To hire a Rust developer...

TLDR: Don't be shy putting Rust on your resume if you have anything to show. Anything. Recruiters do word searches and if you don't list Rust, people won't be able to find you. Of course, if you only followed a few tutorials then that's not enough. And yes, I would love to say "X years of Rust in an enterprise environment", but that's just not possible. So list Rust if you have a public project, a tar ball with some .rs files, or even just talk about your project. It's embarrassing that I had to search for "Golang" to find rust developers!

The long version: I learned Rust this time last year. At first, I only wanted to expand my knowledge, but I came away so impressed that I decided to use Rust for at least a portion of my next project. I typically fill the technical lead role but since I'm only intermediate (I managed to write a derive attribute a few weeks back, but it took me the better part of a day), this time I needed to hire for both senior and junior roles. The senior would do the overall architecture, define interfaces, ... while the juniors would do a bulk of the actual coding.

Hiring the experienced developer was surprisingly easy. I went the route of a us-based recruiting company who was able to use their network to find a few resumes in a couple of days. This was no different than hiring a Java dev or Linux admin. The interview was equally straight forward. We discussed his experience, joked about us both having suffered Java for a few years, then went on to negotiate pay rates and that was it.

The exact opposite happened for the junior roles. I used the same recruiter (the default partner for the company I work for) and told him to find me a junior resource who could support the architect. That's standard operating procedure for us and works well for most technologies. E.g., if I say the architect needs to have 10+ years of C++ and 5+ years of Solaris, then the Jr should have maybe a year or two of C++ and also mention Solaris on their resume. A week later I got a short email saying I had my choice between people without rust skills that matched the rest of what I needed or people with 3+ years of rust at very high salaries. The recruiter could not find a single resume of a jr level resource that included rust. How can that be? Either nothing, or 3+ years?

So I wrote up a few alternative searches. Some were technologies like axum that are just other ways of writing "I know rust" while others were areas where Rust is commonly used, like embedded development or wasm. The thinking was that maybe people have used Rust but haven't incorporated it into their resume yet. This yielded a single resume that mentioned axum and turned into the first junior hire. After the resume I asked why he had mentioned axum but not Rust, I got a funny look. He thought he had...

Still, I needed more people. Depending on the complexity of the project we typically run a 1:3 to 1:8 ratio between sr devs/architects and jr resources. So we started looking for adjacent technologies like Golang that could easily transition. Well, maybe not easily, but easier than a Java or C# developer could. This worked surprisingly well. I got several resumes of people the recruiter had found listing Go. He then emailed them to see if they also knew Rust and several people said yes. One of them actually had more Rust experience than Go, but he only listed Go because that was paid work while his Rust experience was "only" as a hobby.