Outreach can be one of the most frustrating and challenging parts of recruiting. You go to great lengths to make a carefully tailored, individually sculpted
message and your candidate doesn't even open the email. Worse, you know you're probably competing with the messaging of several other recruiters. How do you stand out from the noise? The answer doesn't stop at "write better messaging". The answer is stop being noise.
When it comes to sourcing candidates, recruiters are all drawing from the exact same well. Type Software Engineer and your city into LinkedIn, and you know what you get? The exact same candidates as every other recruiter, reached out to over the same medium, including the same information from which to tailor your message. If you want to get a response and start the hiring cycle, you're going to need to think a little bigger. Here's where you can shift your focus so as to find untapped sources of candidates.
Find Talent Where They Live
There's a community on the internet for any interest you could possibly have, so finding entire groups of related talent is easier than ever before. GitHub, StackOverflow, Dribbble, and Behance are just a few such sites where tech talent are flocking in droves to post their own work and comment on the work of others. These communities allow you not only to evaluate a candidate's real work, but to learn more about their strengths and weaknesses and perhaps even see their personal side projects--one of the things that distinguises a great engineer-- in action.
Recruiter Radiology
You're going to need to get real comfortable with building X-Ray searches. These custom search strings allow you to search through all the google-indexed pages of any site you choose, surfacing candidates you might not otherwise come across. This blog post can get you started on a few sites, and if you want to dig even deeper, head over to Boolean Strings for guides and browser tools. At the very least, you can find pre-made strings and swap out certain elements such as particular site, location, and technologies to better fit your search.
Face Off
Want to get to know your candidates? Have you tried actually getting to know your candidates, offline? Consider searching Meetup and locating groups of relevant talent. It's bold, but going to a Meetup to learn about technology is just like going to Yoga just for the meditation. Do it right, and you'll leave with a date.
In the same vein, for heaven's sake pick up the phone! Ignoring emails is easy, but for whatever reason, people check every single voicemail. Even as technologies progess, you can't be afraid to give the tried and true recruiting methods a shot.
Never-Before-Seen Tools
What if you could find a candidate's profile on every site mentioned above, plus several more, plus their email address and personal website, plus predictive analytics to tell you who're More Likely to Move™, plus email tracking tools to tell you who's engaging with your emails and when? Sounds pretty great, right? Well, turns out you can have it all.
