How to Find Tech Talent on GitHub, Hacker News & Stack Overflow

The internet has created a million talent pools of every variety, but when you’re looking for technical hires a few places in particular stand above the rest: GitHub, Stack Overflow, and Hacker News.

The ever-tightening technical hiring market has turned these communities into essential talent sources for recruiters, yet finding the right candidates still comes down to knowing the particular rules, lingo and cultures that fuel these destinations. By the way, Envoy by Entelo, the world's first AI-powered outbound recruiting and talent sourcing solution might be able to help you with that.

For the uninitiated, that can mean a steep learning curve, which is where this guide comes in handy. If you’re on the hunt for technical talent of all stripes and the usual talent sources have dried up, here’s how to get started in the land of programmer-centric online communities.

Last Week in Talent: May 22, 2017

Good morning and Happy Monday. This is Last Week in Talent.

The biggest news in talent last week is that Google is launching the job search engine to rule them all powered by their robust machine learning and AI algorithms. With partnerships in place with the biggest job boards, it looks like Google for Jobs will complement existing solutions, for now.

But Google is not alone with it’s focus on AI and machine learning, and this deep dive by Fortune Magazine is an excellent primer on how many companies are leveraging smart computing to change the way hiring operates.

Last Week in Talent - Monday, May 8

Good morning and Happy Monday,

Automation is the word on the tip of everyone’s tongue, which is probably why The Pew Research Center just released a report on the future of jobs and job training. In short, people will need to become more agile and adaptable, while also developing the cognitive and interpersonal skills that can’t be performed by machines. Sounds simple enough, until you read that entry-level lawyers are already in the crosshairs of some apps. Fortune, taking a more optimistic approach, is looking at the jobs that will be created by automation. One plus two minus four equals....nevermind. 

How to Fix Technical Interviewing

Imagine you had to fluently speak and understand numerous different jargons, lexicons, and technical subjects, while also needing to accurately assess other people’s mastery of those skillsets. Now imagine doing it multiple times a day with different people in 15 to 30 minute increments. It almost sounds like some crazy version of nerdy speed dating, right? Almost, but not quite. It’s just technical interviewing!

Technical interviewing doesn’t need to feel like a DMV trip. But many organizations handicap themselves with one-size fit all interviewing and hiring processes that make it for more painful than it needs to be.

“Get People To Think Outside The Box”: Mozilla, Instacart VP of TA Mathew Caldwell

Co-founder of Rocketpower and former VP of Talent at Instacart, Mathew Caldwell, joins Hiring On All Cylinders for a conversation about candidate calibration, the magic ratio for recruiting metrics, why CEOs should be the biggest salespeople you have when it comes to hiring, and how diversity of thought is essential to consistently hiring the best people with unique skillsets. Also joining the podcast is Entelo VP of Talent and Operations, Jill Witty, fresh off a presentation on innovative sourcing strategies at the Virginia SHRM conference.  

The High Value of Personalized Outreach with Entelo Engineer James Hwang

Entelo Lead Software Engineer James Hwang popped by Hiring On All Cylinders to chat with the team about the other side of the recruitment coin. In this episode, James shares his best, worst, and most memorable interactions being recruited by talent teams. Listen in to hear how he was recruited to Entelo, why he now has more empathy than ever for recruiters, and why talking about new technologies is the quickest way to an engineer’s heart.

Greenhouse VP of Engineering Decodes Tech Talk in Programming 101

Hiring tech talent is tough enough.

Striking gold means locking down skilled, available people for your engineering roles – a rare, treasured occurence for many hiring teams. To add to the mix, recruiters and engineers have notoriously mingled the same way oil and water does not. Miscommunication. Kitsch outreach. Less than ideal timing. It's a recipe for recruiting disaster. 

One quick fix? Learn how to speak tech talent's language and you'll be a few steps ahead of most recruiters blindly leading the charge.

If you won't take our word, lend an ear to Mike Boufford. As the days count down til we kick off Programming 101 with Greenhouse's VP of Engineering, Mike spills the beans on what ticks off engineers the most – and how to get them on your side. Read on.

A Quick Guide to the Fundamentals of Programming

Shun the nonbelievers. You don’t need a background in tech to make tech hires.

Hiring teams frequently deal with the challenge of finding people for these roles – skilled and available candidates are already hard to come across, but the task becomes especially difficult when you’ve never held or recruited for the job.

That’s where we come in. We tapped on the shoulder of good ole Mike Bouffard, Greenhouse VP of engineering, to teach us his love language in our upcoming joint webinar, Programming 101 for Recruiters.

Won’t you say you’ll join us?

How to Evaluate Technical Candidates as a Non-Technical Recruiter

It’s tough to recruit engineers when you’re not technical.

We’ve all dealt with the challenge and it’s particularly difficult when you haven’t played the role or had exposure to the nitty gritty of what engineers do on a daily basis. However, that should not be an excuse to not try, and fortunately, there are some ways recruiters can rapidly improve while still providing a ton of value to the hiring managers. 

Here are a few strategies for helping your engineering team’s recruiting efforts even if you feel rocky on tech-related topics.

8 Tips for Recruiting Software Engineers

In my past career as a software engineer, I had numerous interactions with technical recruiters. I was placed several times, by agency recruiters, with start-ups and bio-tech companies here in the Bay Area.

Most of you are familiar with my posts and webinars on how to source. This post is different – it reflects my experience interacting with recruiters from the software engineering side.

Here are my eight tips for technical recruiters.

Why the Designer Role May Be Your Most Difficult Req to Fill

Hiring designers is just as complex as hiring engineers.

Where there are twists, there are turns. Where there are umbrellas, there are terms, and calling someone a “designer” is as nondescript as calling last night’s dinner date “nice.” You get the idea.

Depending on the industry you work in, you’re likely hardly recruiting someone who’s labeled as just a designer. There are product designers, game designers, UI/UX designers, illustrators, visual designers, web designers, interactive designers, to name a few and then some.

The process for filling an open req for the company’s creative-engineering roles doesn’t start with understanding what types of interview questions to ask, or key factors to look for in a resume – it’s taking a top-down approach and understanding how to answer:

What business goals does the company want to achieve? What type of designer is the company looking for?

Mapping Out Data Science Roles, Part 2

Data is more accessible than ever and with the upswing of trackable user interactions and behaviors, virtually every choice becomes a measurement of past and present, and a probable indicator of what’s to come.

Think Amazon’s More Items to Consider, Twitter’s recommended accounts to follow, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn’s People You May Know, or Yelp’s Review of the Day. Every suggestion, hint, and tip poking you like a friend who wants to know what you’re up to this weekend and next. Intentional, targeted, and more often than not, effective.

In the first part of our series, we went over the differences between the data analyst and data engineer roles. Rounding out the series, we cover the data scientist.

Mapping Out Data Science Roles, Part 1

Big data rules.

These days, the smartest companies are the ones making effective use of this wave of newfound intelligence – in other words, building a more “data-driven organization.” Data science can be a fascinating, fuzzy field. It’s tricky to tell who does what in the grand scheme of the data-driven org. Defining what that means can also be tricky.

Here’s how DJ Patil, former head of LinkedIn's data and analytics team, breaks it down:

A data-driven organization acquires, processes, and leverages data in a timely fashion to create efficiencies, iterate on and develop new products, and navigate the competitive landscape.

For many companies, one of the first steps to elevating their strengths is hiring a data team comprised of a mix of data scientists, data analysts, and data engineers.

Given data science and its corresponding roles are fairly new, some recruiters and hiring managers may have a hard time differentiating between the types of data specialists – people whose jobs require them to know what type of information to collect, to gather, process, and sift through the data, and to report on the findings.

Having trouble distinguishing the three? In the first our two-part series, we compare the roles of a data analyst and a data engineer.

Missed Our Webinar on Recruiting Data Scientists? Here's the Quick Version

“Are you prepped for the avalanche of data?"

It’s a fair question Entelo’s Loni Spratt asks modern recruiters and hiring managers.

With the rise of new tech and tools, companies aren’t only able to find new ways to garner information, they’re able to answer questions, predict industry trends, and understand how to better retain talent and customers.

You’ve heard the data scientist is the “sexiest” job of the 21st century. Why the hype? If you haven’t yet considered adding this role to the top of your talent funnel, you could very well be a few steps behind the competition.

Missed our webinar on how to recruit data scientists on Kaggle? Read on.

Why You Should Be Recruiting Talent for the “Sexiest” Job of the 21st Century

Hear us out. The Harvard Business Review dubbed it the “sexiest job of the 21st century” – the data scientist, alluring for a number of reasons: It’s a hot commodity position that calls for candidates highly specialized in a medley of areas including math, data engineering, analytics, and computer science. As this position is fairly new to the tech scene, recruiters sometimes struggle to land on a definition that embodies the full scope of a data scientists duties.

In its simplest form, data scientists develop analytical models using data sets to solve problems, answer questions, and to help companies make better decisions for now and the future. Not sure if your company should be hiring for this role? Here are three arguments for doing so.