How We Scheduled 20 Developer Interviews for Our Research in No-Time
In the previous post, we introduced you to our goal, agenda, and we focused on interviewing startup CEOs and CTOs. But to get the whole picture, it was kind of obvious that we also have to talk with software developers and try to understand their point of view and learn some more about their bottlenecks. Since I’m a software developer myself, we decided that I should be the person responsible for reaching out to developers. Having something in common already built a connection between possible interviewees and me.
Since I have quite a lot of work with the research, my company, and the project I’m working on, we engaged our Virtual Assistant to help me with the sourcing. I gave her access to my LinkedIn account and prepared detailed instructions for her to follow in the form of a doc. I also recorded a video showing step by step how I reached out to developers and what I paid attention to when considering their profiles, just to make sure everything as clear and predictable as possible.
To make the sourcing easier, we use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It’s much more comfortable than Recruiter.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to use some convenient filters. In that search, we used the keywords Angular + Node, and React + Node, and set the filters to show us people with English profile language, more than 3 years of experience, and residing in South America and Europe. The most important filter, however, was the one that allowed us to browse through developers who changed jobs in the last 90 days. Why was it so critical? Well, I wanted to ask the developers about their last recruitment process, and I bet if they changed jobs 2 years ago or earlier, they wouldn’t remember a lot from it.
We’ve prepared a first-touch message template and asked the VA to send it together with a connection request.
“Hi <name>, Congratulations on starting a new position at <company> in the last <x days, x months, etc.>
I’m a fellow software developer with 13+ years of track record. Would it be okay to connect and exchange experiences?”
If they connected and not responded in any way, she sent them this message:
“Hi <name>, Thanks for connecting and again congrats on your new job :) How do you like the new challenges and the new project so far?”
When they responded, the conversation went a bit freestyle :) After building a connection, we asked them to have a chat about the challenges they face while looking for a job. If they agreed to talk to me and scheduled a call using my Calendly link, we added their profile to Pipedrive, to stay on top of the communication and remember to follow-up at the right times, share feedback from our research, etc.
This is how our research pipeline looks like. The majority of developers are still in step 1, the ones I have already spoken with are in steps 2 or 3. After a fruitful discussion, we confirmed with these developers if they are interested in getting updates on our progress and testing our prototypes or MVP once it’s ready. That’s a great way to build a small community of closed beta tester to perfect our solution later on.
After our struggles with many rejections coming from startup CEOs and CTOs, who didn’t want to believe that we’re reaching out only for research purposes, we were pretty amazed by how many developers were happy to exchange their experiences with us. Actually, we had to stop connecting with them and asking for a call for a while because it was impossible to have a chat with all of them! As for now, we’ve had 8 interviews with great, experienced developers and there are 13 more scheduled.
We’ve decided to continue the research since it gave us lots of precious feedback not only for the platform but also for us, as recruiters. We already had a workshop during which we discussed the outcome of all of the interviews we have conducted. We’re working on presenting the results in the next posts. Stay tuned and follow our Medium!
