A brief tutorial on sourcing engineering candidates.

1. Sourcing
September 2013

2. Page 2
Creating a Strategy
• Sourcing candidates is a process of
• Identifying traits of suitable candidates for your role
• Finding people that meet the criteria
• Reaching out to the prospects
• Vetting candidates who respond and following up with those
who do not.

3. Page 3
Who am I looking for?
• Qualities to consider
• Companies
• Size? (Seed, Series-A, Late Stage, Public)
• Domain Experience? (Enterprise, Consumer, SaaS, Services, Search)
• Technology
• Specific languages/toolkits (jQuery, Django, Rails, Lift)
• Work Experience
• Projects (Ad-Server, Machine Learning, Front-end)
• Level of responsibility (individual contributor, manager, VP)
• Personal Attributes
• Years of experience (Fresh grad, seasoned exec)
• Education (top school, good school, not important)

4. Page 4
Before you begin
• Sit down with the decision maker on your team
• Go over a few sample profiles and figure out what you like / dislike
• Come to a final decision on the type of profile that you would like to
target

5. Page 5
Where to look?
• LinkedIn
• Github
• Stackoverflow
• Open Source Projects
• University Websites
• Google Resume Searches
• Apache Project Websites
• Meetup.com
• Conference Attendee Lists
• Company Websites
• Twitter
• Code Repositories

6. Page 6
Target and Filter Out
• To optimize your LinkedIn searches you need to take the approach
of targeting an area and filtering out results that are not relevant
• Why?
• LinkedIn profiles are rarely complete so you need to do deep
searches based upon (Keywords, Titles, Schools, Companies)
and then filter down.
• When you focus on one area you lose results that can be found
by optimizing your search in other ways

7. Page 7
Examples
• Relying on keywords
• You search for NoSQL as a keyword and miss developers at
companies like Couchbase and 10Gen that do not use NoSQL
in their profile
• Relying on schools
• You search for engineers out of top schools and miss engineers
at companies like Facebook and Quora that did not attend
college
• Relying on companies
• You search for people out of Quora and Facebook and miss the
people out of a top school that work at small companies with
great engineers that you don’t know about
• Relying on titles
• You search for “software engineer” as a title but miss out on
developers that use hacker as their title.

8. Page 8
Want and Don’t Want
• Start to think critically about what you want and don’t want
• Companies
• Want: Quora, Facebook, Google, Oracle, Vmware
• Don’t want: Cisco, Juniper, Yahoo!, Microsoft
• Schools
• Want: Urbana-Champaign, MIT, Stanford, Washington
• Don’t want: not usually needed
• Keywords
• Want: Python, Django, Tornado, TurboGears
• Don’t want: not usually needed
• Titles
• Want: MTS, Software Engineer, Developer, Architect
• Don’t Want: Manager, VP, Director, CEO

9. Page 9
Filter by using LinkedIn filters
•On the left side of your search results you will see filter criteria
•By checking different criteria you can zero in your results to
certain traits you are looking for such as…
•Developer with less than 10 years experience
•Previously worked at Google
•Went to Urbana-Champaign

10. Page 10
Negative Keywords
• By far the most powerful tool for LinkedIn
• Negative keywords allow you to eliminate results based upon
keywords, schools, titles, and companies.
• To use a negative keyword put “–” in front of the word
• For example if I want to eliminate everyone who has ceo as their title
I would put “-ceo” in the title field

11. Page 11
Boolean Basics
• AND
• Example: Ruby AND Java
• Returns search results that have both Ruby and Java
• OR
• Example: Google OR Microsoft
• Returns search results that contain Google or Microsoft
• Using ()
• Used to separate strings
• Example: Google AND (Microsoft OR Oracle)
• Returns search results that have Google and Microsoft or
Google and Oracle
• Quotes “”
• Make sure to use quotes around phrases

12. Page 12
Targeting on Company
• Come up with a list of all of the companies that have relevant targets
• How do you find them?
• Venture Capital Websites
• Angel List
• Crunchbase
• Wikipedia Pages listing company acquisitions
• Ventureloop
• Gartner Magic Quadrants
• Conference Sponsor Lists

13. Page 13
Executing Company Target Search
• Create a list of all of the companies you want to target
• Go through each company systematically
• If the company is small it should not take much time to go through all
of their profiles
• If the company is larger you can apply filters by targeting certain
titles or schools
• If results have a significant amount of people from a previous
company that you have gone through you can use negative
keywords to take out those results

14. Page 14
Targeting on Keyword
• Come up with a list of keywords that relate to the type of developer
you are looking for.
• How do I determine them?
• Look at the core language site to find projects that relate
• Look at developer profiles
• Look for technologies and keywords that are similar

15. Page 15
Executing a Keyword Search
• Go through each keyword and analyze your results
• If results are too broad consider using filters
• Examples
• use negative keywords to eliminate VP’s
• use a schools string to only surface people from top schools
• As you go through each keyword you can eliminate the previous
ones
• Example
• You went through all of the rails profiles and are now
interested in sinatra
• Use –rails sinatra

16. Page 16
Targeting on Title
• Come up with a list of Titles that relate to the type of developer you
are looking for.
• How do I determine them?
• Look at titles from your previous searches
• Usually if you are targeting developers it will look something
like this
• “Software Engineer” OR “developer” OR “programmer” OR
“Engineer” OR “MTS” OR “member of technical staff”

17. Page 17
Executing a Title Search
• Go through each Title and analyze your results
• If results are too broad consider using filters
• Examples
• use negative keywords to eliminate companies
• use a schools string to only surface people from top schools
• As you go through each Title you can eliminate the previous ones
• Example
• You went through all of the software engineers now you
want to focus on developers
• You would use developer –”software engineer”

18. Page 18
Targeting on Education
• Come up with a list of Schools that you are interested in exploring
• How do I determine them?
• Look at reports
• http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-
rankings
• http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/rank.html

19. Page 19
Executing an Education Search
• Pick a school (or multiple schools) and search for people that go to
that school
• Keywords are typically needed to refine results
• Keyword
• PHD, Computer Science, EECS, Software Engineering
• Titles
• Software Engineer, Developer, Programmer
• Companies
• Large companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle

20. Identifying Active Candidates
Page 20
Saved Searches
Profile Updates

21. Saved Searches
Page 21
 Saved searches let you retrieve new search results for pre-defined queries
 Two Types of Saved Searches
 Keyword Updates
 Movement Updates
 Why use saved searches
 If someone takes the time to update their profile they are most likely looking

22. Keyword Updates
Page 22
Examples
 Technology (Scala, Clojure, Erlang, Rails, Django)
 Skills (Front-end, Machine Learning, Data Visualization)

23. Movement Updates
Page 23
Examples
 Past But Not Current (Linkedin, Facebook, Quora)
 At current job for less than a year

24. Considerations
Page 24
 You can cover more than one keyword with OR statements
 ex: Ruby OR Python OR Rails
 The same applies for companies
 ex: Past But Not Current: Facebook OR Google OR Oracle
 Remember that searches will only return NEW results

25. Hacking Linkedin Groups
Page 25
If you have a premium or recruiter account you can type in a groups name
under the filters on the left hand side to reveal their members

26. Page 26
Email Sourcing
• Roughly 50% of developers have email addresses that are public
• The reality is that not everyone checks LinkedIn and email provides
you with another avenue to reach people

27. Page 27
Applying Email Sourcing
• Finding email address can be broken into the following basic search
strings in Google
• Name + school (ex. “John Schmocker” “UCI”)
• Name + company (ex. “John Schmocker” Greylock)
• Name + technology / skill (ex. “John Schmocker” recruiting)
• Name + gmail (ex. “John Schmocker” gmail)
• Name + yahoo (ex. “John Schmocker” yahoo)
• If one of the above combinations does not return a result try
combining two or three of them

28. Page 28
Keep in Mind
• Common names such as John Smith and John lee tend to be a
waste of time
• If you cannot find an email address in two minutes move on
• A good way to verify the address is to search it in google to see what
results it returns

29. Following Up
Page 29
 Most people that reach out do not follow up
 Separate yourself from the rest by staying top of mind
 Be sure to keep track of who you reached out to
 It only takes a few seconds
 Be persistent

30. Lessons Learned
Page 30
Recruiting is a numbers game where you aim to increase your odds
 Ways to increase your odds
 Targeting only candidates that are a good fit
 Targeting candidates that are open to leaving
 Using personalized emails that are well written
 Following up with Candidates
 Continuing to pursue candidates that you have already identified
Speak regularly with other recruiters
 Share tips and tricks
 Share candidates!
Keep learning and practicing
 There are variety of blogs such as Boolean Black Belt and Sourcecon to learn from
Recruiting is a grind, but if you work hard it will pay off