Tech recruitment has always been one of the most challenging types of recruitment.
Tech candidates are hard to find and tough to convince because there are so many job opportunities being offered to them.
There are always more companies looking for tech candidates than there are candidates offering themselves to companies.
In other words, demand is a lot higher than supply of tech talent.
This makes tech recruiting challenging, but not impossible.
The biggest opportunity for you as a (aspiring) tech recruiter is to do things a little bit differently than most recruiters.
When you expand your view and skills beyond sending InMails on LinkedIn, you already have a big advantage over recruiting competition in the market.
In this guide you’ll learn everything you need to know about tech recruiting and you’ll get the right material to put your new skills into practice.
In this guide we cover:
- A tech recruitment introduction
- Why tech recruitment is different
- Practical guide to tech recruitment
- Tech recruiting per role
- The tech recruiter’s profile
- The future of tech recruitment
- Get started with tech recruitment
1. A tech recruitment introduction
Tech recruitment is the recruitment of, typically hard to find, technical candidates.
A technical candidate can be for example:
- Software developer
- UX designer
- Technical product manager
- DevOps engineer
- Architect
- or IT specialist
Because these roles are very much sought after, there are more companies looking for these candidates than there are available candidates.
Therefore tech recruiting has a competitive nature; many recruiters are chasing the same candidates.
The issue is that those recruiters all use very similar approaches. The biggest majority of them post generic job advertisements or go to LinkedIn to send InMails to candidates.
These methods have become less effective because too many recruiters are using them.
For tech recruiters to be effective in this competitive market, they need to adopt a more proactive and personalized approach to recruiting and be able to target the right potential candidates very specifically.
2. Why tech recruitment is different
What makes the one type of recruitment different from the other is defined by the candidates that are sourced for. Every candidate segment has its own characteristics and dynamics in terms of interests, skills, tenure and job opportunities (demand).
Since tech recruitment is focussed on technical candidates, the tech recruitment job is heavily influenced by the evolution of the tech industry, how technology changes and how talent is reacting to that by quickly adapting skills and needs.
Tech talent: demand and supply issue
When you’re in tech recruiting there’s an important fact about the market you have to be aware of. There is a consistent and growing shortage of tech talent compared to the demand for tech talent.
Demand for tech talent is ever increasing. The amount of tech candidates available however, is not keeping up.
Because of this shortage you need to differentiate your approach from the rest. Otherwise you risk piling up in the candidate’s InMail box with generic messages that the candidate is not slightly impressed by because they get a dozen of those outreach messages daily.
Many vacancies can mean different things. It can mean that a lot of positions are left unfilled because of, again, the demand/supply issue. But it can also mean that tech jobs are just a vast and quickly growing job market.
The truth is, it’s both.
3. The practical guide to tech recruitment
So how do you find and engage tech talent?
To find and reach tech candidates you have to do more than just posting a job advertisement on a job board. Most tech candidates are not actively looking for a job and that means you have to proactively reach out to them.
85% of the talent market is open to job opportunities but 4 out of 5 of those potential candidates are not actively looking for a job. Candidates who are not actively looking for a job don’t look on job boards. That means that for 4 out of 5 of those potential candidates you need to reach them in a different way than job posts.
That’s why a more proactive approach, often referred to as outbound recruiting, is an absolute necessity to be successful in tech recruiting.
Outbound recruiting is searching for potential candidates and reaching out to them proactively. It’s different from inbound recruiting, where candidates land on your career page through job ads or other marketing channels.
Outbound recruiting is spearfishing. Inbound recruiting is casting a big fishing net.
In tech recruiting, outbound recruiting is the more successful approach because of the reason highlighted earlier; most tech candidates don’t have to go look for jobs and view career pages because they already get a lot of opportunities coming their way.
For the full outbound recruiting guide, follow this link:
The outbound recruiting process consists of three steps:
- Targeting
- Screening
- Engaging
We’ll now go over how you can do outbound recruiting from targeting, to screening, to engaging.
Targeting
Targeting is about figuring out which candidates you want to reach out to. You need to have a good idea of where your candidate prospects hang out (do they spend most of their time on LinkedIn, GitHub, Medium, Stack Overflow or Kaggle?).
Also, you need to know how to search those platforms for tech talent. When you do your search in one of those platforms you want to end up with a longlist or shortlist of candidates who you want to reach out to.
The targeting step should result in three things:
Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP)
The ICP is a description and/or visualization of what the ideal candidate looks like. This can be a profile, real-life or fictional, put together by the hiring manager and recruiter. The ICP should at least give a description of the most important skills, interests and work preferences of the ideal candidate.
Talent market analysis
Your talent market analysis is the step where you will answer the question: where can I find my Ideal Candidates and how many of them are available in the market. With a so called talent mapping you can figure out roughly how many candidates there are in the market and what the difficulty level will be to engage them.
Target list
Your target list is your complete list of potential candidates that meet your search criteria. The profiles in your list can come from several sources. You translate your requirements into a search with certain keywords and filters so you get a targeted list of profiles. A tool like HeroHunt.ai can help build your search automatically from your job description, or even from your Ideal Candidate Profile. Based on that it finds your list of best matching profiles from several platforms.
Valuable resources for targeting:
- Google X-ray guide
- Find LinkedIn profiles without LinkedIn Recruiter
- How to find GitHub and Stack Overflow profiles
Valuable tools for targeting:
- HeroHunt.ai: find and reach 1 billion candidates worldwide (free version available)
- Phantombuster: scrape profiles from several platforms (free version available)
Screening
Screening is the process of looking at all the candidate’s information from skills to interests to job history and job switching pattern to decide whether they are a good fit for your job.
The goal of screening is to decide which candidates to spend your time on to reach out to.
While screening, a tech recruiter looks at several things:
- Knowledge and skills
- Job history
- Job switching pattern
- Interests and personality
Knowledge and skills
The tech recruiter reviews the knowledge and skills built up by the candidate by looking at previous job titles and skills mentioned on the profile. But since anyone can put anything on their profile and information could be exaggerated, it pays off to validate the profile information found.
Validation of knowledge and skills can be done through for example looking at deliverables of candidates.
Examples of skills validation:
- Software developer: look at (open source) code shared by the candidate on for example GitHub or their other contributions to developer communities
- Data scientist: look at data models they helped build and possibly their projects on Kaggle
- UX Designer: look at their portfolio of apps they helped design and build
Job history
One of the most obvious things to look at while screening candidates is looking at their previous job titles and the companies they have worked for. It’s helpful to look at the details of a position that someone held because a job title alone can be misleading or just too vague.
Job switching pattern
To make an estimation whether the candidate is open to moving from their current job and to estimate how long a candidate might stick at your company, it’s wise to look at how often the candidate has switched jobs before.
A candidate who has switched every half year might also switch relatively fast in your company.
On the other hand a candidate who has been working 20 years for the same employer might not make a next move quickly so might not be worth your time reaching out to.
Interests and personality
A social media profile of a candidate can say a lot about a person. They might have a profile or background that says something about their passion, maybe they have posted something about their personal life or mention their hobbies.
Even though this information is less tangible than for example skills, it is still very important information especially when estimating if the candidate fits your company culture and team dynamics.
Valuable resources for screening:
Valuable tools for screening:
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