those openings. In the meantime, you can work on the other parts of the obstacle course that are under your control, and you should still see positive results.

And I hope it will help you make your organisation a great place to work, and by doing so, increase, in some small way, the amount of happiness in the world.

Joel Spolsky is co-founder and CEO of Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow, and a globally recognised expert on software development