Your competitive edge as a tech recruiter

90% of tech recruiters are completely dependent on LinkedIn (research). Which means that LinkedIn is overly competitive place for talent.

Recruiters and their leadership have been put on a LinkedIn Recruiter seat from the first day in their recruiting career.

A disaster for innovation in the recruiting space, but a great opportunity for you.

There are many uncompetitive and data rich platforms where you can find candidates that are almost untouched.

Knowing where to look and knowing how to search those platforms is your biggest edge as a tech recruiter.

If you're one of those recruiters who uses LinkedIn as a one stop talent shop, take a minute to think about what you're trying to do.

You're chasing talent that appears on top of most recruiters' LinkedIn searches, you reach out on the same platform where the candidates receive messages from dozens of recruiters a day and use most likely outdated information on their LinkedIn profile to address their skills.

You're making your job almost impossible indeed.

My favourite example of a platform to make your job possible again:

GitHub has 65 million engineers that share their actual code with each other.

GitHub acts as the engineer's online public portfolio with their core technology skills.

And the great thing is that those skills are verified by the code they share.

A similar platform is Stack Overflow, with 18 million engineers, which is primarily question and answer focussed (engineers answering technology questions of other engineers).

You can use this public data to find and screen tech talent.

This data is essentially the most reliable skills data you can attain. Way more accurate and valid than any social media profile, interview round or code assessment.

But you probably don't want to go into every individual software engineer's code to figure out what technology they used.

That's where a talent search engine comes in, and preferably one that is able to analyse core technology skills based on code repositories and other contributions to the tech community.

­Here's:

How to find GitHub and Stack Overflow profiles

How to screen and assess tech candidates

How to find contact details of tech candidates