IT Sourcing is broken, lets fix it together

As a software developer the number of “job opportunities” that reach my inbox is staggering. For most people this would seem like a good problem to have. But that is not the case, most of these “opportunities” as very mismatched, and more often than not, just blatant spam.

The problem seems to stem from either the lack of care from the recruiters, or the lack of proper tools. I want to believe that it’s a lack of data about candidates and thus a problem of not having the right tools. Resume databases and email lists are very easy to obtain, but they provide very little value for the recruiter. Playing the numbers game and sending every single person a job requirement may work, but at the cost of more and more developers setting their inbox to filter out all recruiters, and possibly missing a genuine job opportunity that would fit them.

A major problem is what I call “keyword scrapping”, or in other words, sending any developer who may have even remotely mentioned a skill, even if they haven’t done anything with that skill in many years. Targeting developers with the right job requirement is a difficult and time-consuming task.

This is where my latest project comes in. I got tired of looking at emails for jobs I have no interest or business taking on. So I built a SaaS sourcing tool called gitDiscovered. The key focus is identifying software developers who would be more likely to take on a job requirement.

The data comes from analyzing developers open source contributions, rather than resumes. Because open source communities have a social component, it is possible to measure the direct impact of developer’s individual contributions, and make sense of the caliber of the candidate.

The search engine that is gitDiscovered functions similarly to LinkedIn or Entelo, but if focused specifically on software developers. As a result, the quality of the results is far more effective for the IT niche.

I invite recruiters to try out gitDiscovered and see how properly sourcing developers will save time and headaches for both parties.

Comment by Shawn Petty on June 9, 2016 at 1:52pm: GitDiscovered seems to be very similar to other products in the industry. The thing I would like to know is where do you pull data from, how do you merge the data, and how are you collecting the data.

I currently pull data from a variety of sources and utilize it for my own sourcing strategy. The struggle is that a lot of developers do not have their actual name on Github and Stackoverflow..... correlating this data to other platforms can be difficult.

There is also the struggle of relying on API's to generate the data for you. So far, I have not found a website/applications that has the same capabilities that I have doing it on my own. The thing is that a lot of these applications pull the easy data and do not dive deep enough.