Socialness in the recruiting of software engineers

Recruiting of highly qualified software engineers takes place in a very competitive and global job market. Agile methods have emphasized the relevance of social skills for an efficient and sustainable interaction of individuals. At the same time, employing companies have to provide working conditions which attract and support teams of high skilled and demanding software engineers. In this paper, we evaluate the efforts of IT companies in acquiring software engineers by emphasizing socialness in their job ads. We analyze 75,000 jobs ads from the recruiting platform Indeed to quantify differences in the regional distribution of social factors, and about 2,800 job ads from StackoverflowCareers to investigate correlations between social factors and the employee satisfaction of a work place. Our findings show that many companies advertise socialness explicitly by aspects as extraordinary food offers, a great team, social events, a game room, or family friendliness. Well-established standard benefits such as health care, paid vacation, or retirement savings are non-unique job characteristics. Advanced jobs allow for higher degrees of freedom concerning the location and time of work being advertised by flextime, remote work, or unlimited vacation.