As a recruiter, discovering what’s on your candidate’s mind can greatly help you land him. The more you know what the most important factors for them, the better cthe probablity to successfully recruit them. The benefits could be in the following ways-
The problem is that if you just ask an engineer what they are looking for in a job with open ended questions, you'll hear things like
If you actually look at all these needs you can bucket them into something simpler
Now when you look at this, we can see that technical people – developers, software engineers, designers, QA engineers, database architect, DevOps, PMs, etc. – want pretty much the same thing as everyone else. The difference is a good technical candidate is in a position to choose, so they set the bar pretty high. This means they expect to find a job that meets ALL of their criteria, because they can.
So how do you use this insight. You need to change your pitch to them For example, saying something like
“In our Cloud SDE role, you get to play with petabytes of data, code mind-altering machine learning algorithms, and become a master of all things Cloud and more.”
is a lot more enticing than saying
“I have a very good job opportunity at a Cloud company. I am attaching the JD. If you are interested, kindly send me your updated resume.”
Create interest in your candidates. When you incorporate this into your messages, your candidates will become a lot more responsive.
Mei Lu is the Founder and CEO of Jobfully.com, an online start-up focusing on technology jobs. Before starting Jobfully, Mei recruited top talent for Silicon Valley technology companies, including OpenTable, OutSpark, RockYou and TubeMogul. Mei started her career as a software engineer, building software at Qpass, M.I.T, and MicroStrategy. She runs training programs for technical recruiters in Redmond, WA and blogs at http://blog.geekology.biz/