My Recruiting Toolbelt Open Sourced
Note: this is an old post that featured on my blog some time back, but I never published it at Medium. As I am closing down sourcingmonk.com and migrating everything to Medium I reposted the original today with a few edits. Enjoy.
I am going to make it easy for you all. I decided its time to ‘open-source’ my tool-belt when it comes to recruiting. So you guys can stop googling ‘best recruiting tools’ and get frustrated, because the top 10 google results won’t bring you any further.
I have divided this up in 4 sections: sourcing, information retrieval, productivity & platforms. Also you can find some new ATS players as I can’t help it to follow this space and report about it.
Sourcing
Sourcing has been made quite easy with all the tools out there now-a-days. If you don’t know where to begin this list is quite useful. Some are free, some are paid — however I recommend learning to google x-ray sites yourself since it is basically what these tools do.
Great tool, in my opinion one of the best. Also good for information retrieval. Not expensive, not cheap. Launched their app anywhere, which I will talk about in a next post.
Tool to generate boolean strings for people who like a nice GUI on sites like LinkedIn, Google, Github, StackOverflow, Xing & Twitter.
Have been using Entelo for a few days and it is a pretty solid sourcing tool, with good functionality and web-hooks in to your ATS. Pretty expensive though.
Use this string to search for resumes online:
intitle:resume OR inurl:resume OR inurl:CV) -job -jobs -sample -samples -template -”resume service” -”resume writers” -”resume writing” (Location) AND (Study) AND (keywords)
Edit location study and keywords to your liking and get resumes.
Also, think broad and bold. Every page that has a user base (from Couchsurfing to Strava) is x-rayable. Do not begin at Linkedin, where everyone is, and do not stop at Github. Think bold.
You might be using Slack for internal comms, but there are also lot’s of public channels where you can scout people from. Check out http://www.chitchats.co/ to search for public chat channels.
Information Retrieval
One of the most important things to get is information from people you find. The art is not to abuse this information — which is quite hard for the shitty recruiters.
Connectifier (acquired by Linkedin & being shut down)
Good tool in your chrome that aggregates information such as email, phone numbers & social media pages. Also a ‘Project’ page where you can store the people you find. Good bunch of people too, just got a massive investment so here to stay!
Same as Connectifier, but then not so good.
When you find peoples websites, paste the URL and mostly get their email from the WHOIS registry.
Productivity
I love hacking all kind of free programs together to get a good and productive workflow. These two apps are must haves for all your talent stuff.
Sidekick is a free app from Hubspot that will let you track your emails. Bit controversial but I always like to know if people read the highly personalised emails I send out — especially to give me an idea when and how I should follow up. Works with Google Mail and Outlook.
The biggest thing I hate about the whole talent game is the scheduling of stuff. Calendly is a great tool to schedule calls / skypes with potential hires. You open up your calendar to them, send a link and they can pick a time instead of the usual mail slinging which costs valuable time.
This calendar app is super useful for scheduling as well and it runs as a full calendar program as well, has great timezone support and is fast.
Platforms
Lots of platforms out there right now to match you with people, here are my favourites:
Chatroulette[^1] for technical interviews by my lovely friend Aline Lerner. I also recommend everyone to read her blog when you are hiring technology people. Well written, data driven, smart, ballsy — can’t recommend enough.
My friend Hung Lee is responsible for this platform, basically trying to kill the job description. They make you ‘design’ your job based on a 10 variable graph and match engineers and companies together.
Seems I am only posting friends platforms here, but Pedro of Landing.jobs and I also go way back, even crashed on his couch in Lisboa when I was training some startups over there. Previously called Jobbox.io they have landed in London and built a platform for getting tech jobs based on a referral system. They welcomed their 10.000th user yesterday, congrats!
More friends, curated tech talent, perfectly matched. Built by developers, for developers. Very thorough screening of candidates and good talent on this platform, very much worth checking out when in need of Developers!
I think everybody knows Hired, heard some good stories although I have never used them or made a hire through it. Matching Database, very solid marketing machine behind it. The obvious choice.
[^1]: but without the dicks
ATS
I do not want to go too much in depth on ATSs as you guys know that I am kind of biased to Workable and Lever. But these two Dutch vendors should be put on the map.
These guys sprouted from one of my favourite Dutch design/UX minded job-boards Fontanel. What Homerun does different than any ATS (and what I admire them for) is focus on the design aspect of your job page combined with a Trello-like dashboard for the backend. Really well designed and already trusted by some of the top Dutch startups as Blendle.
Recruitee is a ATS-startup that I met during my training sessions at Rockstart, the startup incubator based in Amsterdam where I am part off. They provide a good, solid foundation to your recruiting admin side and launching a sourcing tool in the not so near future. Good alternative to check out while hunting for the ATSs out there.
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Have a very good week!
