AmazingHiring – a tech talent search engine [expert interview]

Sergey Dmitrichenko is CEO and co-Founder of AmazingHiring.
Sergey started his career in tech recruitment in 2006 after graduating from a leading Russian technical university (Bauman Moscow State Technical University). In 2011 Sergey founded recruitment agency “GMS” – nowadays one of the best IT-recruitment agency in Russia & CIS.

AmazingHiring is the Ultimate Search Engine for Technical Talent.

Best developers don’t polish resumes. They contribute to Github, post at StackOverflow, compete at Kaggle. They blog, code and impact communities across hundreds of sites. We gather millions of profiles, online activities, and work histories. We crank through terabytes of web pages to discover key contributors, their public contacts and evaluate their skills and community influence. We deliver precise and exhaustive search that surfaces 30% more qualified tech talent than any competitive solution.

Tell us more about the mission behind AmazingHiring.

As I also run an IT recruitment agency, I knew all the challenges that recruiters face from within and we created a solution that addresses all of them. AmazingHiring cuts recruitment cost in half by consolidating professional and social profiles and CVs from corporate ATS to discover the best experts in the field ranked by their online contributions.
In short, we empower technical recruiters to achieve their sourcing goals better and faster.

Recruiting tech talent is different. Why should recruiters move to specialized sourcing platforms? What are the big ones, like Monster, missing when it comes to IT?

Stack Overflow developers survey says that globally only 13% of developers are actively looking for a job, which means that they do not update their profiles on professional social networks or polish their resumes on job boards. They participate in numerous online projects instead and that is where we catch them. Moreover, a consolidated profile in AmazingHiring contains more information than any other resource – for example, direct contacts, data on activity in open source projects, portfolios for UI/UX designers, etc.

The time companies spend sourcing candidates can really sometimes take the bulk of their work, how are you cutting that time down for them?

Basically, that’s the main idea behind AmazingHiring – to free up the time recruiters spend on manual research. Instead of sourcing for a person in many different networks, recruiters need only AH profile, thus they are able to focus on more value-adding activities – for example, communicating with potential candidates! This decreases the sourcing time up to 50%.
Besides, there are additional features inbuilt in the system that helps to increase productivity, like the possibility to do bulk emailing via integration with MixMax platform, etc.

What advice would you give recruiters interested in using your platform?

Well, first of all – try the service! We provide demo calls, free trials, trainings and unlimited support during the trial so that our customers would be able to get the real user experience with AH, and afterward make a decision regarding the subscription. It is important to discover your own way of using the system, learn how to make searching strategies and use some system hacks – our account managers work with all clients to make sure they are getting the most from the system.

By the way, the trial would last longer (1 week instead of 3 days) with a promo code DEVSKILLER.

The demand for tech talent is huge. However, it isn’t only about any candidate, but the right one. How do you help companies recognize those who are really a good fit?

We analyze candidates professional activity on the web – and it reveals their tangible (rather than declared) skills, this serves as a critical distinction for selecting top few prospects among thousands found. Our proprietary learning algorithms verify candidate expertise and surface top performers. Besides, depending on the desired profile, it is possible to sort the candidates according to different ratings (by rating on GitHub, on Stackoverflow, on Kaggle and on Google Play). Another feature of the system – a possibility to check all the companies that are donors for certain technology and look through their employees directly. One of our latest updates worth mentioning – so-called “diversity” filter that enables recruiters to filter the candidates belonging to a desired ethnic group thus increasing the diversity within their companies.

Do you help candidates increase their own visibility on the platform?

Well, our search engine is more for recruiters, you can think of it as “Google for recruiters”, and as such, it doesn’t require any submissions from candidates. However as we gather only publicly accessible data, we can advise to those who are interested in getting great jobs – make sure you are present on Github (the best way is to participate in a cool open source project), on Stackoverflow (answering many technical questions, and if the answers are good they are upvoted by others ), participate in Kaggle competitions if you want to have a validated “machine learning” skill etc. In this case, it is much more probable that you will be noticed by the recruiters of the best companies.

How different are passive from the active candidates?

It is much more difficult to find and get in touch with passive candidates, and the situation in the market right now shows that less and fewer developers are looking for a job themselves. AmazingHiring finds candidates who do not post resumes on job boards or maintain profiles on professional social networks and are never solicited by recruiters. By providing the data from a digital footprint of the person, we help recruiters to create a personalized communication approach that helps to win the battle for talents.

What do you do to ensure an increase in the response of passive candidates?

We provide recruiters with a lot of background information that helps them to start the communication with a candidate in a more engaging way. Let’s imagine an email to a potential candidate from a recruiter who uses AmazingHiring, it could look like this:
“Hello, James! I was looking through best python projects on GitHub and found your repository [repository name]! I have also noticed, that you are among top 5% python developers in GitHub, and that you have also committed code to [technology]-related repos. This goes perfectly in line with our project where we are doing XXX. By the way, I have found your email on GitHub and thought you will be up for a chat sometime this week! What about CoffeeBean, I have seen on your Twitter, that’s the best coffee place over here?” This is just an example of a personalized email that makes James think that a recruiter has spent some couple hours researching information about him, and such approach, by our experience, greatly increases the probability of a positive answer. In fact, it takes recruiter no time as all this information and much more is available in James’ profile in AmazingHiring.

What recruitment news outlets do you follow to stay up to date?

We prefer to follow European and American thought leaders (Irina Shamaeva, Victor Soroka, Dean da Costa, Steve Levi, Martin Lee, Kasia Borowicz, Jan Tegze, etc.), and our own blog on recruitment & sourcing is very popular within a Russian-speaking audience.
We actively participate in major professional conferences, this year we are partnering with SourceCon, Sourcing Summit EU, Evolve! conference and different #tru events.

Is that important?

Of course. This helps us to be on the wave of technological innovation and inspires new features in the product.