Finding Untapped Engineering Talent on LinkedIn
Are you hiring engineers right now?
I’m guessing the answer is yes, and I’m guessing it’s taking up anywhere between 25% and 75% of your time.
Someone asked me recently how they could make hiring go faster.
Here are a few of my go-to tricks when sourcing candidates on LinkedIn.
We all complain that LinkedIn is a steaming pile of recruiter spam. It’s rooted in truth though, because so many people are contacting the same candidates who are easily searchable. You aren’t going to get anywhere competing against 100s of other low-quality messages.
Instead, you need to find pockets of talent that often fly under the radar on LinkedIn. These are untapped groups who aren’t getting the recruiter spam, so you’re more likely to get a response:
The Lurkers: People with light profiles but recent activity, so you know they’re still checking the platform. Candidates on LinkedIn are passive. They have no reason to keep their profile up to date unless they are a) looking for a job or b) selling something. Most recruiters will pass on reaching out to them because there isn’t enough info in their profile. Don’t make that mistake. High-performing individuals don’t need to market themselves in LinkedIn.
The Flyovers: Target a region that’s not often associated with lots of tech talent. A personal example: I grew up in Wisconsin. I know that talented folks who graduated from college probably landed in Madison, Milwaukee, or Chicago for at least a few years in their early careers. They might have moved back to Wisconsin to be closer to family once they got a bit older. Most companies there can’t or won’t compete on salary, so there’s a huge opportunity to get amazing talent to join your team. This is especially true if you’re offering location-agnostic salary bands like Airbnb just announced. On LinkedIn, I’m going to search for a specific job title (level + language + “developer” or “engineer”), then set a location filter for Wisconsin, and then probably filter on previous employer if I have some reputable local companies in mind.
The Bootcamp Grad: Bootcamps have been around for a while now. There are people who graduated from bootcamps who have now been engineers for 10+ years but will get passed over because they don’t have a CS degree (mistake) or because recruiters have been instructed not to reach out to people from a bootcamp (also mistake), regardless of their years of experience.
