Finding a strong developer is not an easy task. As a rule, professionals of such caliber are in high demand, and it makes no sense for them to post their resumes on job boards. That’s why the process of searching for an ideal candidate may take much time and require additional knowledge and skills.

StackOverflow

StackOverflow is an online platform for IT professionals from all over the world (it currently has about 20 million users). The creators of this platform claim that first and foremost it is the largest question and answer forum for coders. People from all over the world can post questions regarding technology for free and receive a detailed answer from their colleagues.

This all makes StackOverflow a great place to hunt for strong developers. A well-established ranking system employed on the website helps the headhunters to identify truly outstanding specialists – if a user gives quality answers to technological questions, their reputation grows.

Each user has a profile where their rating is posted. In this tab, you can see a detailed history of how this person earned reputation points, their occupation, the number of question they answered. Moreover, there is a very important section for technical recruiters in the profile – tags assigned to the questions asked on the forum. These tags help to understand what the person’s strongest areas of expertise are and what technologies they are most interested in.

When looking for a candidate you can use keywords and set the following parameters: the required rating level (“reputation” in StackOverflow terms), location and necessary skills.

Kaggle

One more website where you can find many strong developers. Fundamentally, it is a platform for competitions. There are many big data engineers and machine learning experts among the users.

Different companies post certain tasks related to data science on this website and ask to solve them for money or “experience”. Within the limits of a specific task, specialists oer their solutions. The user who provided the best answer gets the prize and ranking points.

For example, Red Hat asks to develop an algorithm for classifying customers that are of interest to the company, based on their activities and characteristics. The author of the best algorithm will get $50,000.

There are three sections in each user profile: Competitions, Kernels and Discussions. Each of these sections has its own ranking system.

• We spoke about Competitions above.

• “Kernels” mean coding skills.

• “Discussions” mean participation in dierent conversations.

Each of these sections contains a list of recently completed tasks, personal data, occupation, geolocation and activity on the website by days.

The first thing to consider is the position occupied by the user relative to all the other users of the website (current rank). Moreover, Kaggle has a Top 100 of users, and if a person is on this list, it is a very good indicator.

At the bottom part of the profile, there is the user’s biography, which sometimes contains contact details of the person.

X-Ray Search

X-Ray search allows you to look for specific information on certain sites by set parameters using the traditional Google search. For instance, if we type in the search box,

site:stackoverflow.com/users location * united kingdom

the engine will search only for StackOverflow users who live in the UK. You can also add the skills you’re interested in.