You receive a new recruitment project. The goal is to find an IT specialist, which you suspect will not be easy to achieve. You prepare a candidate persona to then develop a sourcing plan. The first thought is headed to LinkedIn and placing an ad on various portals. The client cares about time, and you can’t afford to wait for candidates’ resumes to flow. Wondering which sourcing method you should use and where you should find the right employee?
Sourcing in the IT industry
Here is the most important question to ask: what non-standard sourcing methods should I use to successfully complete the IT recruitment process? Do you know it? I bet, you have certainly been in such a situation more than once.
Sourcing in the IT industry is different from that used for non-IT roles, hence the methods often differ from those commonly used. The vast majority of IT professionals, are passive candidates who receive many different job offers every day. Recruiters who specialize in these recruitments, on the other hand, race against each other to get the best candidates in the shortest amount of time. All this is causing us to increasingly turn to non-standard sourcing methods. Which ones? Well, that’s where the following list comes to the rescue.
- Search engines
The most common channels we use in obtaining any information are search engines. What if they could be used to attract passive candidates? We are talking about search engines like Google or Bing. Search engine sourcing involves using logical data operators for a specific website. X-ray, as it is referred to, allows us to search a specific domain by various criteria. The most commonly used operators are insite, intitle and inurl. Each of these operators allows us to search for information, for example, in the title or in a link to a page. This method is time-consuming, but extremely effective, which, combined with the right tools, allows us to effectively search a specific domain or subdomain. The downside is that detailed filtering of the results obtained is somewhat limited.
- Social media for professionals
While social media for professionals like LinkedIn is the most widely used place to look for candidates in IT recruiting, Goldenline or Xing are not as popular as they should be. Each of these portals searches for candidates slightly differently, but it is nevertheless worth taking the time to find the perfect candidate.
When looking for specialists such as web designer, web developer, UX/UI designer or IOS app designer, it is worth browsing Dribble or Behance. Dribble is a self-promotion and social networking platform for digital creators. It is used as a design portfolio platform and to share your work online. Behance, on the other hand, is a platform whose main purpose is to showcase and discover creativity.
- Portals and services
Programmers are one of the most frequently searched groups of IT professionals, and you should definitely look for them on portals designed for them. Such a place could be, for example, GitHub, a web hosting service for software projects using a version control system. GitHub has its own search engine that allows us to easily access and search for candidates by specific criteria.
Another portal that brings together IT professionals is StackOverflow. It is a social networking site where programmers can ask questions about software development in the broadest sense. Thanks to this portal, we are able to reach a very large number of candidates who may be interested in new professional proposals. Another such site that is dedicated to programming is 4programmers. On it we are also able to search for candidates who work in a specific technology and may be interested in new job opportunities.
- Thematic groups
Staying on the topic of portals for professionals, it is worth visiting thematic groups. Such groups can be found on social media on, for example, Linkedin or Facebook. In addition, the Meetup portal brings together IT professionals who work in a particular technology and meet, at various events. This allows us to reach many professionals who are not present in other popular social networks or are hidden from the eye of the search engine. By joining such a group, we become part of a community from which we can source suitable candidates or send a short message encouraging them to look at our job offer.
- Portals for freelancers
One method of sourcing is to search sites where freelancers advertise who are looking for a new project for themselves. The advantage of sourcing in such a place is that specialists are able to join the project in a short time. Well-known portals are Freelancer, Fiverr and Upwork, where you can find projects and specialists with different levels of expertise and technology.
Is sourcing enough?
The very idea of sourcing is not new, and so far there have been many publications on the subject. We must remember that the methods and channels for finding talent depend on the specific profile of the candidate. Nevertheless, the fact remains that sourcing is a huge factor in whether or not we achieve success. In IT recruiting, it is very common to use methods that are out of the ordinary. This means keeping your finger on the pulse and discovering new candidate sites every day.
Without sourcing, we will not expand the contact base we have built so far. Sourcing is the beginning for a broader method, which is talent pooling. The essence is to build relationships not only with the candidate, but with other recruiters. We create a network of mutual contacts, recommending each other’s projects and people who may be potentially interested in them. So how to combine the two methods is described in the article “Sourcing or Talent Pooling“ on our blog.
Talent Pooling Community is a community of recruiters on Slack. It’s a place to share knowledge on talent pooling strategies and a space to exchange candidates. In our community, we believe that the best talent comes from recommendations.
