A Quick Guide to Effective Talent Sourcing
According to Indeed’s report on the number of searches related to remote work, since the beginning of 2016 to July 2017, there was a 32% rise in US employees’ interest in going remote.
More and more companies follow the steps of Zapier, Buffer, or Clevertech by going full remote — and they’re doing just great. Managers who still believe that all employees should be on-site may very soon get into trouble when it comes to finding new, promising talents.
The situation is already quite tricky in the IT market. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small startup or a big corporation (what we confirmed by our research https://medium.com/fe-itc-journey/research-wrap-up-startup-challenges-ecba5f9c361a) — the whole process of hiring a good software developer can get pretty ugly and last even up to 6 months. What to do to shorten it? Where to look for developers? How to approach them?
We will try to answer these questions by laying out the basics of the first step of any recruitment process. Recruiting 101: there are two schools of sourcing — active and passive. In this story, we will cover the pros and cons of both of them.
Let’s start with passive sourcing. The basic idea behind it is posting ads on job boards, social media, community groups, etc. Sounds pretty easy. But do you know how to write a good ad and where to post it?
Be cohesive and specific
Use a precise job title. No need for “We need you!” Describe the position and requirements accurately — this will help you to filter out candidates who are not a good fit for the job. Distinguish which skills are a must and which are nice to have. Don’t write a long list of requirements if you don’t want to scare potential candidates. You can also check out augmented writing software like https://textio.com/.
Write a salary range
This point is non-negotiable. Nowadays, the salary range is a must. We can guarantee that without the remuneration info, all applications you’ll get will be only from candidates who send them in bulk and don’t bother even to read the ad.
Use a magic keyword
Do you want to check whether someone actually read your ad? Include somewhere in the text “and the magic keyword is X.” it can be anything. Cabbage. Golden retriever. If you use a form to take applications, include a field with a question “What is the magic keyword?” You’ll be surprised at the number of candidates typing into your form “please” “sorry” “hire me” “I don’t know.” This will help you filter out some which didn’t care enough to read your ad.
Describe the benefits
A ping-pong table in the office or Beer Fridays are cool but focus on things that really matter. When you’re hiring a software developer, concentrate on the impact the developed software will have. Be specific! “You will develop the software that will help kids learn new languages 50% faster compared to school education” is much more appealing than “You will build great software that will change the education.”
Explain the company’s culture
Many developers who talked with us admitted that a company’s culture is one of the most important factors while choosing a job. Present your mission and vision, describe what you want to achieve and why do you do that. Let your candidates believe in your goals!
Once you’ve prepared your perfect job ad, you need to find a place to post it. There are numerous job boards, like Angel List, Startup Matcher, RemoteOk, you can also post it on your LinkedIn and Facebook. We additionally recommend joining Facebook groups for Developers and posting your job ads there.
While you wait for the candidates to apply to your job ads, you can start sourcing actively. When it comes to this type of sourcing, it requires much more time and diligence. You’ll need to spend at least an hour daily on this.
The best source to look for passive candidates is LinkedIn, especially LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It allows you to use many different filters that can help you find the best match.
What to do when you get a list of relevant profiles?
Connect
Send candidates a connection request with a personalized message. The message must be short — LinkedIn allows only 300 characters in the connection note.
Don’t use your InMail to copy-paste your job ads and send them in bulk. No one cares about that — developers receive numbers of these monthly.
Personalize
Even though you may have a general template for the connection message, follow-up, rejection, always try to make your copy as personalized as possible. Look at my example above — I wrote the guy’s name, I checked where he worked with Ionic. I cared to check his background, so he knew I really wanted to talk to him and offer him the job.
And always proofread your copy, especially if you write in a language that requires gender verb conjugation. The post above was written by a female developer who received a message in Polish in which the recruiter refers to her as a mister throughout the whole message. Mistakes happen — just avoid doing them constantly.
Try to schedule a call with them
When you connect, and a candidate is interested in the job, don’t send him/her a reading list about your company, the position, together with a list of responsibilities. They are probably still working somewhere else, and you have to try hard to convince them to leave the job. The best way to do this is during a conversation, whether it’s online or face to face. Talking to an actual human being that you see, doesn’t matter if it’s on your monitor or in real life, already builds some kind of connection. Call them, describe the company briefly, tell them about their future team. I promise they will be interested.
Keep track
It’s pretty easy to get lost in messages, follow-ups, and candidate profiles. If you are not quick enough, they may accept an offer from some other company. Keep all necessary info in one place, you can use ATS or as we in ITCraftship do — CRM. Don’t lose a great candidate because you forgot to respond.
We covered the very basics of talent sourcing. If you have any problems to find a decent number of candidates interested in your offer — schedule a free roadmapping session with us, ITCraftship! We can take a look at your code, challenges, timeline, budget and prepare a strategy for you to find the best match. Some more advice you can also find on our company’s blog.
