Whether you are an employer or an employee, you need to think beyond résumés to stay ahead of the game.
From hackathons to automated evaluation tools, semantic analysis to personality tests, social hiring to website scraping, recruiting is being reinvented and how.
A “one-size-fits-all” strategy certainly doesn’t cut it.
Résumés will take you only so far.
Research shows that context-dependent skills and passion for the job will continue to drive hiring more than ever.
Here is a quick overview of the top nine sources when scouting for technical talent.
Even if you are not a programmer yourself, these places should help you build a good talent pipeline.
Recruiters can post jobs, source talent, and build the company brand easily using LinkedIn Talent Solutions.
LinkedIn has over 400 million people! Follow etiquette before all else for optimal results.
Potential candidates will see your personal brand as a reflection of the employer brand.
A good recruiting profile has a friendly profile picture, an interesting descriptive headline, a summary that showcases your professional story and the company culture, goals, accomplishments, and candidate expectations in the best possible light.
Encourage discussions to build your brand.
Establish yourself as a thought leader by publishing engaging, insightful content, either curated or original.
Create a career page, apart from your company page.
Use the built-in analytics features to capture valuable insights for data-driven recruiting.
Extend your reach via engaging status updates about your company’s activities.
To target relevant candidates, try sponsored updates.
Say, your company is organizing a Swift hackathon, then you can sponsor an update to software professionals and students nearby, expanding your network with new followers.
Use the built-in dashboard to study the impressions, engagement, clicks, shares, likes, and acquisition.
*Note that you can’t publish sponsored updates without a company page and an advertising account.
Beef up your existing network through content that might interest programmers. Once again, use sponsored content or company updates to grab attention.
LinkedIn Elevate gives your employees quality shareable content, thereby influencing future recruits in their networks.
People are more likely to believe employees than recruiter spiel. Studies show that people who use this tool,
Build a referral chain, and run referral contests or referral programs that reward the participants.
*Data suggests that “it takes 29 days to hire a referred candidate, 39 days to hire a candidate through a job posting, and 55 days to hire a candidate through a career site.”
One of the most effective ways to humanize your brand is by adding recommendations or testimonials.
Don’t forget to tag connections.
For example, a recruiter can group Python developers using tags.
Scan the events section for valuable connections in the attendee list. Or, list an event to spread the word.
LinkedIn has a minimum daily budget that you have to spend on your ads.
Your ROI is much higher than any other internet advertising mediums.
You can attract the attention of people who are checking out profiles of employees in your organization by using Recruitment Ads beside these employee profiles.
Sponsored ads specifically reach the right audience and have proved to be very useful in getting new followers.
Text ads simply display the information you provide under the column “ads you make like” on the right side.
They are also highly-targeted.
Personalized messages can be delivered to a target hire’s inbox.
Use paid options
LinkedIn offers paid services to find passive candidates with access to a wider pool of talent and features to “build a candidate pipeline.”
The advanced search and filter options on offer with a premium account help you source quickly and nurture relationships with top talent easily.
Free (typically done via status updates, job discussions/groups, or creative presentations) and paid job advertising gets you relevant clicks from your target audience.
Use groups and join discussions
Participating in group discussions can be really effective to increase the visibility of your brand among the developers and foster your relationship with them.
Here are a few LinkedIn groups that you as an IT recruiter should join for networking, knowing about the latest trends in tech, engaging with the talent, and posting jobs:
Just check out LinkedIn Recruiter for amazing features such as the Recommendation Engine to source outstanding talent.
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Tips
**Watch some helpful videos on LinkedIn Talent Solutions here.
You don’t need to actually join a group such as Austin Digital Jobs to get access to the members.
Everything is digital now. Recruitment too. When 30% of all Google searches are related to employment, there’s little need for further introduction.
If you look at Dice Social Recruiting in Tech Survey 2016-17, you’ll see that recruiters are going all out with social tools with a remarkable success rate.
Every minute, users update 293,000 statuses and upload 136,000 photos on Facebook (FB).
This is definitely a talent bank you can’t ignore as a recruiter.
Recruiting through Facebook is a quick and cost-effective way to source local talent, especially for small businesses or startups.
Tips
GitHub is an online project-hosting service site where developers share their open- source projects.
You can collect contact information from this hotbed of emerging and established technical talent from around the globe.
Perhaps no other platform has so many programmers in one place. “It is the largest code host in the world.”
Tips
Stack Overflow is an online community for programmers to learn, share their knowledge, and advance their careers.
Currently, it’s a community of 6.9 million programmers where sort-out developers post their day-to-day questions seeking help and advice from other developers.
Tip
Reddit is an online community where users submit content, such as text posts or direct links, in very specific “subreddits” (areas of interest such as news, gaming, music, books, and technology).
Users can vote submissions up or down.
As of early 2017, Reddit had 542 million monthly visitors (234 million unique users) and was the seventh most visited website in the US.
Various developers and thought leaders ask questions and discussion on technology in the Technology section. This can be an amazing place for you to discover highly skilled programmers.
Tips
Quora is a Q&A site which facilitates social interactions and interesting conversations.
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“Glassdoor is a bit like TripAdvisor for HR, gathering user-generated, anonymous reviews about companies and company life,” says Jonathan Bright in his post on the Business 2 Community website. The candid content prompts potential hires to check out employer ratings before they sign on the dotted lines. A promising tool for recruiting, Glassdoor exerts a huge social influence on job aspirants.
Tips
Meetup.com is an amazing networking site which unites people with shared professional interests.
With 30.3 million members and more than 0.25 million groups, it’s one of the largest networks of developers all around the world.
Meetup allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest. It’s designed so that organizers can manage events associated with in-person meetings.
For individuals, it can help them find groups that fit their interests and attend events in their preferred location.
But you can use meetup to find potential candidates without having to go to any events as many of meetup’s groups and attendee lists are public.
In this era of digitalization, we daily come across innumerable ads, emails, offers, sales pitches and a lot of other things.
So as a recruiter, how can you differentiate yourself and your company from others?
Personal relationships not only can enable you and your organization to stand out but can create an image of an outstanding brand for which people would want to work.
And to develop these relationships, as a recruiter, developer events can provide you with an opportunity to network with the most sort-out technical experts.
You can make connections and build mutually beneficial relationships with them.
These events happen around the year globally and your colleagues and you can be part of it.
Over coffee, lunch, or cocktails, you can make connections and spread awareness about how awesome your company is for the developers.
Maybe at a breakout session, you may find your next tech star.
Tips
Companies conduct hackathons to foster innovation and get out-of-the-box ideas to create efficient and highly effective products.
Irrespective of the format or theme of a hackathon, participants are expected to build something from scratch and typically complete the challenge with a working prototype.
Hackathons are one of their favorite talent-discovery activities, say recruiters.
External hackathons are amazing places to network with exceptional talent and industry experts.
You can skillfully build a talent pipeline of hardworking, smart, and passionate programmers by attending the right events.
The participants will need to work collaboratively and competitively against time and resource constraints; this gives a recruiter a complete picture of the programmers in their “natural habitat.”
Companies also conduct internal hackathons to crowdsource ideas and identify untapped exceptional talent in their workforce.
Tips
Recruiters can use these ideas to rope in the best programmers looking for a challenging and rewarding opportunities. Admittedly, finding them can be overwhelming.
No matter which source you turn to, remember to hire a programmer who fits into your work environment in terms of vision and commitment.
To ensure better chances of success, you can give them audition projects or bring them on board as consultants initially.
Take your time.
There’s more to a programmer than knowing how to code. “It’s really just about logical thinking and analysis,” says Zack Haehn, Bloomberg’s Software Engineering Head.
So, hire for proven capability.
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