12 Tips to Help You Find Your Next Tech Hire

If you’re hiring diverse talent for your SaaS company, I don’t have to tell you that it’s not an easy task. Not only are you competing with every other tech company out there for top diverse talent, you’re struggling to find people with the skills that your company needs.

That said, it’s not impossible to find top diverse tech talent, you just need a strategy and knowledge of where to find them.

In this article, I’d like to share 12 strategies to help you improve your diversity recruiting and sourcing efforts starting today.

Have you ever been stuck in your sourcing efforts, and you feel like you’ve already exhausted the candidate pool?

While it may feel that way, I don't think that's the case.?

1.???????Be intentional

One of the things we need to do as sourcing and recruiting professionals is to get more strategic, have more patience, and put our hearts and our heads into the work we do to finding diverse talent.?

We’ve got to be intentional, and we've got to be deliberate about it, because it's not going to happen by accident.?

Why do I say that??

Because you need to be able to think like and relate to the candidates that you're trying to find.?

Doing this is going to allow you to figure out:

• where you might find them
• what they might say and
• what kind of information they share

So as an organization, the sourcer needs to understand what you're trying to accomplish when it comes to your talent agenda.?

• Set a clear goal (define exactly what you're looking for
• Be prepared to explore in more detail what you’re looking for (e.g., are you overlooking transferable skills?)

So first and foremost, be more strategic, and start with the end in mind, and ask yourself what am I trying to accomplish??

2.??Build relationships

Building relationships does not mean you reach out to a candidate and say “hey, I've got a job”. Certainly, that's part of the recruiting process, but you’ve got to start long before by getting to know those people that you're trying to reach out to.

Why?

Because you don't have any credibility, and in this tough market it's a challenge when you're trying to recruit the same person that ten other people are trying to recruit.

So, you want to take what I call a multi-touch approach.?

If you're going to be involved with any organization you want to engage locally at the regional level, at the national level, and in a lot of cases at an international level.

A lot of people that consume this information are working for international companies and they're retiring all over the world.?

3.??Collaborate

Don't try to do this in a vacuum.?

Get your hiring teams, your interview teams and your workforce involved, because the more people that you have reaching out, and connecting and building relationships, the better your pipeline, and the better you're going to engage with those communities.?

Do more to make connections.?

But, it doesn't mean you have to be the one that personally makes the connection.?

As a sourcer or recruiter, if you get six, or even ten other people to partner with you and do outreach, you've just “6X’d” or “10X’d” your ability to reach candidates.

Add value

Be prepared to slow down and not always have the recruiter pitch but to add value because in this market, people are looking for things that add value to their lives and make their lives better.?

Bottom line, it's not about you, it's about what's in it for them.

4.??Think about your process

Put yourselves in the shoes of the candidates. What's your approach and your methodology? How do you go about starting your recruiting??

Review where you're looking for talent. Are the places that you're going bogging you down? Or are they serving you well and letting you find the people that you need??

Obviously, we're not doing a great job of this because everyone's trying to diversify their workforce and everyone's still struggling to get this done.?

Identify those communities; the organizations, associations, groups, and networks where talent may be found.?

Just do a quick search and add a keyword or demographic term, or just put those terms in and maybe a skill set or job title.?

This will let you easily expand who you're looking for.?

5.??X-ray every day

Next, make sure to X-ray something every day.?

Now if you don't know what I mean by an “X-ray”, it's using the “site” command to look at information on a particular website.

You'd be surprised at the information that you can find by X-raying some of the common sites; social media sites and company sites that you're using to search for talent.?

So I always say “X-ray every day”.?

This is a critical part to improving where you're finding talent.?

6.??Do something different every day

Don't just do the same thing. Try something different.

It doesn't cost you anything to try something in a search. It doesn't cost you anything to pick up an article and look for people or if you're watching your favorite reality TV show or anything else. ?

Pay attention to the names or pay attention to documentaries and people because you're going to follow the breadcrumbs that may lead you to the talent that you're looking for.?

And you're not specifically looking for that individual, but you're looking for the organizations that will get you to more people who are in the community.

I think we get trapped by looking for a specific title, but we don't find the organization and we don't find the community that we need to find to get there.?

Because what I do know is, people tend to hang out with people who are like them. And so, once you get to that point where you're actually looking for the community, and not the individual, it'll be a game changer.?

7.??Build on the results that you've already got.?

If you do some searches, you get some data and you find some profiles, build on those results.?

Learn more about those profiles that you've found, learn what they do, learn how they write, learn how they communicate, learn how they describe their work, learn about their accomplishments, and then use those things that you've learned in your sourcing efforts and approach and add those to your search strings and add those to the places that you look at.

What I'm really saying here is fish in a larger pool. Give the pool more width and give it more depth so that you are actually in a position to look at more people.?

Look for more skills and different skills. Look at the rewards and accomplishments that people have had and use those terms in your searches.

8.??Organizations

One of the tips that I give people if you really are trying to diversify is to engage umbrella organizations.

These are organizations that have a broad demographic membership.?

A lot of times we try to narrow down to a specific demographic, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's certainly one of the approaches for finding a specific demographic. If you're looking for women, if you're looking for African Americans, if you're looking for Latinx if you're looking for people with a disability, look at those organizations.?

But there's a group of organizations I call umbrella organizations that have all the demographics and all the genders.?

Some examples include:

• LGBTQ organizations

These organizations have men and women and all kinds of different demographics. And that's a rich source for talent.?

And that gives you a great opportunity to diversify.?

• Organizations that work with people with disabilities. ?

There is no discrimination in having a disability, so everyone is in the group.

It's the one community that you can join at any point in your life so focus on that.?

• Veteran organizations.

There are all kinds of people in the veteran organizations.:

• Active duty
• Returning to active duty
• Former military
• Non-military

So these are big umbrella organizations; men, women, almost every demographic you can imagine.?

• Alumni associations
• HBCU schools
• Native American institutions
• Women’s school
• Trade school
• Two-year college

The alumni have graduated, and now they're working somewhere. They've got skills.?

So, look for alumni in those organizations.?

There are lots of places that you can find them.

Alumni people are proud of where they went to school, and they're posting it on their LinkedIn, their Facebook, and they even tweet about it on Twitter.

They join organizations from their school.?

• Boards

This is another big umbrella organization that people tend to not go to as quickly or as often and that's look at boards.

Is someone a member of a board?

You can put all kinds of demographic terms with board and member of service on this board or a member of a council or a member of a committee.

• Committees

Committees are other big umbrella organizations that typically have all kinds of demographics and professionals in them.

• Other organizations
• Chamber of Commerce
• NMSDC (National Minority Supplier Development Council)

These are organizations you can not only target when searching for talent, but you can also find people to build relationships with who can help to connect you with communities you’re trying to reach.

I talked about alumni, but the NACE alumni (National Association for Colleges and Employers) is just another example of a place that where could find alumni with a connection to all these colleges and universities and employers.?

So that's a way that you can expand your search, expand where you're looking and just improve the channels.?

So let me talk a little bit about inclusive job descriptions.

9.??Make sure that your job description is inclusive.?

I know this gets covered a lot, but think about not only the language in your job description, but where you’re posting that job.

What is your company branding around the job description??

You can use tools like Textio, TalVista, Gender Decoder, OnGig, etc. that will help you simplify your job descriptions, make them gender neutral, and make them more appealing to a diverse candidate.

One of the big ones, and this is not necessarily the recruiter, but this is something that you need to have input in and that is, what's your company brand?

Is it inclusive? Are you known for being an inclusive company? Does your brand take a stand on big social issues, or is it absent?

You can't just sit on the sidelines because communities notice, and they recognize this.

Another way to do something different is to do what John Lewis calls finding “good trouble”.

Finding good trouble means researching current events and social topics and following the trail that leads to those marginalized communities where their civil liberties are being impacted by something.

For example, it could be something like a law that's coming through at the federal or the local or the state level.?

But if you find the people who are marginalized, you're going to find the people in the communities that you're trying to recruit for.?

If you’re vocal in the marketplace about these big issues you’ll help your candidates know what to expect from your interviews. Doing things like this goes a long way towards building a relationship.?

10. Diversity is no longer an option

No longer are the days where candidates don't have options. You've got to sell the candidate, but you also need to make sure that they're prepared.?

It's a waste of time to put all this time and effort into building relationships and getting a candidate interested in your role, only to have them fail in your interview process.?

This could be due to either poor interviewers, or they just didn't understand what you were looking for, in their answers to your interview questions.?

And then, avoid tokenism practices.?

I read something the other day where someone talked about being only one of two women in an organization.?

They're included on every interview, and they had to go to every recruiting event. Which meant that that person didn't have time to do their day job because they were the “token woman” who was being showcased for diversity and inclusion.?

I'm all for making sure you reflect the diversity of your organization. But be thoughtful about how you bring others to the table and don't make them your token person.?

11. Adjust for bias

Recognize and then adjust for bias in your hiring process.?

There's a lot of conversation about interview bias, unconscious bias, implicit bias, etc. and how to mitigate for that bias.

If you're human, you have bias, so that’s why we all have to check that bias.?

Culture fit vs values

Hiring for culture negatively impacts your inclusion and diversity efforts. I talk about this all the time.

But what I want to talk about though, is the need to check your sourcing channel bias.

Do you lean toward one sourcing channel and always go to that one sourcing channel or one title or one skill set??

Or are you expanding that title??

Make sure that you're expanding the titles, you're expanding the places that you're sourcing, and you're doing something different every day to find a broader pool of candidates.?

One of the things that I'm guilty of and I think a lot of people are probably guilty of is you see a LinkedIn profile and it's not built out - do you ignore that profile and just move on because there's a minimal amount of information??

Sometimes that's done by design; that candidate does not want to be found.?

Or, they might have a misspelling, or they might have a poorly designed profile.?

We have people on our team, who I would have never recruited because their LinkedIn profiles didn't say that they had 10 years of recruiting experience.?

They had other things up there that were important to them, but don't allow that bias to keep you from seeing a great candidate.?

So, expand more titles. Look at the impact that people have had in their roles. Look at the responsibilities that they've had because they may have accomplished many things in their role.?

Take a software developer for example. They may never put the words “software developer” on their profile, they may call it something else and depending on where you are in the world, that role could be called something different.?

But the responsibilities of the job, the things they accomplished and how they got their work done, will make a difference.?

12. Finding data on diverse talent

To find data on diverse talent some of the data you can get internally from the company if it's available.?

For example, your funnel metrics, your workforce demographics, your attrition rates, your hiring rates, who's leaving that may or may not be available inside your company, etc.?

But then there's some broader data that you can get from in the US from the EEOC, which talks about diversity by role, and by level and by responsibility, right.?

You can find that data on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. They have simple tools that are free and available to everyone. It's like city data.com - it'll give you an idea of what the demographics are.?

One of the simplest ways is to type in demographic information, your location. It's going to pop something up and give you a general idea of what it looks like. And the reason this is important, is if you're trying to hire for a specific location, and you have to have local talent, you need to be realistic about whether that talent pool is available.

And if it's not there, you have to come up with a plan for how you're going to get the talent.?

Consider:

• Are they going to be able to be remote?
• Are you going to relocate people?
• Will you hire at a different level and promote people from within when you look at transferable skills to find the talent in that area, and their rates??

In conclusion, by taking the time to understand the people you want to find, you can create an effective strategy for finding diverse tech talent.

By being clear in what you need, being patient and transparent, you can create a process that will help you find the best candidates for your company.