Sourcing Hacks (or how to find IT talent in the era of digital transformation)
In my LinkedIn profile, just under my name, is my job position. And it says (in addition to IT Recruiter) Sourcing Specialist. Some people have asked me what sourcing means (in the recruitment), or what is to source, so I wanted to write an article not only answering this questions, but also explaining a bit about how to source effectively, and what tools we have to do it.
I am from Argentina, so I talk with a lot of people who only use Spanish to communicate. The answer to the first question they ask me is simple: it doesn’t matter what sourcing means, but why we do sourcing (unlike recruiting or recruitment, which have a simple translation into Spanish -“reclutamiento”-, sourcing does not have its clear equivalent in Spanish).
Sourcing is vital when your job involves hiring IT profiles, especially developers (also called programmers or software engineers). Why? Because, before hiring them, you will have to find and recruit them. And finding them is often the most difficult task, and the key part of the job.
Those of us who work in technology areas are familiar with this topic, but I’m going to explain a bit, so that those who come from other areas also understand it.
The work market is quite peculiar when we talk about hiring software developers. The demand for this professionals (especially those with SR and Ssr seniority) is very high, and there are not enough qualified people to cover it.
There are also programming languages and technologies that in some countries are managed by very few people, which makes those few highly required by companies, earning inflated salaries, and receive so many job offers per week that they no longer have an interest in being found and contacted.
In this context, finding the right people to fill an X position, who have certain knowledge and skills, can become a difficult task. Posting an ad, using referral programs or candidate databases, whether personal or from a company, is not enough. Here is where the Sourcer, Head Hunter and IT Recruiter, specialized in finding these people, appear.
The first step to find the right candidate is understand the profile we are looking for. This will be very important to define the strategies that we are going to use, the level of difficulty that the search has, and the time it can take us to carry out and complete it.
After we clearly know the profile we are looking for (a task that can vary greatly depending on who is commissioning us the search), we must build a JD (Job Description) as clear and informative as possible (although not extremely long), and publish it, so that it is accessible to potential candidates interested in our search.
And then, finally comes the part I want to talk to you about: sourcing. This is the way we have to build a pipeline of potential candidates to fill the position. These candidates will be passive candidates, because they may not be actively looking for a new job, unlike those that apply on their own (active candidates).
How to source IT Profiles?
The classic social network for sourcing has been, in the last years, LinkedIn. This network gives us two great options for sourcing:
LinkedIn Recruiter: This is a paid tool, which updates your personal network profile to a Recruiter one. It has several interesting functionalities to source by competencies, skills, location, etc., and build your own talent pipeline within the same social network (that is, you can not use any ATS or extra tool to build it).
LinkedIn boolean search language: Using Boolean searches is the technique that I find most interesting, and its use is not only limited to LinkedIn (it can be applied in many search engines, such as Google).
Booleans are written in the LinkedIn search engine, and use different commands: AND, OR, NOT, parentheses () and quotes “”
Example: If I want to find a Java developer that uses Spring framework, I can write:
Java AND Spring AND (developer OR developer OR programmer)
“AND” means that two or more conditions that must be present, “OR” means “or” that any of those options may be present. Parentheses are used to separate in terms.
The quotation is used to group words, so they are not searched separately. For example, if I write “Functional Analyst”, I will look for people who have that, as I wrote it, in their profile, discarding those who are Administrative Analyst, or Programming Analyst (who could have appeared if I did not use the quotes).
What if LinkedIn is not enough?
Now, suppose you used these techniques, and found the candidates you want to contact to send them your job proposal. The next step would be to add them to your network, to be able to exchange messages with them (you can also send them a note when adding them, but it is very short, and possibly it won’t be enough to tell them all the details of the proposal).
If they accept your invitation in LinkedIn, you can send these messages without any problem (if you have LinkedIn Recruiter, you can also send a certain amount of messages to people who did not accepted you, called InMails).
But what if they don’t accept you, or you spent all your InMails? Some people have their email public, even for those who are not contacts, but most don’t.
In these cases we will have to use other tools, and this is also apart of sourcing.
Some tools are directly related to LinkedIn, others are not and can even be used if you don’t use that social network.
I am going to leave you a list with the ones I know, and a brief description of those I use the most, although obviously there are many more:
- Github (https://github.com/): A collaborative development platform, where anyone can create an account and upload repositories. If you have an account you can search for people by location, or programming language in which the repositories are, and also see their mails, in case they have it posted publicly.
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/): Similarly to Github, there are interesting ways to source with the twitter search engine. There is also the option of looking for those who follow certain profiles dedicated to certain technology, or who organize events about it, because many people have informatio in their profile about the work they do.
- Slack (https://slack-redir.net/): In Slack there are many spaces designed to group people with interests in a certain area or technology, and there are almost always channels where job offers can be posted. In addition, you can send private messages to its members.
- Amazing Hiring (https://amazinghiring.com/): Paid sourcing platform, which has a free extension of Google Chrome and allows, when entering a person’s profile (either LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc), to see what other networks they have associated with the mail with which they created that profile. Thus,we can easily find someone’s profile, for example, of github, being on their LinkedIn profile.
- Dux-soup (https://www.dux-soup.com/)
- Social Talent (https://www.socialtalent.com)
- Stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/)
- Gitlab (https://about.gitlab.com/)
- Hiretual (https://hiretual.com/)
- Monster (https://www.monster.com/)
- Behance (https://www.behance.net/)
- Workana (https://www.workana.com/)
- Upwork (http://upwork.com/)
- UniversobBit (http://www.universobit.com.ar/)
- Dribble (https://dribbble.com/)
- Recruitin (https://recruitin.net/)
- Xing (https://www.xing.com/)
If you have others tools to recommend, they are welcome! I would like to write more about this topic later, maybe about the different ways to source in the different countries!
It would also be interesting to talk about the similarities that sourcing has with social research and with the commonly called stalking… 😄
