Don't be a lame recruiter

Alright, I'll get more nuanced than that.

Hiring tech talent is hard, and it only gets harder as demand is rising and supply lacks behind. You can be smart in finding and reaching the right talent, or you keep with traditional methods that everyone is using (like sole sourcing LinkedIn) and see your response rates decline.

In this blog we want to give the highlights of what we have seen working in tech recruitment and what definitely hasn’t worked.

Searching

Don’t only search in the talent pools that everybody is searching in, competition is fierce and the same top 100 candidates for particular roles receive hundreds of outreach messages. 

Do expand your sourcing mix and look at all the alternative platforms to LinkedIn to find the profiles you’re looking for.

Don’t be too narrow in your search, if you require talent to have more than four hard to find tech skills you end up with very few results.

Do use a targeted but realistic search including the right search operators to distinguish required keywords from nice to have keywords.

Don’t repeat the same strategies day in day out to find talent.

Do challenge yourself and be creative in where and how you can find tech talent.

Outreach

Don’t entirely standardize your outreach message. If you want to stand out among all those recruiter outreach messages it doesn’t help to be too general and transactional.

Do hyper personalize your outreach message by including personal details from the candidate that you have found across several places online, showing that you’ve learned something about them before reaching out to them.

Don’t use contact details that are meant to be private, using leaked databases with email addresses from for example Facebook leaks is not cool.

Do use publicly available contact details that are suited for recruiter outreach, like personal email and some social media platforms like LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter).

Job descriptions

Don’t include dull and empty phrases like ‘market conform salary’ in your job description.

Do include a salary range specific enough for the candidate to review if it is within their desired income.

Worth adding, because this one changed after we first wrote it: in a lot of places a salary range is no longer just good manners, it is the law. Around a dozen US states plus Washington DC now require the range in the job posting itself, including California, Colorado, Illinois, New York and Washington, each with its own employer-size threshold - Jackson Lewis. The EU Pay Transparency Directive goes further: employers have to give the starting pay or range in the ad or before the first interview, and asking a candidate for their salary history is out. Its transposition deadline was 7 June 2026, but only Italy, Slovakia, Lithuania and Malta actually made it, so whether it legally binds you right now still depends on the country you are hiring in - Baker Tilly. The candidate expectation, on the other hand, is already everywhere.

Don’t use vague job titles like ‘digital wizard’ or ‘tech ninja’.

Do use specific job titles like ‘React (Native) Front-end Developer’ that are clear to candidates and findable in job search engines so candidates can come to you.

Offering

Don’t offer highly standardized contracts that do not take the individual situation of the candidate into account.

Do make a custom contract with benefits that are in line with what your company offers but which are weighted according to the position, seniority and possibly location (cost of living) of the candidate.

Don’t limit your offer to salary only.

Do include benefits in your offer like an incentive scheme, stock options, goodies and company perks like work from anywhere.