3 Fundamental Tools for Successful Tech Recruiting

August 27, 2015 at 11:00 AM by Kathleen de Lara

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Making the successful transition into a tech recruiter doesn't require a former life as an engineer or developer. The search for tech talent is one of the industry's most difficult challenges to crack, and hiring pros might even equate finding this niche market to learning another language.

If you're looking to take on the mission of hiring one of the most in-demand, tough-to-find talent pools, consider these starting points. 

Know the vertical networks. 

Candidates aren't all connected on the same networks. If your go-to search platform for finding sales, marketing, and engineering talent is LinkedIn, try branching out to other networks to quickly hone in on the types of candidates you're looking to hire, and to steer away from the groups of people who have likely already been contacted by your competitors. GitHub, Dribbble, and Behance are brimming with engineers and designers, but don't forget the lesser known sites that also attract these candidates. 

Be strategic and intentional with your outreach. 

Engineers are contacted anywhere between once to 100 times a week. (At least that's what I learned at the Greenhouse Recruiting Roadshow.) Standing out from other recruiters no longer means sending those tried-and-true templates, so try this: Peer-to-peer messaging (an engineer reaching out to an engineering candidate) builds a sense of rapport between your team and the people you want to join your team. No more of the constant tug between tech candidates and the poking recruiter. An email from the company's VP of Engineering instead of a recruiter, for example, tells a candidate you're not running the course to connect with them. Shameless plug for Entelo's SOBO feature here. It's a pretty rad tool.

Get in the game. 

Try a hand at the languages developers and engineers use to get an understanding of the skills you’ll need to search for when looking for candidates. You don’t have to be fluent in writing code, but recruiters should know the languages coders use. One of the best ways to turn off a tech recruit is by reaching out to them with a job that doesn’t align with their skill set. 

Here are a few sites to get started. Check out Codeacademy, Coursera, Udemy, General Assembly, and don’t forget Dash, GA’s free coding tutorial teaching basic HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Tommy Chheng's guide to web tech and this programming 101 course are also helpful.

What else did we miss? Share your ideas in the comments!

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