Tips to Become the Recruitment Sherlock Holmes: Finding the Hidden Talent (vol. I)

Finding talent can be super hard! 🔥

In this article, the one and only Ricardo Roxo, will drive you through the world of sourcing and provide valuable tips that can help in your quest of finding the best talent.

Navigating the tech market can pose quite a challenge, and identifying the ideal candidate for a specific vacancy? That’s the Major League’s challenge!

Reflecting on my university days studying organizational psychology, a particular mantra resonates:

“Everyone has a right place, and every place has a right person.”

As recruiters, we aim to guide candidates in their journey to find their perfect fit in the market and revolutionize their careers. Sounds challenging, doesn’t it?

I have experience in recruitment in several areas and industries, such as Real Estate, temporary jobs, centres, and factories, among others. Two years ago, I joined Damia Group where I’ve gained further contact with tech recruitment, and I must say this is a different league. It demands daily self-challenges, constant experimentation with approaches, and an acknowledgement that “what works well today may not even work tomorrow.” Hence, the necessity of adopting a mindset that embraces constant change.

For that reason, you need to keep in mind that, to achieve great results, you must try different avenues, diverse messages, A/B testing, and understand what works the best.

In this article, I’ll try to give you different tips on how to find candidates, to help you apart from your daily job routine and have a different perspective on how to source candidates.

LinkedIn Recruiter is widely used to search by keywords, skills, job titles, companies, and universities, among others. How can you think outside The “normal”?

👉🏻 Tip number 1 The search box from the “regular” LinkedIn. You can add a small Boolean search, and filter by location, companies, universities, etc. Most of the time this search will give you different results, and maybe candidates, that you never contacted before. Just keep it short and simple.

👉🏻 Tip number 2 When searching for a specific profile, like React developers, consider starting from the end of the search results, the last page. Recruiters typically begin from the beginning, so flipping the script and starting from the last pages can uncover candidates with fewer views and consequently, fewer contacts.

👉🏻 Tip number 3 Use connections on LinkedIn. For instance, you may use that awesome DevOps that turned you down and use the connections to find new candidates. Go to the profile and click on “ 500 connections” (in blue), This will open the connections from this profile, and in the search box, you can search “DevOps” or choose any skill, and the search will give you results that you may not expect. Give it a try!

👉🏻 Tip number 4 Use similar words. You can find similar/related words for a specific tech stack on Wikipedia or on Stack Overflow by selecting related tags. With this tip, you will try to find a candidate from another perspective. When we need a React profile, we will search on LinkedIn React (and other stacks), and using related words you can find different profiles because you´re looking for the same React profiles, but from a different perspective, giving importance to another stack that will be related with React.

With these 4 tips for LinkedIn, you can potentially uncover different profiles, or, at the very least, you can use them to break from your sourcing routine, try something different, and understand if your search gives you the results that you need.

👉🏻 Stay alert for our next article, where we’ll deep dive into each of these tips 👈🏻