Refresh your technical recruitment methods

You are looking for that engineer that seems to be impossible to find. As a tech recruiter you just sometimes get stuck in finding that right candidate. 

You know the tricks that everybody knows but you want to refresh your sourcing strategy and methods.

With these methods you can fresh up your talent sourcing strategy.

1. Source from the unconventional places

As you probably know there are many other places than LinkedIn to find candidates on.

With a cross platform sourcing strategy you systematically search for candidates across several professional and social media platforms.

This involves a lot more platforms than LinkedIn. Think about platforms like GitHub, AngelList, Stack Overflow and Kaggle. Just to name a few.

Technical recruiters that source on alternative platforms have big benefits like less competition, richer candidate information and access to niche players.

These are the best platforms to find tech talent on.

2. Get talent data at scale

Talent data is now more accessible than ever.

Having access to that data enables you to increase your reach in terms of candidates and make better screening and hiring decisions. 

One of the ways to get relevant talent data is by scraping profiles.

Tools like Phantombuster scrape different social media platforms. Phantombuster can scrape hundreds of profiles a day from platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Google and Medium. In some cases of the scraped profiles it also provides contact information like public email addresses and phone numbers in the output file of your scrape job.

Alternative tools are ‍Instant Data Scraper‍ and ‍Data Scraper.

3. Use people analytics

People analytics is the collection and interpretation of talent data to improve the effectiveness of the workforce and drive business outcomes.

Organizations are increasingly adopting people analytics to improve the performance of their teams, their happiness and to recruit the right talent.

People analytics is not only for the board room, at a tactical level you can use people analytics to make sense of the current workforce and of future hires.

Data that you can explore with people analytics:

Market data

Market data is the most abstract level of data about people in the workforce. You can use market data to benchmark your talent base, your practices and your sourcing outcomes. Market data can give you insight in for example the total addressable talent market, talent demand and talent demographics of your target group. One of the ways to analyse market data is to do a talent mapping.

Company HR data

Company HR data is the data that you collect as an organization about your own workforce. You can use this data to signal patterns in how the workforce behaves. For instance you can measure if and when they are successful in their job (with eg performance data) and if they are happy (eg tenure per talent category). You can explore data points like employee demographics, company skill composition, employee experience, talent performance data and tenure.

Recruiting data

Recruiting data is the data about how you source and recruit talent. You can use this data to better understand where talent is coming from, to what extent your recruiting methods are effective and how candidates experience your recruitment process. Recruiting data can give you insight in for example talent sources, time to hire, candidate experience, job assessment data, hiring requirements, sourcing channel effectiveness and quality of job descriptions. 

4. Use Google Alerts to find candidates

Google Alerts can notify you when relevant events are happening. The notifications that Google Alerts provides are based on new content posted online.

When companies have to let people go, it means that talent becomes available on the market at scale.

By using a Google Alert on company layoff announcements you can take immediate action and source talent that is going to be fired by their company.

This is how to set up a Google Alert for company layoffs

Step 1. Set up a simple search string on google.com/alerts like ‘Company layoff’

Step 2. Add keywords to your search string that describe the industry you’re recruiting in, for example: (tech OR internet)

Step 3. Your final search string can look something like this: Company layoff (tech OR internet)

Step 4. Review the results for the alert

Step 5. Go to ‘Show options’ and add options, for example sources: News

Step 6. Save the alert, you now receive news updates on company layoffs of tech companies

Here’s a detailed guide on how to set a Google Alert to find and recruit available candidates at scale.