How often are we as recruiters limiting ourselves just with LinkedIn, overlooking other resources? In this article, I want to push the borders of sourcing and show non-trivial platforms where to look for IT specialists.
These resources can be useful not only if you’re searching for new profiles not available on LinkedIn. They can also provide you with information that helps to personalize your starter message to the candidate.
Quora
Everyone knows Quora as the Q&A platform. But it turns out you can also search for candidates there. Here are two ways how you can do that:
- Use internal search
- X-ray search
For internal search, go to Profiles and enter keywords in the search box, for example: Java Ukraine
The website will show you the list of profiles having these keywords.
As for the X-ray search, here’s how to use it:
site:quora.com/profile Java Ukraine
In many cases, profiles you’ll find look much like pretty detailed CVs.
Goodreads
You surely know that in many companies, candidates are asked at the interviews about professional books they read. This question matters to the companies, as reading books, after all, shows that candidates work on their professional growth, and are focused not only at current working issues.
So, if you’re also interested in these employees, why not search them on Goodreads? Sure thing, not everyone uses it and writes their reviews. But if you reach out to a person there or refer to their book review in your first email, it’ll be a huge plus and will surely set you apart from the crowd of other sourcers and recruiters.
To find candidates on Goodreads, you can use a simple X-ray request:
site:goodreads.com Python London
You can also try to look for people who’ve read a specific book, for example:
site:goodreads.com “Full-Stack recruiter”
Slack
Slack has become a standard tool not only as a messenger for internal communication across the teams but also as a place where different communities meet.
There are plenty of specialized IT communities in Slack. You can find many collections by yourself on the Internet or by recommendation of programmers you know.
Once you find the community you need, go to the Work or Job channel – they are created for sharing careers opportunities so that you can post your vacancy there.
Getting back to the article topic, here’s a hack on how to export the data from the entire channel with the names of participants and their available contacts. I just changed the code a bit, removed the parts which I don’t need and added a Skype search. As it turned out, many guys mention it 😉
You’re welcome to use this approach:
var members = TS.model.members.map(function(member) {
return {
‘firstName’: member.profile.first_name,
‘lastName’: member.profile.last_name,
’email’: member.profile.email,
‘title’: member.profile.title,
‘telephone’: member.profile.phone,
‘skype’: member.profile.skype,
}
});
console.log(JSON.stringify(members));
Blogs
If you are looking for someone who writes professional articles, you can use several ways to search for such people:
- Search within a specific resource (e.g. SourceCon)
- Search on popular blogging sites: Medium, Tumblr, etc.
If you know the websites where specific professionals publish their content, create an X-ray search for this website. For example, here’s how we’ll search for people on SourceCon:
site:sourcecon.com/author UK
This request can also be helpful for those who are looking for potential keynote speakers for the conferences.
If you’re searching for the candidates on such popular websites, like Medium, the request may look like this:
site:medium.com Frontend Europe
You can also easily search for people by tags.
Flickr
This is the platform where people post their photos. Flickr has an internal keyword search used in the profile. Many users indicate their position and location.
We also use X-ray search:
site:flickr.com/people designer Berlin
Here you can find many designers who post their works or are fond of photography and to plenty of other IT specialists.
Of course, first of all, each of us will begin the search from the LinkedIn, the resource we all know and widely used. But I hope these ideas will help you expand the boundaries of sourcing and bring you to more interesting profiles.