Three mistakes I see every company make at the start of an Elixir search, and what the conversations in Málaga taught me.
I gave a lightning talk at ElixirConf EU in Málaga last week.
The topic was the three mistakes I keep seeing companies make when they try to hire Elixir engineers. Five minutes was not long enough to do it justice. The full recording is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSnOvtrYkvo
What follows is the longer version, plus the conversations and observations from Málaga that backed every mistake up.
The message that stayed with me
After the talk a developer messaged me. He said he did not get the chance to chat a lot but he wanted to thank me for spreading the word for Elixir. He added that recruiters did not get appreciated enough for the marketing they do for technologies, and that he was glad I was around.
I have read it back several times since I got home.
It is unusual for a developer to thank a recruiter like this. The reason is that most recruiters in this space turn up when they need something. They reach out cold, they ask for referrals, they send the same InMail to anyone with Elixir in their job title. Then they vanish until the next role lands.
Specialism is different. You commit to a community or you do not. You attend the events. You give the talks. You learn enough to have an actual opinion about why someone is reaching for Phoenix LiveView when they should be thinking about Nerves. You make introductions when you have no commercial reason to.
The reason I was at ElixirConf is because that is where the work is.
Arjun Gillard speaking at ElixirConf EU 2026 in Málaga
What ElixirConf actually looks like
I sat in on a talk where the Dennis Palmer (Erlang Solutions) live coded a Nerves robot with LiveView. He walked the room through three iterations of motors that did not work, an MPU accelerometer he had owned for 15 years and finally put to use, and a PID controller he had to research on YouTube before he could get the robot to balance.
Misael Perez Chamorro (Taciyon) had built voice-controlled smart lights using Elixir, ONNX models loaded with Cortex, Phoenix LiveView for the dashboard, and Bumblebee for speech-to-text. The whole system ran on a Raspberry Pi without an internet connection.
Andrea Leopardi (Knock) built an agentic Elixir workflow where the documentation itself became the input layer for AI coding agents. The agents were treated as the unreliable component. Tests, formatters and Credo checks were the verification layer.
This is the level of curiosity in the room.
It is not the kind of community where someone can pass an interview by reciting Phoenix syntax.
Dennis Palmer Live Coding a Nerves robot with Livebook
Why Elixir hiring is different
Most hiring processes are built for languages where there are millions of engineers. Filtering on years of experience makes sense when the talent pool is large enough that you can afford to lose the edge cases.
Elixir is not that.
The community of engineers who have shipped Elixir at meaningful scale across Europe is in the low thousands. They know each other. They speak at the same conferences. They contribute to the same libraries. Word travels fast.
A bad hiring process does not just lose you a candidate. It damages your reputation with the engineers you have not even approached yet.
The three mistakes
In my talk I covered three things I see companies do at the start of an Elixir search that almost guarantee they hire badly.
The first is briefing the role without defining what success actually looks like in the first 90 days. The brief becomes buzzwords and seniority signals. Strong candidates walk away because they cannot see what they are walking into.
The second is mistaking volume of applicants for momentum in the market. More CVs is not progress. It is usually a sign the filtering criteria upfront is too weak.
The third is the one I think matters most. Most processes screen for years in the stack. They reward fluency in Phoenix and LiveView. They do not test how someone actually reasons about fault tolerance, distribution, or when not to reach for a GenServer.
Elixir thinking is rarer than Elixir experience. And it is the harder thing to hire for.
What the conversations in Málaga confirmed
One developer I sat with is leaving his current role on a notice period of two months. He has done several interviews already. None have landed. One was too front end heavy. Another required hardcore Linux and DevOps experience he does not have. The roles were briefed against the wrong shape.
Another developer told me his company had a vacancy open right now but the HR team had written the brief without consulting the technical lead. He found out about the role from internal Slack rather than from the people writing it.
A third developer talked about the geographic challenge in the UK. Most Elixir engineers cluster in London. Companies hiring from Manchester or further north worry about replacement risk if their one Elixir hire leaves. That worry shapes their hiring process. It usually shapes it badly.
Every conversation backed up one of the three mistakes.
Conversations at ElixirConf
What to do about it
If you are hiring Elixir in the next six months, do three things before you write the job spec.
Sit with the technical team and define what success looks like in the first 90 days. Not the year. Not the long term vision. The first 90 days.
Decide what a strong signal looks like in a CV before you start reviewing them. Write it down. Hold the line on it.
Build interview questions that test how someone reasons, not what they have memorised.
If those three feel hard, you are not ready to hire yet. I would rather tell you that on the first call than waste both our time running a search that was always going to drift.
Where to find me
I run AG Talent. I have spent fourteen years in technical recruitment, four of them focused specifically on Elixir, working with startups and scaleups across the UK, Europe and North America.
If any of this sounds like a problem you are sitting with, reach out to me and let’s talk
Arjun Gillard https://cal.com/arjgillard/hiring
The lightning talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSnOvtrYkvo
