4 Strategies for Finding the Right Hire
Sourcing Tech Talent
As a recruiter, you know filling your pipeline with qualified tech talent is not only essential to your success, but also to the success of your organization.
Finding, nurturing, and engaging top tech talent can be a daunting task. But it doesn't have to be.This eBook offers five proven strategies to transform your sourcing process. By optimizing your approach, you’ll not only save time but also enhance your ability to attract and hire the best tech talent in the industry — the kind that is qualified, engaged, and valuable. Discover how to streamline your efforts, build stronger pipelines, and ultimately drive business growth.
Cultivate an Engaging Brand Experience
Branding is the neon sign that brings talent to your door. By putting the right focus on your brand and how it engages potential talent, you are utilizing a powerful tool that will make your sourcing process so much easier and more effective.
Get Specific About Needs and Goals
Aligning with hiring managers on necessary skills is especially important when hiring in-demand technologists, who are looking for opportunities that offer work in specific programming languages and frameworks.
Optimize Your Outreach
Testing methods and messaging on a regular basis and leveraging what works best can increase the efficiency of your outreach and increase response rates.
Use a Third-Party Recruitment Service
When resources are constrained, employing help from a third party — whether it’s a contract or contingent recruiter (headhunter) or recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) — can get you through temporary high demand.
Cultivate an Engaging Brand Experience
Your brand — whether it is your personal brand as a recruiter, your agency’s brand or your brand as an employer — can be a crucial differentiating factor in a tech candidate's decision to proceed with the hiring process and ultimately accept a job offer.A brand in this context is the collective experience a candidate has with you and/or your organization or agency — from outreach to employment. This includes visual representation (photos, logos), messaging, core values, company culture and much more. Now more than ever, building a pipeline of active and passive tech candidates requires a powerful brand story that is deliberate, data-driven and continually nurtured.
Historically, “employer brand” has only referred to the brand of the organization looking to hire and retain staff. However, the importance of brand has broadened to also include personal recruiter and agency brands. In short, your reputation, what you’re known for, and what you stand for, matters. Regardless of which brand you’re cultivating (personal/recruiter, employer or agency), it’s important to take the following three steps
70%
of tech professionals would not apply for a role at a company that offered them higher pay, but had a bad corporate and/or culture reputation.
72%
of global recruiting leaders believe employer brand significantly influences hiring success.
1. Establish Your Brand Story
Reflecting on basic brand story elements like what it is you, your organization or agency are known for, what makes you unique and what your goals are will help you establish your brand and will serve as the foundation for executing your brand strategy. Thoughtful reflection is important in this stage and asking for external perspective, for example, through a survey, can also provide valuable building blocks for your brand story. Understanding the essence of your brand will allow you to make stronger connections with the right talent.
2. Communicate Your Brand Effectively
Once you have determined your brand story and what you want to be known for, you’re ready to explore communicating those messages effectively through every relevant channel and interaction you have with candidates. Understanding the candidate journey is incredibly important in this stage. The candidate journey generally follows this path: awareness of your brand, consideration of employment, experience and decision, and employee experience. Depending on the type of brand you’re optimizing for and the stage at which the candidate is, you’ll want to communicate your brand story in different ways for it to be most effective.
3. Measure the Success of Your Brand
Formalizing a plan for consistently monitoring your brand’s reputation is a key step in the branding process that will gain momentum the more you cultivate it and refine it. By regularly reviewing your efforts and optimizing your brand strategy, you’ll know you’re always taking the most effective actions toward cultivating an engaging brand experience. Actions like completing a gap or competitive analysis, surveying employees and keeping tabs on metrics like cost per hire, time to hire, etc. are great practices to include in your regular measurement of success.
Bonus Tip: Develop Candidate Personas to Inform Everything Else
Candidate personas are the blueprint for a compelling employer brand. By deeply understanding your ideal candidates, you can tailor your messaging and employer value proposition to resonate powerfully with them.
Here’s why candidate personas are so useful:
- Messaging that resonates: Know exactly who you’re talking to when you create job postings, develop employment pages, and more. By crafting messages that speak directly to their needs, desires, and pain points, you’ll cut through the noise and capture their attention.
- Optimized candidate experience: From career page content to interview processes, every touchpoint can be personalized to resonate with the right talent in the most engaging way.
- Strategy Improvement: Strong persona identification can be the first step in finding the best sourcing channels and recruitment strategies to reach your target audience effectively.
- Data-driven decisions: Use persona insights to measure the impact of your employer branding efforts and make informed adjustments.
- Stronger employer brand: By truly understanding your ideal candidates, you can build an employer brand that authentically reflects your company culture and values to the audience of tech professionals that are most valuable to you.
In essence, candidate personas are the key to unlocking the full potential of your employer brand. By investing time in creating detailed and accurate personas, you’ll be well on your way to building a magnetic employer brand that attracts top talent.
Dice Employer Brand Solutions
If you’re looking for assistance building or communicating your employer brand, Dice can help. Dice Employer Brand solutions offer a multi-channel approach that allows you to target the best candidates for your open positions, and raise your brand awareness with an engaged, relevant audience. Plus, we can customize any and all of our solutions to fit your unique needs, wants and goals.
Bonus Tips
Source for roles you don’t have yet. Constantly growing and cultivating your network can set you up for success when roles open up, especially when they need to be filled ASAP.
1Don’t forget your “not interested at this time” candidates. A candidate who wasn’t interested in an opportunity six months ago may be in a different mindset now, especially if the new open role is a better fit.
2Connect and build relationships with leaders in your industry. Even if they never align with a role you’re hiring for, their networks can be incredibly valuable in bringing top-quality active and passive candidates.
3Get Specific About Needs and Goals
Recruiters — whether they’re in-house or working for an agency — face a two-part dilemma when it comes to sourcing candidates. While you need to provide hiring managers with a solid list of professionals, these professionals also need to be relevant, qualified and interested in the opportunity being offered — otherwise, they’re likely to drop out during the interview process because the job isn’t right for them, or they won’t respond at all. Getting alignment from hiring managers on the specific needs and goals for the open position is a great way to mitigate this problem.Intake meetings with hiring managers are the best way to get the alignment needed to avoid uninterested and unqualified candidates. These meetings can help both the recruiter and the hiring manager focus on exactly what’s needed before the recruiter even begins drafting a list of potential candidates. In addition to understanding the hiring stages, candidate touch points and basics like the job title and salary range, it’s important to align on the ideal candidate profile, understand what soft and technical skills are necessary for the role and, above all, be realistic.
The bulk of your intake meeting should focus on understanding the hiring manager’s ideal candidate profile (and managing their expectations around it). Separate from a job description, a candidate profile focuses on characteristics and soft skills. It’s how a recruiter will evaluate if a candidate is a cultural fit and gives recruiters ideas of where to look for candidates.
Here are some questions you can ask the hiring manager to start the sourcing process out on the right foot:
- What are the potential growth opportunities for the successful candidate?
- What specific company values or behaviors are essential for success in this role and team?
- Are there specific technical skills or industry knowledge areas that are particularly challenging to find in the market?
- What aspects of the job description are most important to you?
- Beyond technical skills, what are the top three soft skills essential for success in this role?
- How will the success of this role be measured in the first three, six, and twelve months?
- What is the team’s working style? Are they highly collaborative, independent, or a mix?
- How would you describe the team’s personality?
- Are there specific communication challenges this role might face?
- Can you elaborate on the three most critical responsibilities for this role that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the job description?
- What is the leadership style of the team lead? How does this impact the team’s dynamics and the role’s expectations?
There is some overlap between the ideal candidate profile and job description when it comes to soft skills; they can be listed on both. Knowing what intangible characteristics (those that can’t be taught) the hiring manager is looking for will be critical to finding the right hire. If the candidate needs to be self-motivated because they will be joining a team where their manager already has a lot on their plate, you as a recruiter know to ask about experience with learning quickly on the go and pose questions that evaluate resourcefulness.
Technical “hard” skills also need to be determined and added to the job description. Be as specific as you can in your questions with the hiring manager and how you communicate to tech professionals. Listing technical skills broadly may widen your reach, but it will also likely deter technologists looking for opportunities to work in specific programming languages or develop specific cloud computing skills.
Remember that it is critical to understand the specifics of the role yourself. Be able to speak and write using the terms, the skills, and the acronyms that are used in the industry. This way you can have clearer communication with both the hiring manager and the candidate. Understanding deeper aspects of the role you are sourcing is key to knowing the difference between a good candidate and a great candidate. Knowing specifics will also help you sell a role better. Technologists want to know about the day-to-day work they will be doing — what programming languages or frameworks they will be working on, how quickly they will get to see their work in action and what new tech skills they’ll have the opportunity to learn or build on. The better you understand the answers to these questions, the more effectively you will be able to move qualified candidates through your pipeline.
Throughout the entire intake meeting, focus on keeping expectations realistic. While it’s worth discussing all of the things wanted in an ideal candidate, asking the right questions will help the hiring manager narrow down their needs and most important skills. A job posting with an excessively long list of requirements, while potentially describing the ideal candidate, likely won’t attract many candidates. Reminding the hiring manager to keep in mind a balance of what’s needed versus what’s available will help everyone in the long run, candidates included!
Tips for More Productive Intake Meetings
Ask the hiring manager to rank the importance of their list of soft skills so you know what’s non-negotiable (you can do this with hard skills, too).
1Ask the hiring manager to give you three characteristics of the top-performing employees on their team to understand what traits the team values most.
2Ask whether generalists could excel in the position, or if it would benefit more from a candidate who is extremely specialized.
3Optimize Your Outreach
Reaching out to potential candidates is in every recruiter’s job description, but it also requires a commitment of effort and time that can feel overwhelming. Prioritizing quantity over quality with generic bulk emails or messages that feel copied-and-pasted is not a winning strategy, though. Instead, work to continuously optimizing your outreach.74% of tech professionals are considering changing employers in the next year, according to the Dice Tech Sentiment Report. Those candidates who are actively searching are, of course, more likely to respond to outreach (if the role sounds like a good fit for their experience and skillset). For passive candidates, it’s even more critical that recruiters get the outreach right. By continuously testing and optimizing your outreach efforts, you’ll be more aware of what’s increasing your response rate.
It’s no secret that personalizing your outreach can boost response rates. It may take additional time to draft individual messages, but making a candidate feel like the message is unique to them almost guarantees a higher response in the long run. There are multiple ways to personalize your outreach, such as the type of message you send (email, direct message, instant message) or the length of the message.
Personalizing your outreach establishes trust and creates a positive atmosphere for candidates. It also supports a positive experience with your brand, your agency’s brand and/or your employer’s brand.
Here are a few ways you can start optimizing your outreach today
A/B Test to Find What Works
Testing elements in your recruitment outreach with a method like A/B testing refines your approach, turning guesswork into data-driven decisions. By experimenting with different messaging and tactics, you'll identify what truly resonates with top tech talent, increasing your chances of building a strong talent pipeline.
Get an Insider Perspective
When possible, share your outreach messaging with someone you know who has a similar role to the job description. Their feedback can illuminate whether your message resonates with the target audience and if it highlights the role's most compelling aspects.
Focus on Your Email or Instant Message Subject Lines
Try asking a question or including their first name. Email subject lines need to be short and to the point. According to Campaign Monitor, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
Show Evidence of Interest from Others
Mention the hiring manager for the position or your organization's CEO or CTO in your outreach to show that there are multiple people from the company interested in the expertise and skillset the candidate offers.
Ease Into the Ask
Don’t pitch the job right away. Ask for a brief call or to meet over coffee where you can establish trust and a friendly rapport. This will also allow you to learn what’s most important to the candidate right now so you bring them more relevant opportunities.
Mention Motivating Factors
Including specifics about the opportunity that might be motivating factors, such as salary range or fully-remote/flexible work options, could entice a candidate to respond to learn more about the opportunity.
Keep Lines of Communication Open
Test follow-up cadences with candidates who don’t respond or were not interested initially. (Maybe it wasn’t a good time to switch jobs six months ago, but now the candidate feels differently.)
Connecting with Technologists on Dice
Recruiters have access to Instant Messaging and Private Email — two Dice tools that create seamless lines of communication. Recruiters and technologists can initiate real-time conversations through Instant Messaging, and with Private Email, recruiters can contact technologists while preserving personal email information. Because of this, Dice Private Emails see a 71% higher open rate than the industry average.
Use a Third-Party Recruitment Service
There are times when demand for tech talent is too high for your team or organization to handle on your own. Perhaps there is a big project you’ve been tasked with sourcing for or a sudden increase in open positions that need to be back-filled — two very common scenarios in today’s hiring landscape.When employers are in critical need of tech talent but short on time or resources, there are a couple of options that can be explored. Hiring a contract or contingency recruiter can help your organization navigate the temporary increase in need until demand returns to a manageable level. Another option is outsourcing your needs through a recruitment process provider, like Dice. Both third-party options are good for filling gaps in the short-term.
Contract recruiters are typically great at networking (their work depends on it!) and bring with them an existing pool of qualified candidates whom they’ve found and keep in contact with about potential opportunities. They can be hired for a specified period of time or to fill a specified number of open positions.
Signs It’s Time to Consider Outsourcing Recruitment Help
You lost more than a few great candidates recently due to lengthy time to hire.
1A significant number of hires need to be made by a specific date to support a project that is vital to your organization’s success.
2Your team’s recruitment and hiring KPIs are starting to fall behind.
3When evaluating whether hiring a contract recruiter is the option you want to pursue for your needs, consider your budget, the complexity of the project and the scope of work. Hiring someone with market knowledge and proven success with placing tech roles specifically will be important as well.
Another option for temporary assistance in sourcing tech talent is recruitment process outsourcing (RPO). At Dice, we offer a Sourcing Services solution that simplifies your recruitment process when you don’t have the time or resources to hire for your open tech positions. Our dedicated recruiting team acts as an extension of your talent acquisition team to create a customized hiring strategy and quickly deliver a qualified shortlist.
Learn more about what Dice Sourcing Services includes and how it can help you quickly find the tech talent you need or contact Dice to speak to someone about your specific needs.
– SVP, Application Development and Support Services at DA Davidson