https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/
The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market.
The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career.
The great college graduates get pulled into an internship by a professor with a connection to industry, then they get early offers from that company and never bother applying for any other jobs. If they leave that company, it’s often to go to a startup with a friend, or to follow a great boss to another company, or because they decided they really want to work on, say, Eclipse, because Eclipse is cool, so they look for an Eclipse job at BEA or IBM and then of course they get it because they’re brilliant.
I have three basic methods for how to go about this: