The Ultimate Guide To Finding Your Next Technical Hire — For FREE!
Boolean Search, GitHub, Stack Overflow, AngelList, Twitter, Google+, Meetup…Are you ready?!
About the author: T. Brad Kielinski is the Founder & CEO of IT Pros, a technology staffing and recruitment company based in Philadelphia that recruits, profiles, and staffs talented hands-on technology professionals for hire.
Sourcing Tools
Followerwonk helps you explore and grow your social graph.
Twitter analytics to find, analyze, and optimize for social growth. It is a fantastic tool for finding, targeting and engaging candidate prospects.
Here are a few examples when swapping out “Software Engineer” for:
A type of search allowing users to combine keywords with operators such as AND, NOT and OR to further produce more relevant results. For example, a Boolean search could be “DevOps” AND “Philadelphia”. This would limit the search results to only those documents containing the two keywords.
Here are a few examples that will help get you started:
- inurl:resume (javascript OR node.js) philadelphia ~developer
- inurl:dir, site:linkedin.com “devops” philadelphia
- inurl:resume (javascript AND angular AND node) philadelphia ~engineer
In my opinion, boolean search reigns king above all else. Why? You can search outside of website restrictions — for FREE!
GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features with 9.7 million users (2015).
GitHub is a place where talented developers hang out, providing an excellent platform to find top candidate prospects.
Boolean search — site:github.com “joined on” “Philadelphia” “gmail.com”
This search allows you to see every GitHub user who has a Gmail account in Philadelphia, saving time on finding contact details for your recruitment efforts. You can also add “javascript” or any other language to your search based on your hiring need.
Here is another good way to search GitHub candidates based on location and skill:
Select the language you need to hire for: Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, CSS, C, C++, Objective-C, C#
Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers with 4 million users (2014).
This one is a bit tricky since users are asking questions, but at least you know what they are working on and who is providing the answers.
Boolean search — site:stackoverflow.com/users (“location * philadelphia”)
Then, add the skills you are looking for: JavaScript, jQuery, Node.js, HTML, CSS, C#, .NET, ASP.NET, VB.NET, Java, C, C++, Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Bash, Oracle, MySQL, Scala, Redis, MongoDB, NoSQL, SQL, Linux, Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, AWS, Azure, Vagrant, Docker, Git, Subversion, MapReduce, Hadoop, Hive, R, iOS, Android, Objective-C, Magento, Salesforce, Sitecore, Solr, Drupal
AngelList is where the world meets startups. Investors: invest in early-stage startups. Startups: find team members, angel investors and venture capital.
The is the #1 place to find great candidates who are interested in startups. Prime case — my company has hired 5+ AngelList users for my team who have turned out to be excellent internal hires.
First, you will need to create a company profile and post a job to enable AngelList’s recruiting feature.
Then, AngelList will ask:
Select “Recruiting”:
Now, the fun begins:
You will find plenty of students and recent grads on AngelList who are hungry to work at startups. You will also find some more experienced talent who are either looking to enter the startup world or already have been there and love it! Great place to hire interns, contractors, or full-time staff (technical and non-technical).
Google+ is a social layer across all of Google’s services, sharing a user’s identity and interests with over 540 million active users (2014).
G+ is a great place to find candidates, along with providing a platform to instant message them through Hangouts. Great for recruitment. There is much less recruitment noise here, due to less candidate information. G+ is just one piece to a larger candidate puzzle. Think of all the Gmail users out there. Now think G+. Tons of sourcing and recruitment opportunity.
Boolean search example — site:plus.google.com “lives * philadelphia” “software engineer”
Mobile Developer, DevOps, Product Manager, Software Architect, CTO, Data Architect, QA, Java, JavaScript, Systems Engineer, Network Engineer, UI, UX, Salesforce, Drupal, Big Data
Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups with over 21.8 million users (2015).
Searching within Meetup’s search interface allows you several options.
Boolean search — site:http://www.meetup.com/ inurl:”javascript” inurl:”members” intitle:”PA”)
Try searching directly on Meetup to find relevant candidate prospects:
- Use keywords like “Python” or “Scala” to find relevant Meetup Groups
- Choose a city e.g. “Philadelphia”, “Boston”, or “San Francisco”
- Select the range of miles you are willing to search from your city
To find your target audience, you will need to join a group or search through members within the group. Keep in mind, not all group members are actual candidates. You will also find sales people, recruiters, marketers, business owners, students, etc.
Meetup is another piece of the puzzle. You can find location, contact information, profile photos, etc. here.
Key Messages
- This article serves as a guide to find technology professionals. Most of these folks will not be active job seekers, nor will the skills you find in their profiles make them an expert.
- I want to make finding talented people easier for companies who are hiring. Constantly asking for referrals is one thing. Job postings is another. Hopefully, this article serves as a DIY.
- Check out Talent Mapping, if you wish to take this to the next level.
- The war for talent is real. It’s a 24/7 job. Invest in good people.
- This article is an extension of the popular “Step-by-Step Guide To Finding Philly Tech Talent” that I posted in 2013, but this time with a bit more meat. Enjoy!
Hey, We’re Hiring!
If you enjoy research, sourcing, recruitment, development, design, marketing, or sales then check out opportunities to join the IT Pros team here. We are a privately-held fast growing company with big ideas and sales to show for it. Our team works remotely in a highly collaborative flat organization structure where performance is key. Let’s continue to build something awesome!
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