Here's something Recruiters aren't going to like hearing: engineering candidates don't want to deal directly with you. It's a shame, but many of them just have a bad taste in their mouth from the outreach of bad Recruiters. The real issue here isn't an implacable hatred, but rather an expectation that in a Recruiter they'll be talking to someone who doesn't truly understand exactly what they do. For this reason talent often prefer to talk to a Hiring Manager or future teammate right off the bat, as they know they'll be chatting with someone who speaks their language.
Short of learning as much as you can about your own company's stack, the best way to get the attention of the elusive engineer is to do just as they suggest, and connect your team to the talent early on. Clearly, your co-workers can't manage the entire process (or you'd be out of a job!) but if you can get them involved in sourcing and initial outreach, your odds of engagement will skyrocket. At Entelo, we've had a ton of success with this, and here's how we went about it.
Get Your Hiring Manager to Manage Hiring
Just last week, we hired ourselves a brand spankin' new Senior Data Engineer. The time we spent going from initial source through outreach, phone screen, onsite interviews, and offer issued was a whopping 5 days. How did we manage to get them in the door so quickly? Honestly, our VP of Engineering is to thank. With the help of his team, he sourced jusy shy of 400 candidates, and then emailed all of them himself with Track. The results were staggering, he achieved an 80% open rate and an 18% response rate on his emails. His subject line? Buckle up for this one: "Entelo". That's it, just that name of our company. After that, he gave a detailed explanation of the role in the body of the email. If you can get that part right, you don't even need a hyper-personal email.
Talented individuals would rather know exactly what they're getting in to that hear you build rapport by commenting on a tweet they sent. 
Calling All Networks
Hopefully by now you've already sat down and actively combed through your team's network to look for referrals. Try to think outside the LinkedIn box, though. Here, we've had luck looking at interactions our team has had with other pros on skill-centric communities. If you have developers who post frequent repositories to GitHub, chances are they've had other users fork their work to experiment. Consider these forks extremely hot leads. If you can get your co-worker who originally posted the repo to reach out to that little forker, it's not even recruitment so much as a message from someone in the industry whose work the candidate already respects. This is an extremely effective way to get in front of candidates and prove to them early on that they'd be working with a team they respect.
All Aboard the Hiring Train
You might be thinking that the above is all well and good, but what if you're unable to convince your team to help out with hiring? Well, that's a problem, because hiring is everyone's job. In fact, if you read 2014's How Google Works, you'll remember that they believe hiring to be every manager's most important job. If your engineers want to be part of a great team, then they need to prove it by making an effort to scale the team.
How have you leveraged your own team to help with hiring tech candidates?
Liked what you read? You might like our recent webinar with Greenhouse VP of Engineering Mike Boufford, Programming 101 for Recruiters. Watch it on-demand here!
