Every day candidates are divulging more and more information about themselves online across various 
social networks. Luckily for you, in between the Buzzfeed quiz results and cat memes, there's a considerable amount of relevant stats you can use to help you assess their professional chops. Here's a handful of metrics that sometimes go overlooked but if considered appropriately can be recrutorially illuminating.
Github Followers
The bar for approval on Github is exceedingly high. Tough news for below average engineers, but great news for recruiters. As a result, even a small handful of followers on Github can provide all the social proof you need. Whereas a Twitter follow or a LinkedIn add is a lightweight connection, a Github follow is less a networking tool and more of an endorsement. Fun fact, with this nifty product called Entelo, you can filter search results by amount of Github followers, leaving only profiles with a greater amount of followers than whatever you specify.
Twitter Ratio
As I said, a Twitter follow is rather lightweight, and in and of itself isn't necessarily a barometer of skill or influence. What's more telling is the ratio of following:followers. The 'follow back' phenomenon is real and ever-present, so if someone has 16,000 folllowers but follows 14,000 themself, they're probably not particularly influential or innovative. The most impressive Twitter stat is a user who's inspired strangers to follow them due to the insight of their posts. Anything better than a 1:2 ratio is huge and should tell you you're dealing with someone who's active, thoughtful, and providing real value to the endless conversation.
If you want to dig deeper into Twitter, have a look at the accounts your candidate follows, as it can give you a sense of their interests and how engaged they are in their space. Also, looking at their individual followers, you can see the type of people who find them compelling, which isn't just a minor endorsement but also a rich source of additional candidates.
Industry Engagement
A great way to find someone who's not just skilled about the work they do, but passionate as well, is to see how engaged they are in the space even when they're not at work. One way to measure this is to have a look at the content they post, whether by tweets or posts to their personal website, or re-posts of relevant material. A great signal of tuned-in talent in any industry is the presence of side projects related to their field. Encouraging talent to 'geek out' in an interview and see what really keeps them up at night and makes them tick is one way to learn this, but if they're constantly reading and posting content related to their industry, you'll have an idea of how plugged in they are even before meeting them.
What are some other key attributes about a candidate's social presence to take into consideration? Leave a comment or tweet @EnteloRob!
