Finding the right subreddit communities to subscribe to for sourcing on Reddit can be a bit of a stab in the dark if you’re new to the platform. There are however some avenues to take to get you headed in the right direction. The essential component to keep in mind first and foremost is to find active communities.
Navigating and Interacting
Reddit has hundreds of thousands of subreddits but many of them have very few members, or they no longer have any activity. What I have found to be a good guideline is to interact in communities with 10,000 members or more and at least 300 to 600 active users at any given time. Here are just a few classifications to keep in mind while building your assortment of subreddit subscriptions.
Profession and Skill-Based
I started my initial dive into Reddit for sourcing purposes a few weeks ago when I was tasked to find a front-end developer that was proficient in React.JS. Through a quick search on the main page and I found r/reactjs which turned out to be a fast-growing and vibrant community of React beginners to experts. The community as of today has 73,000 subscribers, and I typically see around 500-700 users as being active on the sub.
In many cases, you will get lucky with communities where they “sticky” a megathread for posting jobs. Many times the admins of the subreddits will do this, so the rest of the forum does not get cluttered with postings from recruiters and job seekers. If you are going to post your job on a sub, be sure to read all the rules for posting and editing your job description. Getting banned for not abiding by the guidelines from a valuable subreddit can be a costly mistake. I ended up having success with posting my front-end developer job in the monthly megathread on the React subreddit and received a resume in my inbox a day later from an advanced React.JS developer. The hiring manager was ecstatic and brought him in for an on-site interview.
In addition to developer roles I source for finance, HR, retail, and marketing positions and I have subscribed and posted to and direct messaged possible candidates on additional subreddits such as r/adwords, r/cissp, r/marketing, r/Python, r/webdev, r/SEO, r/FinancialCareers, and many more. If you find that the subreddits most relevant to the professions you source for don’t have a monthly sticky or megathread for jobs, it never hurts to direct message an admin to ask if they would consider it. Usually, they appreciate the respect for community guidelines and are more inclined to add it to keep the feed free of clutter.
Geographically Centered
The biggest challenge for sourcing on Reddit is that users are not geotagged. The most popular forum for posting and searching for jobs on Reddit is r/forhire. You can search within every subreddit, and Boolean strings will often work just fine if you want to filter out certain professionals in geographic locations. Aside from the catch-all “For Hire” subreddit almost every major city has their subreddit. Some even have offshoots that are specifically for posting jobs. It’s not uncommon to see posts from redditors asking what the job and housing prospects are for the city while also listing their profession. In the r/chicago subreddit, I found a couple of recent posts from users looking to relocate, one of which was a React.JS user.
I wouldn’t recommend posting jobs on a city subreddit unless there is already a thread specifically for that. Aside from the official Chicago city Reddit, there is also r/chicagojobs, and many other cities host similar communities. These give you the freedom to post jobs but be cautious about how many you post in a short time span.
Inside jokes or venting forums by profession
If there is anything that Reddit is known for its memes and user-generated comedic gold. You may or may not find candidates of a certain skill set directly on these subreddits, but it will give you invaluable insight into their motivations and common annoyances of a profession. You might even gain some possible subjects of small talk to break the ice once you finally engage the perfect candidate. You could even use some of this content to build some rapport with your hiring managers. It could be as easy as sharing a web developer meme and asking why it’s considered humorous. Here are a few communities to get started. r/ProgrammerHumor, r/accountinghumor, r/EngineerJokes, r/techhumor r/justgamedevthings r/engineeringmemes r/AccountingBlockchain
Developing some intuition of where to look for talent based communities on Reddit will take time, but my best advice is to make sure you also have some fun while exploring and the search will feel a lot less overwhelming. Find a few subreddits that interest you, subscribe, interact and become part of the Reddit universe. If all else fails and you can’t find the subreddit you’re looking for, you can always ask for help from the community to get answers on r/findareddit The next installment will cover external tools and resources designed for Reddit which will help to optimize posts and give insight into redditors you may want to contact.