Sourcing
September 2013
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Creating a Strategy
• Sourcing candidates is a process of• Identifying traits of suitable candidates for your role• Finding people that meet the criteria • Reaching out to the prospects• Vetting candidates who respond and following up with those
who do not.
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Who am I looking for?
• Qualities to consider• Companies
• Size? (Seed, Series-A, Late Stage, Public)• Domain Experience? (Enterprise, Consumer, SaaS, Services, Search)
• Technology• Specific languages/toolkits (jQuery, Django, Rails, Lift)
• Work Experience• Projects (Ad-Server, Machine Learning, Front-end)• Level of responsibility (individual contributor, manager, VP)
• Personal Attributes• Years of experience (Fresh grad, seasoned exec)• Education (top school, good school, not important)
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Before you begin
• Sit down with the decision maker on your team
• Go over a few sample profiles and figure out what you like / dislike
• Come to a final decision on the type of profile that you would like to target
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Where to look?
• LinkedIn• Github• Stackoverflow• Open Source Projects• University Websites• Google Resume Searches• Apache Project Websites• Meetup.com• Conference Attendee Lists• Company Websites• Twitter• Code Repositories
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Target and Filter Out
• To optimize your LinkedIn searches you need to take the approach of targeting an area and filtering out results that are not relevant
• Why?• LinkedIn profiles are rarely complete so you need to do deep
searches based upon (Keywords, Titles, Schools, Companies) and then filter down.
• When you focus on one area you lose results that can be found by optimizing your search in other ways
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Examples
• Relying on keywords• You search for NoSQL as a keyword and miss developers at
companies like Couchbase and 10Gen that do not use NoSQL in their profile
• Relying on schools• You search for engineers out of top schools and miss
engineers at companies like Facebook and Quora that did not attend college
• Relying on companies• You search for people out of Quora and Facebook and miss the
people out of a top school that work at small companies with great engineers that you don’t know about
• Relying on titles• You search for “software engineer” as a title but miss out on
developers that use hacker as their title.
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Want and Don’t Want
• Start to think critically about what you want and don’t want• Companies
• Want: Quora, Facebook, Google, Oracle, Vmware• Don’t want: Cisco, Juniper, Yahoo!, Microsoft
• Schools• Want: Urbana-Champaign, MIT, Stanford, Washington• Don’t want: not usually needed
• Keywords• Want: Python, Django, Tornado, TurboGears• Don’t want: not usually needed
• Titles• Want: MTS, Software Engineer, Developer, Architect• Don’t Want: Manager, VP, Director, CEO
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Filter by using LinkedIn filters
• On the left side of your search results you will see filter criteria
• By checking different criteria you can zero in your results to certain traits you are looking for such as…
• Developer with less than 10 years experience
• Previously worked at Google
• Went to Urbana-Champaign
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Negative Keywords
• By far the most powerful tool for LinkedIn
• Negative keywords allow you to eliminate results based upon keywords, schools, titles, and companies.
• To use a negative keyword put “–” in front of the word
• For example if I want to eliminate everyone who has ceo as their title I would put “-ceo” in the title field
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Boolean Basics
• AND• Example: Ruby AND Java• Returns search results that have both Ruby and Java
• OR• Example: Google OR Microsoft• Returns search results that contain Google or Microsoft
• Using ()• Used to separate strings• Example: Google AND (Microsoft OR Oracle)• Returns search results that have Google and Microsoft or
Google and Oracle• Quotes “”
• Make sure to use quotes around phrases
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Targeting on Company
• Come up with a list of all of the companies that have relevant targets
• How do you find them?• Venture Capital Websites• Angel List• Crunchbase• Wikipedia Pages listing company acquisitions• Ventureloop• Gartner Magic Quadrants• Conference Sponsor Lists
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Executing Company Target Search
• Create a list of all of the companies you want to target
• Go through each company systematically
• If the company is small it should not take much time to go through all of their profiles
• If the company is larger you can apply filters by targeting certain titles or schools
• If results have a significant amount of people from a previous company that you have gone through you can use negative keywords to take out those results
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Targeting on Keyword
• Come up with a list of keywords that relate to the type of developer you are looking for.
• How do I determine them?• Look at the core language site to find projects that relate• Look at developer profiles• Look for technologies and keywords that are similar
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Executing a Keyword Search
• Go through each keyword and analyze your results
• If results are too broad consider using filters• Examples
• use negative keywords to eliminate VP’s• use a schools string to only surface people from top schools
• As you go through each keyword you can eliminate the previous ones
• Example• You went through all of the rails profiles and are now
interested in sinatra• Use –rails sinatra
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Targeting on Title
• Come up with a list of Titles that relate to the type of developer you are looking for.
• How do I determine them?• Look at titles from your previous searches• Usually if you are targeting developers it will look something
like this• “Software Engineer” OR “developer” OR “programmer” OR
“Engineer” OR “MTS” OR “member of technical staff”
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Executing a Title Search
• Go through each Title and analyze your results
• If results are too broad consider using filters• Examples
• use negative keywords to eliminate companies• use a schools string to only surface people from top schools
• As you go through each Title you can eliminate the previous ones• Example
• You went through all of the software engineers now you want to focus on developers
• You would use developer –”software engineer”
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Targeting on Education
• Come up with a list of Schools that you are interested in exploring
• How do I determine them?• Look at reports
• http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings
• http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/rank.html
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Executing an Education Search
• Pick a school (or multiple schools) and search for people that go to that school
• Keywords are typically needed to refine results• Keyword
• PHD, Computer Science, EECS, Software Engineering• Titles
• Software Engineer, Developer, Programmer• Companies
• Large companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle
Identifying Active Candidates
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Saved Searches
Profile Updates
Saved Searches
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Saved searches let you retrieve new search results for pre-defined queries
Two Types of Saved Searches
Keyword Updates
Movement Updates
Why use saved searches
If someone takes the time to update their profile they are most likely looking
Keyword Updates
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Examples
Technology (Scala, Clojure, Erlang, Rails, Django)
Skills (Front-end, Machine Learning, Data Visualization)
Movement Updates
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Examples
Past But Not Current (Linkedin, Facebook, Quora)
At current job for less than a year
Considerations
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You can cover more than one keyword with OR statements ex: Ruby OR Python OR Rails
The same applies for companies ex: Past But Not Current: Facebook OR Google OR Oracle
Remember that searches will only return NEW results
Hacking Linkedin Groups
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If you have a premium or recruiter account you can type in a groups nameunder the filters on the left hand side to reveal their members
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Email Sourcing
• Roughly 50% of developers have email addresses that are public
• The reality is that not everyone checks LinkedIn and email provides you with another avenue to reach people
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Applying Email Sourcing
• Finding email address can be broken into the following basic search strings in Google
• Name + school (ex. “John Schmocker” “UCI”)• Name + company (ex. “John Schmocker” Greylock)• Name + technology / skill (ex. “John Schmocker” recruiting)• Name + gmail (ex. “John Schmocker” gmail)• Name + yahoo (ex. “John Schmocker” yahoo)
• If one of the above combinations does not return a result try combining two or three of them
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Keep in Mind
• Common names such as John Smith and John lee tend to be a waste of time
• If you cannot find an email address in two minutes move on
• A good way to verify the address is to search it in google to see what results it returns
Following Up
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Most people that reach out do not follow up
Separate yourself from the rest by staying top of mind
Be sure to keep track of who you reached out to
It only takes a few seconds
Be persistent
Lessons Learned
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Recruiting is a numbers game where you aim to increase your odds
Ways to increase your odds
Targeting only candidates that are a good fit Targeting candidates that are open to leaving Using personalized emails that are well written Following up with Candidates Continuing to pursue candidates that you have already identified
Speak regularly with other recruiters
Share tips and tricks Share candidates!
Keep learning and practicing
There are variety of blogs such as Boolean Black Belt and Sourcecon to learn from
Recruiting is a grind, but if you work hard it will pay off
