Free Alternatives for Sourcing Technical/Engineering Candidates

Problem

"In my company, the Management didn't want to spend more money on hiring so we did not use any 3rd party recruiter or headhunter. Due to this, I became responsible for all sourcing tasks because which were delegated to me."

Actions taken

"I had to be creative to find a solution to the problem. I discovered a couple of places not so common to search for potential candidates, one of which was AngelList. It was my favorite place to source from since most people went there to look for jobs and that made it easier to find potential candidates."

"Another place to look into are Slack spaces. I actually hired three really great engineers from the firebase-community slack for free. I simply posted the job on their job channel and because we were there, people saw us and they reached out to us which made connecting to possible applicants a lot easier. For the other community slacks we visited that didn't have job channels at the time, I created the job channels there myself and posted the job requirements (LGBT Slack space for instance)." "Finally, another method I used was through blogs. I run an engineering blog on general engineering subjects which tracks anyone who reads it and applies for job posts. We also received a good number of job applications from there."

Lessons learned

"The main lesson here was that you can get great candidates through these alternative sourcing methods. I recommend using these if you don't have the resources to pay 3rd party channels. Personally, I think there are excellent candidates out there that can make an awesome team - that really worked well together based on my experienced with my team, which I would largely link to the organic nature of how and where these members of mine were all found."