Perfect timing for the guest post from Tom Savage ahead of the Discover Sourcing event which takes place tomorrow (18th September). Tom is the founder of www.3sourcing.com a search engine for technical talent, which won the European iTalent Award in 2012. He also writes a blog at www.simpletom.co.uk.
There is a faux pas amongst IT recruiters that, if the anecdotes are to be believed, occurs about once a week. It normally goes something like this – a new, eager recruit is tasked with finding an ever-elusive ‘Ruby on Rails’ (RoR) developer. With boundless enthusiasm and the knowledge that a good recruiter’s secret weapon is the amount of time spent on the phone, our new starter begins calling everyone and anyone that has ever had a remote interest in RoR.
Before long, and because there aren’t many RoR developers about, they will call David Heinemeier Hansson (or DHH as he’s known). Our hapless recruit wasn’t to know that they’ve just stepped in it, because ringing DHH is a bit like calling Darth Vader to see if he’d like to become a Storm Trooper. DHH is famous amongst developers for writing the RoR coding language.
In recruitment, first impressions and good research count. Most talented candidates have multiple anecdotes of clumsy approaches by recruiters. None more so than for developers, who have taken to blocking phones, LinkedIn accounts and other sources to prevent people hassling them. A manager I met this week says that despite removing his details wherever he can, he still gets 3-4 calls a week because of a position he held, briefly, over 5 years ago. Job boards, in their bid to compete with one another, have kept old CVs like his to massage their figures and help sell their wares. As a result, recruiters will ring what seems like a candidate even though the reality is the CV prompting the call will have been written years ago.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful, for recruiters and candidates alike, if the time spent calling inappropriate candidates – like those that have moved job, country or discipline – could be saved?
Unfortunately, too many tools exist today that arm recruiters with enough information to approach someone, but not enough to decide whether the call is appropriate. The pressure on recruiters to act quickly and make calls puts intense strain on CV databases, where new ‘hot’ candidates can expect tens if not hundreds of calls within days of uploading a CV. In fact, on the battlefield of the ‘war for talent’, a good candidate will never need to upload (or even write) a CV, because they know the moment they step from one position they’ll have a plethora of other offers. They’ll also rarely apply for jobs on job boards, again relying on their networks. Therefore the recruiters that spend and depend on these boards and databases are sifting through the same names as everyone else, and are often missing the best candidates who’ve never written a CV.
Enter social networks. The ‘boiler room’ approach to recruitment is changing. More and more of our recruitment clients within the IT sector tell us that the most successful recruiters are no longer those who maximize their phone time, but instead balance their activity with research. In high-demand sectors like IT, with a limited number of candidates for a growing number of opportunities, a recruiter must speak to a lot of people. They must also do their research quickly and efficiently to ensure that they are putting in the right calls and maximising the chance that they will be listened to. Which, to give them the credit they deserve is hard, really hard.
I know how difficult it is to find good technical talent. My own search for a co-founder took me six months full time and comprised over 1000 conversations and 120 interviews. It was worth every second. My co-founder is on of the best developers in the world, with medals in international math Olympiads 21 first prizes in national IT and math competitions. Watch out DDH! When I told my partner Raz how hard the search was to find him, it reinforced our desire to work on this problem. We want to make it easier for people to find talent and also to make it easier to know who to approach, to save the time of recruiters AND candidates. Which is why we’ve started building a search engine for people, that is getting fantastic reviews from the leading recruiters in the world (www.socialtalent.co/?p=9051).
Our tool enables anyone to find and research potential candidates. It also makes the quality of the approach and, perhaps even more importantly, the quality of the opportunity, the key element of recruitment, rather than relying on the volume of calls or mails a company can afford. That way, we’ll make the market a little more liquid, helping connect the best engineers with the best ideas, technologies and people. As well as ensuring DHH get on with what he does best!
If you are going to be at Discover Sourcing tomorrow why not catch up with Tom and see how the tool works; if not pop over to the site and check out the free trial.
