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A while back, as spent 3 months sourcing my own candidates as an engineering manager and it was enlightening. I spent a while on each candidate, finding their github repo, personal webpages, and the roles they had held, then wrote a personalized note explaining who I was, what I was doing and why I thought their experience was useful. Out of hundreds of emails I sent, I got a handful of responses. I had a few takeaways: - People with really good information on-line get tons of responses. Someone from LinkedIn confirmed that a small number of profiles get most hits. - Most public information about engineers is total crap. Most LinkedIn profiles have no detail to determine if someone is a fit. I looked at the profiles of some of my coworkers who I thought were really good and there was nothing interesting in them. Most github repos have not substantive or interesting projects. Looking at github was a big waste of time. - Being a recruiter is hard work. It's exhausting looking through profiles and dismaying to get rejected and ignored all the time, especially when you've spent time researching people. - Often you need to contact people several times before they will respond, even if they are interested. I've found this even when I've been contacted by recruiters: I think "interesting, I'll get back to them" and forget about it. Recruiting is a volume game. Carpet bombing is the only effective strategy in my experience, which is why recruiters do it. It's simply not worth doing that much research up front. Also, bear in mind that the recruiting staff is usually divided into recruiters and sourcers. The latter are who are doing a lot of the contacting, and their job is mainly to find lots of profiles, not do deep research. Once they get a response, the recruiter takes over and does more of the relationship building and candidate vetting. Given low response rates, this is also a more effective strategy. |