How to Attract and Retain Top-Quality Atlassian Contractors

As the world’s leading provider of team collaboration and project management software, Atlassian’s tools like Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket (among others) have become integral to the workflows of countless organisations worldwide. Atlassian Server and Data Centre products are inherently built to scale alongside an organisation and, due to their intricacies, have paved the way for a niche but highly rewarding and fulfilling job market.

Their prevalence and importance within modern tech stacks mean that experienced Atlassian specialists have become highly sought-after to help organisations successfully navigate digital transformation challenges and achieve growth milestones. However, the rather secular talent pool of qualified Atlassian contractors also makes recruiting and retaining the best talent an ongoing challenge for companies. 

When a business’s workflows depend on optimising Atlassian’s project tracking, documentation, and DevOps offerings, it often necessitates hiring subject matter experts who can add value and make an impact immediately. One of the quickest and most effective solutions to this is to engage qualified and vetted Atlassian contractors and freelancers through a specialist recruitment agency. 

This guide explores the key steps to take when commissioning Atlassian and Jira experts through portals like ClearHub, the agency with a proven track record of placing top-tier talent into contract and permanent roles.

Defining Must-Have Atlassian Skills and Expertise

Atlassian encompasses a wide range of applications catering to software developers, IT teams, and business users alike. When posting an Atlassian contractor vacancy – courtesy of a user-friendly portal such as ClearHub – start by outlining your core requirements around the following criteria:

• Specific Atlassian tools required, such as Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence, Bitbucket etc.
• Minimum years of hands-on experience administering/developing with the above tools or similar
• Understanding of add-ons or extensions e.g. Scriptrunner, Structure, Gliffy
• Exposure to instances in cloud vs. self-hosted environments
• Familiarity with integrating Atlassian tools with CI/CD pipelines and workflows
• Knowledge of migrating data or instances between Atlassian versions or cloud platforms

Whether you need a specific DevOps engineer to monitor performance or a dedicated Atlassian administrator to oversee custom integrations, including permissions and workflows, seeking help from specialised Atlassian contractors makes cloud migrations scalable and seamless.

Verifying Atlassian Expertise During Screening

A person’s competence with Atlassian products should involve a mixture of hard technical and soft skills. During the preliminary stages of a contractor background screening, it’s prudent to assess and validate candidates based on:

• Tool administration competencies via technical testing
• Communication skills through interviews and assessments
• Cultural alignment with your business through situational questioning
• Portfolio of past Atlassian projects completed
• Testimonials and referrals from clients or managers

This level of pre-employment validation enables the fast and productive placement of talent into the right Atlassian and Jira job vacancies online, with contractors able to make a solid, frictionless start. 

As is the case with any Atlassian job opening, technical skills alone shouldn’t be the sole indicator of a good contractor assignment. The intrinsic and personal qualities of candidates should also be assessed when hiring Atlassian contractors. Carefully examine how the candidate answers questions and what they don’t say, as well as the answers they give. Monitoring responses – or lack thereof – indicates how well a prospective contractor may embrace your company’s values and culture. Specialist contractors likely already prove capable of adapting between clients, but those newer to the field may be more naive, so bear this in mind. 

ClearHub’s background screening processes aim to take the administrative burden away from time-restricted organisations. As a result of our due diligence, we have cultivated a carefully formulated talent pool of reputable Atlassian experts waiting for their next freelance, temporary, or permanent assignment. We can make considered candidate recommendations based on your criteria and job requirements, and who we firmly believe will be a good technical and cultural fit. 

Retaining Great Talent Through Effective Scoping

Even if a candidate ticks all the capability and culture boxes, they may fail to live up to expectations if your organisation fails to give specific or clear project scoping. Vague or ambiguous project scoping often leads to breakdowns in communication and misaligned objectives and expectations.

Before assigning your Atlassian contractor their first task, outline all their responsibilities, objectives, and timeframes through a comprehensive Statement of Work including:

• Exact Atlassian instance details – Cloud/Data Centre, tool versions etc.
• Supporting systems connected e.g. CI tools, repositories, directories
• Specific tasks needing completion – migrations, custom workflows etc.
• Measurable deliverables and outcomes paired to tasks
• Expected timescales or milestones for essential tasks
• Communication protocols for updates and reporting

This early alignment means contractors know what to work on immediately and will minimise friction. Simultaneously, clarity around responsibilities and objectives gives purpose-driven talent reason to stay invested in the long term.

Respect your specialists’ expertise too; inefficient and disruptive micromanagement limits their results and productivity. Highlighting that you trust them will enhance retention, as will empowering them to work autonomously and seek assistance when needed.

Trust ClearHub to Attract Premium Atlassian Talent

Great Atlassian recruitment starts with great candidate networks and supplier relationships. With decades of experience placing thousands of technical contractors into a broad spectrum of roles, ClearHub leverages unrivalled access to specialist Atlassian talent across software development, infrastructure engineering, and everything in between.

Our global talent pool combines market-leading contractors and niche specialists to fill urgent vacancies through efficient and time-saving Atlassian recruitment processes, allowing you to focus your resources on important business matters. All Atlassian candidates are pre-verified against your criteria before submission, with our dedicated account management team communicating with you regularly about placements and opportunities. Our transparent and collaborative approach is why we are the trusted Atlassian recruitment agency for hundreds of businesses worldwide.

To find your next high-quality Atlassian candidate(s) who can integrate seamlessly with your business immediately, contact our expert team today to get started.