DEV Community

.Net Dave
.Net Dave

Posted on

so how do we approach developers without causing offence?

So as a recruiter I am very interested to understand how its best to actually approach developers in the market.
There is a lot of discussions about CRM based emails (keyword focused and usually very inaccurate) obviously these are not great.
I hear a lot of complaints about LinkedIn approaches, to be honest I think its a fair thing to do if the role is an actual match i.e. you have gone to the very small effort to read someones profile.
So do we phone? Its hard to reach people in the day and I bet you get a lot of these and if I am honest people probably return calls about 5% of the time.
so what then ? text? WhatsApp?

How would you all like to be approached by people in my industry and what is the way to not offend? (Before it's said I only approach people about relevant positions and I most certainly know the difference between Java and JavaScript!)

Top comments (4)

Collapse
 
rdumais profile image
Ryan

I prefer a LinkedIn approach. I would advise to be direct with me and let me know everything up front so it benefits us both by saving time. I understand it could be in your best interest to get a candidate on the phone ASAP, but know that many developers are introverted and need to be convinced to take a step of a phone interview.

If you are having problems with no replies within a week then chances are the developers are not interested. Don't be afraid of making the initial introduction a copy-and-paste message, as long as I have all the information I need to reach back out to you.

Collapse
 
ondrejs profile image
Ondrej

LinkedIn/E-mail. If you are polite, everything is OK. But you must deal with fact that some people are just assholes even in the case you are polite.

Collapse
 
dotnetdevsmids profile image
.Net Dave

totally agree! Issue I see is I do send a lot of messages and they get ignored simply because developers get so many of them that the good ones get lost in the spam...

Collapse
 
ondrejs profile image
Ondrej

Yes, that happens a lot, especially if you are good (i.e. known) developer with rich history. I always try to reply to all messages (I'm not interested in 90% of cases, but it's just matter of good behavior), but it's just me, I believe that if you get like 10 offers per day, you do not really have a time to respond to them.