Since the last article I wrote, I’ve gotten a lot of questions around how to find candidates on Twitter. And while there are a few great ways to do this, the one that I’ve had the most luck with lately is TalentBin…in fact, I’ve become so in *love* with TalentBin that I decided to dedicate an entire blog post about it. (OCD much? Yeah, yeah, I know.)
Open Web Sourcing…Before TalentBin (Yawn)
Because I’m assuming that everyone that reads this is probably a bit more resourceful than the average recruiter, I’ll spare you a lecture on what I think a “good recruiter” looks like. We all know that using job boards should not be a recruiter’s first place to source. More often than not, those candidates have already been contacted by everyone and their mother (hell, maybe even *your* mother) and they aren’t the best candidates available. It is well known that {almost always} the best candidates are the ones that you have to really dig for and they aren’t searching for a new role.
So, where in the world do you find those people then?
(For those of you who said, “Show up in their bushes!”…you’re a creeper. Sorry.)
Chances are, you’ll take it to Google and get crafty with a Boolean search. Chances also are, you won’t write a string that can possible encompass every single viable candidate. You just aren’t that smart…sorry. (I kid. I kid. Sorta.)
Perhaps you’ll go on LinkedIn — and, so will every other recruiter now-a-days — which means that all of the awesome candidates YOU are emailing about that “hot” new opportunity is showing up in their searches, too. And, all of the candidates that are equally as viable with stripped profiles aren’t being populated in your search results. Bummer.
Maybe you’ll hit Twitter, but you still don’t understand how to search for candidates, engage, and turn an interesting “tweeter” into a viable candidate. Plus, Twitter can be unbelievably time consuming. As much as I love Twitter, I’ll be the first to admit this.
Maybe, maybe, maybe you’ll really get crazy and visit specialty groups. While the likelihood of finding good talent increases significantly with this approach, it is also insanely time consuming, and unless you’re wicked smart, engineering ways to search these sites is difficult.
While all of these approaches can yield decent results if you stick with it, send enough emails, etc. they all also have one thing in common…they are incredibly time consuming and when you’re racing to find that one-in-a-million-candidate…we all have to agree that time is a premium.
This is where tools like TalentBin become so gosh darn valuable.
Open Web Sourcing…After TalentBin (Dance, Dance, Dance)
In a nutshell, TalentBin is a candidate discovery tool that utilizes open web recruiting to the fullest AND leverages your company’s network to maximize referral generation. In short, it is the ultimate sourcing tool…on crack.
I was first introduced to TalentBin about four months ago, shortly after I transitioned from agency recruiting to the sole internal technical recruiter at a booming e-commerce startup in the Bay Area. When I joined my company, I was tasked with growing our engineering and product teams and ideally moving away from agency usage. (Love you guys — but you’re expensive!!) While I am fairly confident in my ability to source great, hard-to-pull candidates I also recognize that everyone can use a little help — and if there is a freaking awesome tool out there to help…well, sign me up.
Awesomeness In Action
I was immediately impressed with TalentBin and all that their product offers. From an open web perspective, it blew my mind and is extremely easy to use. (In all honesty, it completely levels the playing field for recruiters of all experience levels because it builds your booleans for you…and these booleans are formulated by super smart Stanford engineers.)
Once you log on and create the title of whatever job you are recruiting on, it immediately searches every single person with that background available anywhere on the web. It scrapes social networking sites like Facebook, Quora, Google+, Google Groups, MeetUp, Twitter, GitHub, Stack Overflow and makes it searchable by location AND skillset. Once your search results populate, you can search by your company’s network (with filters) or everyone (without filters).
Undiscoverable Candidate, No More
To give an example of how revolutionary this is for recruiting, here is an example of a recent search I ran for Ruby on Rails engineers in San Francisco, California.
When I did this search in LinkedIn, I got back 3,850 engineers with this skillset in the Bay Area.
When I ran this same search on TalentBin, I got back 8,870 with this skillset in the Bay Area.
And…to make it even better (and more fun for all of you stalkers), it gave me any contact information they had linked to any profile on the web. Twitter handle? Got it. No more searching for hours finding that one person tweeting about something remotely relevant to your search. I found them through TalentBin in two minutes and had a tweet out to them instantly. Email address? Got that, too. No more clogging in-boxes with LinkedIn “In Mail” that won’t even be read.
Finished Product
So, because I know recruiters are numbers driven, I know you are wondering what this meant for me in terms of actual hiring. Those of you that know me know I’d never champion a product unless I’ve had some serious success with it so here are some rough stats to whet your appetites:
In the four months I’ve been using TalentBin, I’ve located, extended offers to, and hired nearly a half-dozen candidates (all top notch engineering and design professionals) and my pipeline is robust with killer talent that will, at some point, be looking for a new company to join.
In terms of time, it took me a fraction of the time it used to take me, allowing me to be so much more efficient and contribute more to my employer. And, it saved us money — the ultimate ROI.
Grand Finale
If by now you can’t tell that I truly think TalentBin is the ultimate game-changer in the recruiting industry — well, there is something wrong with you. I highly recommend that everyone at least check it out.
It is a great company; hell, their sales team actually had so much luck with the product as recruiters, they joined TalentBin to sell the product. In my opinion, that is the ultimate endorsement. I guarantee that you’re recruiting game will strengthen, you’ll save yourself so much time and you’ll finally find those one-in-a-million type candidates.