When it comes to connecting with experienced developers, a generic intro won’t bring you sufficient response rates.
In this article, we’ll cover a range of tactics to help improve personalization in your candidate outreach and automate repetitive tasks in tech recruitment. By the time you finish reading, you’ll have a new set of practices to upgrade your response rates and save time when attracting senior tech candidates.
Ready? Let’s go.
Editor’s note: This is a guest contribution by Alexandra M., Customer Success Manager and outreach fan at AmazingHiring.
Don’t rely exclusively on LinkedIn for cold outreach
LinkedIn inboxes can get overwhelmingly full with everyone using their InMail credits and connecting with developers daily. LinkedIn itself states that the average reply rate you can get there is fluctuating between 18% to 25%. You can imagine how many profiles you need to go through to ensure your pipeline is progressing.
In contrast, good old email allows you to connect directly without any limits for your follow-ups. This lets you stay top of mind and share as many details with your prospects as needed.
In fact, you can achieve a 30-50% reply rate while keeping your outreach clean and GDPR compliant. What’s the key? Accurate contact details with enough context to create personalized and effective outreach messages.
Go beyond resumes when reviewing previous experience
Researching your prospects’ tech skills, expertise, projects and achievements would help you identify the best people for the job and attract their attention easier. This is why you need to go beyond LinkedIn and resumes when gathering information about your potential candidates.
Developer-focused platforms like GitHub and Stack Overflow are still uncommon for many tech recruiters. This means there is an opportunity to gain an advantage when connecting with tech talent. Here’s more on that:
Browse through community answers and contributions
Visit candidates’ profiles on GitHub, Stack Overflow, Bitbucket and Hackerrank to review their recent repositories, answers, projects and comments, highlight what you found to be valuable for your outreach.
Let’s look at a GitHub profile as an example:
Use Achievements to reference something outstanding, browse through candidate’s repositories to learn about their core expertise and programming languages in use, look at the contributions activity to see if your prospect is sharing pieces of code regularly, devoting time to any new projects that may be relevant to the role.
Reference what you see and it will help boost your reply and interest rates while building a better candidate experience and trust with you as a recruiter.
Want a more visual representation of this data? Use Profile Summary for GitHub to see aggregated results:
Automate data gathering
While gathering data for customization is powerful, it’s also time-consuming. AmazingHiring offers unique insights automatically aggregated from GitHub, Stack Overflow and Kaggle to save you time. This allows you to learn about your candidate’s expertise level and rankings without having to research each individual platform.
You can also uncover insights as you are reviewing a potential candidate’s social profiles – just add the AmazingHiring Chrome Extension:
Accessing all the highlights in one place will allow for a faster, more targeted and personalized outreach.
Scale your outreach
Finding your personalization hints is one thing, but preparing messages and sending custom campaigns still takes a lot of time.
AmazingHiring offers automatic Messaging that allows you to insert dynamic variables, ensuring that each person receives the right message based on their profile and background.
All you need to do is prepare template and use it as part of your campaign for a given role. You can then automate follow-ups and diversify the outreach channels beyond email to get the job done faster.
Track your results
Your email campaigns are out and candidates are moving forward in the hiring process. But how do you repeat your success?
In-depth analytics will not only help track your progress but uncover exactly which approach brings you the best results. Analyze your own efforts and scale them further to ensure your reply rates are stable and high:
We’ve seen the power of personal, customized and attentive outreach firsthand. Try out these tactics yourself or feel free to connect with the AmazingHiring team to learn more about automated outreach strategies.
Further reading: