5 Effective Sourcing Tools
How to use them?
Introduction
Looking for the right candidates for the proper positions has become, with increasing competition in the job market, not only difficult, but sometimes really impossible. In such situations, a number of recruiting tools help, the use of which leads to increasingly satisfactory results in the search for candidates.
In this article, we would like to give you a few examples of tools that are effective in the daily work of a Recruiter/Sourcer, making the search for people not only more comfortable, but also allowing you to develop your personal professional skills.
- LinkedIn Recruiter (used by around 1,6M engaged talent specialists)
Do you want to be able to get the most out of the LinkedIn platform?
Let’s check out the features of LinkedIn Recruiter, which is a cross-functional recruiting platform for talent specialists that helps you find, match and manage the people you want for your company. Using LinkedIn’s recruiting power solutions, you’ll receive real-time insights from more than 740 million members, advanced tracking filters, and recommended matches to target priorities based on who is closest to being open to reaching out to you.
How to use it? What benefits does it bring?
Firstly, you should find the right people. You can go beyond your third-degree connections with access to more than 700M LinkedIn members by searching the whole LinkedIn network.
Recruiter search filters allow you to build complex queries. It is useful to learn how to effectively combine filters to get the needed results. Search filters work on the basis of type logic, using AND, OR and NOT operators. Remember that you should necessarily refine your search. You can use more than 40 filters, keyword searches, Boolean searches, and search filters based on LinkedIn cues (such as “open to work”) to find candidates with the relevant skills and experience.
Also, it’s worth to mention that you will get smart recommendations, because the Recruiter learns from your actions to provide a list of preferred candidates for your featured role.
When you reach the right people, you can start to send a personalized InMail or summary message to many candidates at once — and store your messages as templates for simple reference in the future. You can also receive reminders to keep track of candidates and synchronize your calendar for effective planning. With the Recruiter mobile app, you can receive notifications of candidates’ responses. Then you can decide on a quick response at the right time.
LinkedIn Recruiter allows you to organize your work. It’s not only a tool, which gives you a lot of new possibilities for searching, but also a tool to spread out the activities. Using Recruiter Projects, you manage your work in one place and by adding your job listings there, you can review candidates along with the candidates you have already sourced. The tool would not be complete if its functionality could not be shared with team members, therefore you can share candidate profiles with your managers or clients for feedback, and add collaborators to a shared project for trouble-free collaboration.
2. Github
First, a few words about Github. This is the world’s largest social coding site. Simply put, there’s a cloud-based hosting platform for open source (OS) developers who use it to host and share code based on open source frameworks and technologies. The popular use of Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to share photos/articles/beliefs is mirrored by developers sharing open-source projects on Github. The name ‘GitHub’ derives from the fact that the site is used by developers for everything using the Git Revision Control System, which is essentially a version tracking system. The bottom line is that the Git Revision Control System allows you to record and track all changes to a given code from the original source code.
How to use Github for the recruitment process — basics
In the user options, you have the option to search for people by location, first and last name (or just one part), number of followers or number of public repositories, among others. Most importantly — you can also define the programming language with which the user works (creates repositories).
An example how to start:
You are looking for users living in Poland, writing in Python and having at least 5 repositories.
- Log into GitHub (it is essential): without this, you will not be able to fully use the site.
- Go to the extended search engine
- Define the location. You are looking for people from Poland, so limit the location to “Poland, Polska” treating the comma as OR. It’s not a good idea to ignore Polish spelling, because then you won’t include people who use Polish spelling on your profile.
After all, our search query will look like this:
So, then…
- Choose the programming language. From the drop-down list that includes most of the languages currently used. At this level, you cannot define more than one language.
- Indicate the number of repositories using the basic signs of equalities and inequalities. In your case (5 or more repositories), it will be “> = 5”. You have many other possibilities: greater (>), less (<), less than or equal to (<=), a specific range (e.g. 30 or 50).
You prepared your query to the search engine, pressed Enter and the results appeared. We have 1000+ results now, sorted by best fit by default. However, it is worth taking a closer look at the available options for sorting the results. To do this, you select a specific option from the drop-down list on the right.
You can focus on the most “popular” users at first, taking into account the number of followers of them. This is possible thanks to the Most followers function, but you can also sort users by the date they created an account on GitHub (Most recently joined).
The fact that someone set up an account a month ago does not necessarily mean that they are just starting their adventure with programming — perhaps they did not need GitHub in their previous assignments. This sorting allows you to reach people who most likely have not yet been “bombed” with messages from recruiters.
So this is it, the basics of searching on Github! Knowing them is the best start for developing an advanced searching on this platform. The only thing that limits you is your ingenuity in creating more and more new queries.
3. Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow is a site for technical programming Q&A questions. It is part of a larger group called Stack Exchange Network. The goal of the platform is to solve everyday problems that are posted in hopes of getting answers from fellow programmers. The posted code is fragmented because it is designed to solve a specific problem.
Questions are tagged with programming language or application language tags for easy browsing. Answers are voted up and down, and people receive reputation points for quality contributions. To keep Stack Overflow the best source of information, members are also demoted for poor answers and dumb questions. The person who asked the question chooses the best answer for their query.
3 great ways to find potential candidates thanks to Stack Overflow:
- Use their job board
Stack Overflow has a job board where you can post your job ad. As an added advantage, Stack Overflow will put your job ad directly into front of the right audience. For example, if you are looking for Java programmers, your ad will appear on Stack Overflow pages that discuss Java coding issues.
- Use their advanced candidate search
Stack Overflow offers its paying customers access to the profiles of its users. This option allows employers to find, message and recruit from Stack Overflow’s pool of interested programmer candidates — all of whom have agreed to be contacted by employers.
- Tag search
Here, you can find relevant potential candidates. The thing you should do is to click on the tag button on the homepage. The tag is actually a skill. For example, click on the “javascript” tag to find Javascript developers.
4. Kaggle (5M users)
Kaggle brings together an online community of Data Scientists and machine learning experts or enthusiasts. Kagglers share datasets, collaborate on code and enter competitions to solve data science tasks and even win cash prizes. Organizations can create challenges in which Kagglers can compete.
Highlights:
- Data science & Machine Learning profiles
- Data Science talent competes in projects and can win money
Kaggler’s profiles are full of important information from a skills point of view. In particular, the discussions and public works give an accurate view of the candidate’s capabilities based on actual data science projects he has done.
What can you do as a Sourcer to find a good candidate?
You don’t need a premium account to browse Kaggle. Kagglers earn points by winning contests, publishing datasets and notebooks, and adding value in discussions. Based on the points earned by users, a classification is assigned. You can search Kaggle user rankings to find the best data scientists — Search Kaggle rankings.
You can also search competitions based on the keywords you are looking for to find interesting candidates who have scored high on the leaderboard of a particular competition — Search Kaggle competitions and you can do the same for section Code and Discussions.
For Kaggle, actions are not difficult, and the platform allows you to quickly figure out how it works.
5. Followerwonk
Logging into Followerwonk is possible with your Twitter credentials. You simply need to click the “Search Twitter bios” as well as the “More options” button under the search bar. From there, you’ll be able to start putting your searches together. You’ll use two main fields for your search — the main search bar, and the “Location” field.
Some examples of how to get started with this tool:
Twitter differs from LinkedIn in that how users set up their profiles, there is no pre-filled list from which to choose their current location — it’s a free text field. So users can enter their city, town, country or even leave it blank if they want!
So when you choose locations to search in Followerwonk, you need to keep this in mind. For example, someone who lives in Dublin might have their location as “Rathmines” or “Dublin” or “Ireland.”
AND:
Instead of writing the word AND in your search strings, you just need to put a space between words, the exact same way as you would on Google.
OR:
Instead of writing OR, you need to use |, which is a special character on your keyboard, generally found above the shift key.
NOT:
Instead of writing NOT, you just need to use — (a minus sign).
“” and ()
You can still use brackets and parentheses for terms as well as grouping synonym sets.
So a search in Followerwonk to find a potential candidate for a marketing role in Dublin would look something like this at a very basic level.
Summary
Describing the above tools can, of course, be much more elaborate — which we also plan to do! In this article, however, we wanted to outline the most important functionalities of several tools so that you, as a Recruiter or Sourcer, will have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with some of the more important choices in our opinion. We hope you’ll take a look at our other articles, where we talk about the work of a Sourcer vs Recruiter, among other technical cases, and describe the X-Ray Search tool. Enjoy!
Words by Kinga Kuśnierz, Content Writer at Altimetrik Poland
Big thanks to Weronika Grzeszcz, TA Analyst at Altimetrik Poland — for providing me such a valuable materials and supporting me while writing.
