5 Tips for Finding Great Technical Talent

Can you remember a time when the job market was more confusing? Every day, we hear that companies are laying off great people, but recruiters and hiring managers are having a super tough time finding the right talent to fill open roles. AI recruiting solutions offer a lot of promise, but most don’t live up to the hype. And finding the best talent acquisition software for small businesses in particular can be as difficult as finding the candidates themselves.

Recruiting for technical positions such as software developers, solutions engineers, and data scientists is especially challenging. These candidates are in hot demand, and if the initial outreach doesn’t immediately pique their interest, they’ll keep on scrolling.

The good news is that there are five easy tips you can use to find great technical talent.

Tip #1: Know Your Audience

Not all engineers care about pizza Fridays and ping pong. Like everyone else, technical candidates are a diverse group with different goals and values. Some love startups, and others want to work for a large company. Some do their best work from home, whereas others prefer to be in an office. The job description should make it clear what the culture is like (“Remote OK” sends a different message from “We embrace a remote work culture”) and should talk honestly about opportunities for career growth.

Additionally, be sure to cover these key points:

• Tech stack: Engineers want to know what tools they’ll be working with and how they’ll be used. But don’t assume that the tools a candidate already knows are the ones they want to work with. Many engineers love to learn new technologies and are looking for an opportunity to dive into a new skill set.

• Role and responsibilities: Many tech workers care deeply about purpose-driven work and making an impact. Be sure to describe the company's mission and how this role will directly affect it. Also clarify how much time they’ll help with existing work vs. driving new initiatives.

• Compensation: In today’s market, it’s important to be up-front with the base pay range and benefits. If you expect to find a senior developer but can only pay them a junior developer salary, the role will need to have some pretty compelling upside potential in terms of equity and deeply meaningful work, so be sure to state those clearly.

If you are a recruiter and can’t influence the job description itself, make sure you cover these key points in your outreach messages to candidates.

Tip #2: Search Smarter

If you’re spending all your time scrolling through LinkedIn searches, you’ll never have time to nurture the good candidates you find. Thankfully, AI tools for HR and recruiting have changed the game forever. However, not all of them actually deliver on what they promise, and some aren’t any better than a LinkedIn search.

It’s essential to choose an AI talent acquisition tool that pulls data from all corners of the web, not just one source. It should also make it easy to refine the search further and further until you find just the right candidates.

For example, TalentWell lets you have a conversation with an AI co-pilot where you might just type, “Find me a full-stack developer with Python and Flask experience located in the Seattle area.” After receiving the first batch of results, you might ask it to further refine the search by only showing candidates with generative AI experience, at which point it will not only return a more targeted candidate pool but will offer suggestions for other ways you might refine the search, such as, “Do you want to focus on any Generative AI skills in particular, such as NLP, computer vision, or text generation?”

By harnessing the power of AI not only to find candidates for your initial query but to also have it suggest ways you can go a step further, you save hours and hours of tedious browsing.

Tip #3: Think Outside of the Box

The best software developers and other technical talent are out-of-the-box thinkers who can come up with novel solutions to problems because they challenge the problem statement itself.

The same is true for technical recruiting. Too often a job description will hit the same notes as every other req—5+ years of experience, degree in CS or similar, etc. This leaves out a whole lot of smart, motivated people who are ready to dig in and make significant contributions.

Rather than just searching by the exact job title, it’s important to see what a candidate has done. Have they made contributions to Stack Overflow? Can you see their repos on GitHub? This can give you insight into their actual accomplishments and potential.

If you’re a recruiter, you might have to sell these candidates a bit more to the hiring managers, but there’s a gold mine of talent outside of the normal parameters. And if you’re a hiring manager, keep in mind that rather than competing for the same talent as everyone else, you’re often much better off with a candidate who is highly passionate and has a bit of learning to do over candidates who tick all the boxes but might not be as motivated.

Tip #4: Optimize Your Outbound Messaging

Once you’ve identified the candidates you want to reach out to, the real challenge begins. Great candidates receive a barrage of unsolicited messages regarding job opportunities. So how can you cut through the noise and get people to respond?

This is where AI comes in again. Modern talent management software uses AI to help you draft a series of emails and send it automatically to candidates on your behalf. It should allow you to tailor the messaging for this specific job using the pointers in tip #1. And it should also automatically personalize the email for each candidate, referring to their specific jobs and experience in the body of the email.

Recruiters are also noticing that including a video message can make a huge difference in open and response rates. Usually it’s a pre-recorded video introducing the company and the role. But groundbreaking AI recruiting solutions take it a step further and automatically generate a personalized video using your own image or an avatar, saving you a tremendous amount of time and effort. To see an example from the first company to offer this, check out TalentWell.

Tip #5: Close the Loop to Keep it Open

We cannot stress this enough: tech workers talk to each other. This means that when you ghost a candidate, especially after they’ve been through multiple rounds of interviews, the company’s reputation is severely tarnished.

Once a position is filled, it’s absolutely essential that you immediately let all the other applicants know. Thank them for the time they invested in the application process and wish them well. It’s astonishing how many companies skip this step and then wonder why the company’s reputation is suffering and the ghosted applicants are less than friendly when you reach out to them for another role in six months. By showing courtesy to today’s applicants, you protect the company’s reputation as well as your own, and you set yourself up for success in filling future roles.

Summary

It’s a challenging time for recruiters and job seekers alike, but AI is proving to be a very useful tool in bringing them together. By choosing the right talent management platform and following these five tips, you can find great candidates and optimize your chances of success now and in the future.

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