How To Hire a Developer In Two Weeks: 3 Practical Tips

AmazingHiring — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 08:08:54 +0000

Recruiting software developers is a tough task. According to various surveys and stats, the talent shortage in tech is at its highest level since 2008. For example, research conducted by StackOverflow points out that there are currently 5 jobs hiring for every available software developer.

Competition for talent is extremely high too. So, for companies who need to hire many developers, this means constantly scanning and engaging the market to make the sourcing of suitable candidates more effective, and much faster.

Today we will give some practical advice on solving this particular problem, based on the real example of a tech startup called Mollie.

Set up the hiring funnel

When you need to fill dozens of tech positions, the most important task at hand is to set up a stream of candidates to fill the funnel. For example, Mollie had a global goal to hire about 40 software engineers within a year. The company had over 30 open positions and planned to hire 3-4 candidates per month.

However, in such a situation, you need to somehow source enough candidates. For each position, you need to get dozens of CVs and contacts to find the best candidate possible. This requires resources: the company needed many skilled, experienced sourcing specialists. The faster the position needs to be filled, the harder it is to do it.

To optimize the process and make it more effective, the right approach is to automate the sourcing process. There are recruitment tools like AmazingHiring that allow the discovery of the best developers based on predefined criteria. The system creates candidate profiles, which combine candidate information collected from multiple sources. This allows the gathering of a constant stream of top candidate profiles that meets your requirements. To provide the same number of profiles using a manual method would require a lot of sourcing specialists and time. Recruiters at Mollie were able to source and contact 100 candidates in just two weeks.

Reduce time for candidate review

The overall hiring process includes multiples stages: pre-screening, contact, technical interview, on-site meeting, etc. It takes time to run the candidate through the funnel, but it is crucial to make the selection process as fast and as effective as possible.

This means that if you can assess the candidate's code samples, see their rankings on GitHub and StackOverflow, as well as a list of projects they've participated in, this will speed up the initial screening process and make it more efficient.

Automation tools allow access to all this information in just one place so that the recruiter can evaluate the candidate's accomplishments, as well as "social capital”, and collect code examples before contact. In such a way, unsuitable candidates are filtered out early with no wasted time and effort.

Contact via email

Finding direct contact details for developers is crucial for starting the conversation. Sending messages on social networks like LinkedIn turns out to be a less effective strategy, as up to 65% of developers prefer to be contacted by recruiters via email. But how do you get the right address?

There are multiple ways of getting the email of a specific candidate. First, you can run an extended search on the websites where the candidate has a profile (GitHub, StackOverflow, etc.). Or you can run a Boolean search on Google.

Another tactic is to use email discovery tools like EmailHunter or VoilaNorbert – if you know the candidate's domain name (current company, or personal email domain), these tools may help in getting the exact address.

But the manual search process, again, is time-consuming, so if there is any way of optimizing the collection of direct contact details, it is a good idea to use it. For example, recruiters at Mollie increased their response rate by using AmazingHiring. The system collected publicly available contact details for candidates. According to the stats, this form of personal communication improves the reply rate by 40%.

Final thoughts

Despite the task of hiring around 40 developers in a year sounding like a real challenge, there are automation tools that can help recruiters effectively achieve this aim. By using sourcing automation tool for just two weeks during a trial period, hiring specialists at Mollie managed to source and approach 100 engineers, hire 4 senior developers, and start interviewing two more suitable professionals.

Given that the task was to fill 3-4 tech positions per month, this hiring pace was just what was required.

For Tech Recruiters: 9 Ready-to-Use Sourcing Hacks

AmazingHiring — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:53:47 +0000

GITHUB EMAIL SOURCING #1

Find any GitHub commit of the developer you are interested in. Click the commit name to open the commit page. Add .PATCH to the end of the page address in the address bar. Search (Ctrl+F) “@”. Get the developer’s email.

FACEBOOK SOURCING SWISS KNIFE

Go to https://inteltechniques.com/osint/facebook.html . You will find yourself on the page of Custom Facebook Tools of IntelTechniques. Paste Facebook user name (from the address bar on the Facebook profile page) into the FB User Name field, get the user number and populate all the fields with this number. You will get all the information that can ever be found on Facebook in one click.

EXPORT ALL STACK OVERFLOW PROFILES BY COUNTRY

Go to http://bit.ly/2uhr6sU . You will find yourself on the “Top Users by Country” query page at StackExchange Data Explorer. Enter the country in the “CountryName” search field at the bottom of the page. Click “Run Query”. You will get the clickable list of Stack Overflow users ranked by reputation from the country you are interested in. You can also download the list as a CSV file.

EXPORT ALL STACK OVERFLOW PROFILES BY LOCATION AND SKILL

Go to http://bit.ly/2yIrP6P . You will find yourself on the “Find Stack Overflow Users in Your City (with user-links) With Their Score For One Particular Tag” query page at StackExchange Data Explorer. Enter the skill in the “TagName” search field and the city you are interested in in the “LocationName” search field at the bottom of the page. Click “Run Query”. You will get the clickable list of Stack Overflow users ranked by the tag score from the city you are interested in. You will also see the reputation and the ranking position of the users. The list can be downloaded as a CSV file.

PLUGIN TO SEARCH CANDIDATES' SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES

Install https://extension.amazinghiring.com/. It's free Chrome extension. It helps to see the candidate’s social footprint and professional background. The plugin activates automatically when you browse candidates’ profile pages on social networks (Facebook, Twitter and etc.) and developers’ resources like Github. Plugin shows you other accounts of the candidate and when you click on the icons you go straight to the needed page. You can also see the information about candidate’s achievements on the developers’ resources.

PERSONAL WEBSITES SEARCH

Use this X-Ray string to find CVs posted on the personal websites by position and location: site:.me (intitle:CV OR intitle:resume OR inurl:CV OR inurl:resume) (“SOFTWARE ENGINEER” OR DEVELOPER) “BAY AREA”.

ANDROID DEVELOPERS’ LINKEDIN PROFILES

# X-Ray # Linkedin Use this X-ray string to find Linkedin profiles of Android developers by location and position: site:linkedin.com https://play.google.com/store/apps/details -dir -jobs WARSAW DEVELOPER

GITHUB X-RAY

Use this X-Ray string to find developers’ profiles on GitHub by location and skill: site:github.com “contributions in the last year” SWEDEN RUBY

LINKEDIN PROFILES WITH EMAIL

Use this X-Ray String to find Linkedin profiles with publicly available emails by location and skill: site:linkedin.com/in (“gmail.com” OR “yahoo.com” OR “hotmail.com” OR “icloud.com”) UK “OBJECTIVE-C”

More sourcing hacks and tips you'll find here https://amazinghiring.com/blog/sourcing_hacks_web/

DEV Community: AmazingHiring

How To Hire a Developer In Two Weeks: 3 Practical Tips

For Tech Recruiters: 9 Ready-to-Use Sourcing Hacks