Open source recruiting

It's pretty interesting that open source projects don't recruit the same way commercial projects do. In a company you usually have particular people responsible for going out and recruiting employees, advertising the availability of positions and so on. But the only time I think I've seen a similar thing is from companies like Mozilla or Red Hat who do commercial open source, and their recruitment is just for the commercial side. For an open source project, usually you get involved by just turning up on your own initative and submitting some code.

Interestingly, commercial open source companies often take advantage of the benefits of the open source way. An open source contributor already has to show a degree of initiative in showing up and demonstrate ability by sticking around and having their contributions accepted, which is a reliable signal that the person in question would be a good hire.

But I think the open source community would be a lot more robust if it embraced some of the benefits of traditional hiring. Recruiting lets you specifically target certain people and certain roles that are under-served, and advertising for open source contributors would pull in a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have considered the project, or even open source in general.

I suspect recruiting might appear to project maintainers as one of those "we don't play that game" type things, or perhaps they've just never considered it. Either way, I think adopting some more traditional recruitment strategies could be a serious benefit to open source projects and the movement in general.