Recruiting software developers is a tough task. According to various surveys and stats, the talent shortage in tech is at its highest level since 2008. For example, research conducted by StackOverflow points out that there are currently 5 jobs hiring for every available software developer.
Competition for talent is extremely high too. So, for companies who need to hire many developers, this means constantly scanning and engaging the market to make the sourcing of suitable candidates more effective, and much faster.
Today we will give some practical advice on solving this particular problem, based on the real example of a tech startup called Mollie.
Set up the Hiring Funnel
When you need to fill dozens of tech positions, the most important task at hand is to set up a stream of candidates to fill the funnel. For example, Mollie had a global goal to hire about 40 software engineers within a year. The company had over 30 open positions and planned to hire 3-4 candidates per month.
However, in such a situation, you need to somehow source enough candidates. For each position, you need to get dozens of CVs and contacts to find the best candidate possible. This requires resources: the company needed many skilled, experienced sourcing specialists. The faster the position needs to be filled, the harder it is to do it.
To optimize the process and make it more effective, the right approach is to automate the sourcing process. There are recruitment tools like AmazingHiring that allow the discovery of the best developers based on predefined criteria. The system creates candidate profiles, which combine candidate information collected from multiple sources. This allows the gathering of a constant stream of top candidate profiles that meets your requirements. To provide the same number of profiles using a manual method would require a lot of sourcing specialists and time. Recruiters at Mollie were able to source and contact 100 candidates in just two weeks.
Reduce Time for Candidate Review
The overall hiring process includes multiples stages: pre-screening, contact, technical interview, on-site meeting, etc. It takes time to run the candidate through the funnel, but it is crucial to make the selection process as fast and as effective as possible.
This means that if you can assess the candidate’s code samples, see their rankings on GitHub and StackOverflow, as well as a list of projects they’ve participated in, this will speed up the initial screening process and make it more efficient.
Automation tools allow access to all this information in just one place so that the recruiter can evaluate the candidate’s accomplishments, as well as “social capital”, and collect code examples before contact. In such a way, unsuitable candidates are filtered out early with no wasted time and effort.
Contact via Email
Finding direct contact details for developers is crucial for starting the conversation. Sending messages on social networks like LinkedIn turns out to be a less effective strategy, as up to 65% of developers prefer to be contacted by recruiters via email. But how do you get the right address?
There are multiple ways of getting the email of a specific candidate. First, you can run an extended search on the websites where the candidate has a profile (GitHub, StackOverflow, etc.). Or you can run a Boolean search on Google.
Another tactic is to use email discovery tools like EmailHunter or VoilaNorbert – if you know the candidate’s domain name (current company, or personal email domain), these tools may help in getting the exact address.
But the manual search process, again, is time-consuming, so if there is any way of optimizing the collection of direct contact details, it is a good idea to use it. For example, recruiters at Mollie increased their response rate by using AmazingHiring. The system collected publicly available contact details for candidates. According to the stats, this form of personal communication improves the reply rate by 40%.
Read More: How Tech is Transforming HR?
Final Thoughts
Despite the task of hiring around 40 developers in a year sounding like a real challenge, there are automation tools that can help recruiters effectively achieve this aim. By using sourcing automation tool for just two weeks during a trial period, hiring specialists at Mollie managed to source and approach 100 engineers, hire 4 senior developers, and start interviewing two more suitable professionals.
Given that the task was to fill 3-4 tech positions per month, this hiring pace was just what was required.
Read More: Three Ways Technology Supports the Digital Workforce
This article was first published in Dec 2019