The many alternatives to LinkedIn for recruiting talent

Many recruiters rely on LinkedIn to hit their recruitment targets.

But LinkedIn is not the only platform to source talent on.

Many platforms are overlooked as sourcing platforms. They might not be necessarily designed for recruitment, but you can find talent if you know how to search them.

And the best part is that most of these alternative platforms provide information on professional activity of the candidates that is richer than the information on LinkedIn.

These alternative sources can be X-rayed, but there are also talent search engines which help you find LinkedIn profiles, but also profiles from these alternative sources.

Using these alternatives can not only save a lot of money like for the LinkedIn Recruiter seat equal to $880 per month, it can also provide you access to profiles that other recruiters are not finding.

These are your best alternatives to recruiting talent on LinkedIn:

1. X-ray search
2. Use a talent search engine
   

And these are the best alternative platforms to recruiting talent on LinkedIn:

1. GitHub
2. Stack Overflow
3. Reddit
4. AngelList
5. Xing
6. Kaggle
7. Medium
8. Profile aggregator

Best alternatives to recruiting talent on LinkedIn

There are two main alternatives to paying for a LinkedIn Recruiter (Lite) account.

X-ray search and talent search engines offer the ability to find LinkedIn and other profiles.

X-ray search profiles

X-raying or x-ray searching is finding (LinkedIn) profiles in a generic search engine like Google. You can instruct Google to search for LinkedIn results and for profiles only.

Here's an example of a simple x-ray search string:

site:linkedin.com/in "software developer"

This will instruct Google to search for results from the LinkedIn website only (site:linkedin.com), for profiles only and not for example blogs (/in) and for profiles with keywords mentioned ("software developer").

Here's a complete guide on how to use X-ray:

LinkedIn X-ray search guide

Use a talent search engine

A talent search engine automates the finding of profiles and typically also searches for profiles from not only LinkedIn, but also other platforms like GitHub, Stack Overflow and Medium.

Most talent search engines also find contact details like email addresses and enable quick and personalized outreach to candidates with automations that even LinkedIn doesn't have.

That means you can find more profiles, recruit faster and have to spend less time doing so.

Here's a popular talent search engine that finds profiles from several platforms and finds contact details:

HeroHunt.ai talent search and engagement engine

Best alternative platforms to LinkedIn

As mentioned there are many other platforms where candidate profiles can be found. These platforms are not specifically designed to recruit on, but when you know how to use them (responsibly) for recruiting purposes you can get significantly higher conversion rates than sourcing on LinkedIn only.

1. GitHub

GitHub is the platform with the most active engineering users, beating LinkedIn and any other platform. A goldmine of rich and up to date candidate information.

Key facts

• Engineer profiles including activity
• 65 million users
• Publishing of code repositories including tech tags
  

How to recruit talent on GitHub

2. Stack Overflow

With 14 million developers and rich technology skills information based on Q&A's, Stack Overflow is a must for sourcing tech talent.

Key facts

• Engineer profiles including activity
• 14 million users
• Up to date tech skills data based on tech Q&A activity
  

How to recruit talent on Stack Overflow‍‍‍