Top 10 places to find developers

I was invited for an amazing HR event organized by Vimvic to speak about some underutilized sources for finding tech talent. A lot of people wrote to me to send them my presentation so it is much easier for me to share it on Linkedin and then I have decided to put my presentation to the separated article and attach the slides. I have decided to choose these sources:

1) Google Scholar

is a Search engine that belongs to Google and searches in the databases of various scientific articles, patents etc. From a sourcing perspective, it’s very useful when you need to find a candidate with a scientific background or PhD. degree etc. As you can see on the screenshot below

It’s in Czech but you can search by keywords for example like java, exact phrase, name of authors, books or journals, date of publishing etc. There is a problem if you want to find some contact details. There is no filter that you can use for finding contact information. From that perspective, it is much easier to use X-ray search.

I am quite successful with a string like site:scholar.google.com/citations?user=* java Prague “email me” that you can apply for example for your search but you can change your keywords for any keyword or location.

2) Internations

is a social network per se focused on expats. When we relate it to sourcing its very useful for finding candidates with language skills. Do you need to find a developer with Chinese in Prague? It’s the best source to use. You can use either a free version or you can have a paid version for 51 EUR per year. The full version will enable you to use all features and filters as you can see on the screenshot below. You can search either by spoken language or country of origin or interests. The filter Gender is also very useful.

3) Angellist

I really love AngelList since I am working at a startup. The best way how to describe it is “all in one” network. It’s a free job board, Talent Search Engine, Startup directory, Investors directory. Do you work as a recruiter in a startup? Do you want to hire someone from any startup? You should be on AngelList. You can contact candidates for free, connect with them. You can also create your own profile and post your jobs for free so its another place where can be your company more visible. You can search by location, role, school, market, company. Check out the search query for Prague AND developer AND java on the screenshot below. Don’t forget to choose “Everyone” to include all candidates.

4) Reddit

Reddit could be described as an opened social network or forum. Needless to say that it’s very useful for sourcing. Thank you Erin Mathew for a Reddit Sourcing Toolbox. It’s great for checking all Reddit communities. Unfortunately, you can not source candidates on Reddit unless you are a member of the community. What you can do is to use Reddit Investigator which is a tool that helps you to find more information about almost every user. You can also use some cross-reference chrome extensions like Amazing hiring. You can see how the python community page looks like below

Are you looking for an Android developer?

5) Google Play

You should know how to source candidates on Google play. You can use the internal search engine but it won’t help you so much. The only way is to run an X-ray search on Google. You can use this query: site:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details -dir -jobs prague developer

As you can see on the screenshot it will bring you a lot of results. How to prioritizes the results? We want only candidates that publish their contact details on their Google play profiles. I really recommend you to add some additional information like email domains into your query (“@gmail.com” OR “@hotmail.com” OR “@seznam.cz” etc.) It will narrow down your search and bring you more relevant results and at the same time, it will exclude company email addresses.

6) Amazinghiring

I have to say that really love Amazing Hiring even tough its a paid tool. I would label it as a people aggregator that offer you also some other features like AI sourcing that I really love so that you don’t need to source by boolean strings but you can use this feature instead and the system will serve you the candidates you need. You can see that interface on the screenshot below.

Other features include adding people to the projects, filtering by various criteria, 3rd parties integrations with Greenhouse or Smartrecruiters, enriching profiles about links on all social networks and sources and some cool highlights like the section achievements on a candidate profile. You can use it for pitching your position and establishing the rapport.

If you want to try out AmazingHiring for 2 weeks for free you can sign up here and use this promo code {AMAZING_JIRI}

7) Instagram

Sourcing on Instagram is pretty difficult due to the search engine that this social network uses. There is only one search bar for all queries so you can not narrow down your search. I use X-ray searches on Google instead. You can use for example this query for finding SW engineers in the Czech Republic: site:instagram.com (developer OR “SW Engineer” OR programmer OR programátor OR SDE) (java OR python OR “C#” OR “C++”) (CZ OR “czech republic”). Alternatively, you can use also Yooying that is an Instagram online search engine where you can search candidates by username or hashtags.

8) Dribble

Dribbble is a must-have social network if you are looking for a UI/UX Designers or Graphic Designers. You can create your own account for free and source candidates but instantly you will see the roadblocks. If you want to see the results you have to pay for it but you can search for candidates by tags or location like for example Prague. It’s really amazing that most designers publish their contact details like websites, Linkedin profiles etc. You can also use X-ray candidates on Google site:dribbble.com (UX OR “user experience” OR “user-experience”) Prague “email me”) Do you want to hire a designer who is looking for a new project? It’s not a problem. You can use the following string on Google: site:dribbble.com (UX OR “user experience” OR “user-experience”) Prague “hire me”

9) Slideshare

Slideshare is an online platform for sharing presentations and documents. The internal search engine is again very cumbersome. You can just insert your search query and that’s all and then narrow down your search results by uploaded time, type of a file and language. There are plenty of various files and from a sourcing perspective, it is a very useful platform. Since Slideshare has been acquired by Linkedin and most of CVs on Linkedin profiles are uploaded by candidates on Slideshare. The implication is that if a candidate publishes his/her CV on own LinkedIn profile you can’t find it on Linkedin because it’s stored on Slideshare and in many cases it’s in a different format. You can find these candidates easily on Google with this string, for example, site:slideshare.net (CV OR resume OR zivotopis OR “curriculum vitae”) developer prague -job -sample. You can change a location or keyword or use another expression for a CV.

10) OSINT

The last underutilized source is an Intelltechniques which is a part of OSINT. OSINT stands for “Open source intelligence techniques” and its ideal for sourcing candidates on opened sources. On that website, you can source candidates almost on any website as you can see on the screenshot below

You can search candidates by user name or real name, telephone number, IP address, location, communities and countless other sources. OSINT has also its own Chrome extension that you can download in the chrome store.

Please, let me know into the comments which source you use for sourcing a tech talent.