At the end of the day, the most important resource in any company is its talent — especially in the highly-competitive world of tech. Top developers have their pick of interesting jobs and employers with generous benefits — and in an increasingly remote world, you have to compete with companies all around the globe for valuable talent.
All of this means hiring the best possible developers to fill your openings is getting harder. And that means you’ll need to hire a technical recruiter to handle that process for you professionally and efficiently.
Ironically, that brings you to a conundrum similar to the one you have about hiring developers — how do you find the best tech recruiters for your company? We’ll explore the answer to that question in-depth below!
- What is a Technical Recruiter?
- Finding & Hiring Technical Recruiters
- Working With Tech Recruiters
- Questions to Ask Technical Recruiters Before Hiring Them
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What is a Technical Recruiter?
Think of tech recruiters as professionals who are capable of bringing the best tech talent to employers, and filling their tech vacancies with the best available candidates. They know how to identify the best-fitting job seekers that are a great match for the employer in terms of goals, experience, and skills — and then attract them with the right incentives to get them to come on board.
With the global demand for tech talent being higher than ever, high-quality tech recruiters have become a valuable niche unto themselves. There are hundreds of thousands of tech recruiters in the United States alone, and plenty more elsewhere.
The best tech recruiters have the necessary networking and communication chops to find and recruit the best tech professionals — making them valuable assets to any tech company.
What does a technical recruiter do?
Once you hire a tech recruiter, they’ll probably become a part of your company’s Human Resources department — after all, that’s what they’re there to improve. They’re the part of your HR staff that focuses on talent outreach, and their mission is to identify and attract suitable candidates for your open positions.
In practice, that means doing a lot of “people work” — participating in networking events, visiting tech colleges, representing the company in job fairs, and doing pretty much anything to get your company on the map when it comes to prospective tech talent.
When you find a technical recruiter of your own instead of relying on an external recruiting agency, they’ll represent your company directly in talks with potential hires — and they’re usually more familiar with your company’s work, internal operations, and the opening itself.
Recruiters are the company’s “front line” and they find potential new employees while hiring managers usually focus on the onboarding process and make the ultimate decision on whether someone will be hired or not.
Read More: Software Engineer Job Description: Guide, Examples, Templates & More
Technical recruiter vs recruiter
So, how does a technical recruiter differ from any other human resource specialist who’s working as a recruiter?
Apart from all of the skills that a recruiter would need to have to hire talent in other industries, a technology head hunter needs to be tech-savvy themselves. In other words, they need to have more than a passing familiarity with the technologies utilized by the company they’re finding talent for, and the specific work that the company does.
In-depth industry knowledge is essential because tech recruiters have to be able to efficiently deduce which developers are a great fit in terms of their skills and previous experience. Also, top developers usually choose jobs based on how interesting the projects that they’d be working on are — the accompanying benefits are almost a given.
Considering that, tech recruiters need to have sufficient knowledge of the work their companies do to properly entice new talent.
How do job recruiters get paid?
It largely depends on who they’re working for. The largest number of tech recruiters work for talent agencies, and they receive their base salary from them. On top of that, they’re further incentivized through commissions, which they get when they help a client company fill a job position with the right candidate.
Also, some great developers who don’t want to search for work on their own seek out tech recruiters and hire them to find opportunities on their behalf. In that case, the tech recruiters receive a fee from the devs when they find them work.
If your company hires tech recruiters of its own, the base salary + commission structure will likely be the one you’ll use as well.
Read More: 10+ Software Engineer Interview Questions to Find Top Dev Candidates
Pros & cons of using technical recruiters
There are a lot of benefits to using technical recruiters — but if you don’t utilize them properly, there are also some downsides you should be aware of.
The primary advantage of tech recruiters is their ability to streamline the process of recruiting top-notch tech professionals. In most cases, the best tech recruiters have an expansive network of existing relationships in their tech niche, which they can use to help companies reach the developers they need more efficiently than through simple job ads.
And as we’ve mentioned above, technical recruiters have a deeper understanding of the work done by their company, its individual teams and developers, and the wider tech industry — allowing them to make the most informed choice when selecting candidates to reach out to.
Also, a great tech recruiter knows how to make your company stand out among its competitors — providing top-tier talent with the information they need to conclude that working for your company is the best opportunity they’ve got.
They can also explain why specific developers are precisely what the company needs, and how the company would value them. All of this eliminates a lot of the legwork that comes with solely advertising opportunities through ads on job boards, and consequently sifting through thousands of applications to find a couple of candidates that are a great fit.
However, the most crucial advantage of using tech recruiters is that they allow you to reach out to the most valuable type of candidate: passive candidates. Or, in other words, people who are currently employed and aren’t actively looking for new work, but are still willing to make a change and hear about different opportunities.
The insanely high demand for tech talent means that the best developers rarely spend a lot of time actively searching for work — they’re already employed, and they only want to switch companies if they’re presented with more interesting projects and better compensation and benefits.
They probably won’t spend their precious time browsing countless job ads online. However, savvy tech recruiters can contact them personally and pitch your company to them as their next career opportunity — which is always more effective than waiting for top talent to reach out to you first.
On the other hand, there are some downsides to hiring tech recruiters — and they only present themselves if you hire the wrong people for the job. If your tech recruiter doesn’t have a high number of high-quality connections in your industry and niche, they probably won’t bring a lot of value to your company.
Also, you need to be sure they’re sufficiently proficient in your company’s line of work and the specific technologies used by your developers — there’s nothing that turns off potential great hires quicker than a recruiter that clearly doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Furthermore, you need to be certain that your tech recruiters have the right people skills to get top tech talent interested in what they have to say and offer, despite the fact that countless other recruiters have probably been pestering them as well.
Read More: Andela vs Toptal vs Turing vs Arc: Which is the Best Andela Alternative?
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How to Hire a Technical Recruiter
Okay, so hiring a tech recruiter definitely brings value to your company. But that still doesn’t answer your primary question — how do you find the best recruiters for your company, and attract them?
When you’re looking for top tech hires, the recruiters are the ones that do it for you. And unfortunately, there aren’t any recruiters that recruit other tech recruiters — that would be too meta.
However, there are still some surefire ways of finding great recruiters for your company.
Use LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the bread and butter of most tech recruiters out there, seeing as the platform is pretty much a must-have for any kind of tech employee. And that means tech recruiters that have experience in your industry will also have a profile there. So, LinkedIn is your first stop when it comes to hiring technical recruiters.
A simple “tech recruiter” search on LinkedIn will yield hundreds of HR professionals with the right expertise — all that’s left is to reach out to them with the right opportunity.
Read More: 10+ Things to Consider BEFORE Hiring a Freelance Software Developer
Reach Out
Once you reach out to a recruiter through job boards like Indeed or networking platforms like LinkedIn, it’s important to present them with the right information — and get the right information from them.
Primarily, you’re interested in their:
- Experience
- Tech knowledge
- Industry connections
These are the three basic factors that decide whether you’re looking at a tech recruiter that can bring value to your company or not. Their previous experience is always the first thing to look at — have they worked for other companies in your industry and niche before? That’s always a big plus.
Also, while they obviously don’t need to be as knowledgable as the developers they’ll be hiring if they work for you — the tech recruiters still need a relatively in-depth knowledge of your company’s projects and technologies.
Consider both breadth and depth when it comes to a recruiter’s technical knowledge. Breadth means how wide their knowledge extends in the realm of software development and technology in general. Depth means how advanced their knowledge extends into one particular technical field or programming language.
A technical recruiter with an extensive breadth of knowledge will be able to find decent candidates across many levels of developer experience, languages, tech stacks, etc. And a technical recruiter with a depth of knowledge in front-end development, say, might be perfect for finding Angular developers but less so if you need to hire machine learning experts.
They can learn about your specific projects during the onboarding process, but they still need to be familiar with the primary elements of your tech stack if they’re going to discuss it with potential hires.
And finally — the biggest difference between good and great tech recruiters are their industry connections. Their networking capabilities will decide how quickly they can bring top talent to your company.
Get References
Naturally, getting references is a great way to ensure you’re dealing with professional tech recruiters. And the best people to ask are the tech professionals already working for your company. If this isn’t their first job, they may have been hired by tech recruiters in the past — and some of them have probably left a particularly positive impression.
Reach out to them — if they’ve impressed your current employees, they’ll probably be able to impress future ones as well.
Read More: How Much to Hire a Software Developer: Freelance vs Full-Time Costs
How to Work With Tech Recruiters
When you’ve finally hired a few decent tech recruiters, you’ll want to ensure you’re making the most of them — and here are the things you need to do to make that happen.
Understand their sourcing process
In any kind of business relationship, it’s always best if all parties involved know what they can expect. That’s why you want to understand the process your tech recruiters use to find, approach, and close candidates — from start to finish.
What platforms do they use to find passive candidates? How do they make the initial contact? What’s their approach to negotiations? What kind of industry connections do they have — and how do they use them in this process? All of these are great questions to ask when you’re trying to understand your recruiters’ sourcing process.
Make Your Expectations Clear
The best way to ensure your recruiters are getting you the exact kind of candidates you want is to define your expectations well. You need to ensure the recruiters know the skills, expertise, and level of seniority you want for a specific position — and the kind of benefits and compensation you’re prepared to offer to the best candidates.
Do you need your new hires to work in-office, or do you offer remote work options? And if it’s the former, do you offer relocation packages? Is this a long-term or a short-term, project-based position? Make all of this clear from the very beginning.
Read More: Hiring In-House vs Remote Developers: Cost & Competitive Advantages
Check out our entire set of tech hiring guides and choose the one which fits your recruiting needs best:
For general employment advice, view our article on how to find developers and our complete freelance developer hiring guide.
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Questions to Ask Tech Recruiters Before Hiring Them
We’ve already discussed some of the main questions you need to ask your tech recruiters, both before and after hiring them. However, here are a couple more to ensure you’re working with the best-fitting tech recruiters for your company.
What core duties have they performed in the past?
You probably know what kind of duties you expect out of your tech recruiters already — you want them to represent your business at industry events and in communication with potential hires. However, this work contains many smaller, individual tasks — and it’s always useful to know what kind of practical experience a tech recruiter has before hiring them.
There are plenty of recruiters who have worked with larger agencies and only worked on finding talent through LinkedIn — which means they don’t have much experience in navigating the social aspect of networking during industry events.
This is the kind of stuff you want to know about before hiring a tech recruiter to find candidates for you.
What are the main challenges they’ve faced in their previous work?
While you’re searching for your perfect job recruiter, your main aim is to learn what they’re good at and in which areas they lack experience. However, simply asking them about their skills and proficiencies point-blank doesn’t always reveal the full picture of their experience.
With that in mind, you’ll always get some interesting information if you ask tech recruiters about the challenges they’ve faced in their line of work so far. If you can read between the lines, you may learn more about their current approach to finding clients, or some inefficiencies that they can work on.
What skills do they use the most in practice?
Ask your technical recruiters about their most relevant skills — in the context of their previous work. Has their emotional intelligence and conversational skills proved to be their greatest asset so far — or their in-depth knowledge of the industry and the network of contacts they’ve built up over time?
All of this will tell you a lot about what kind of value you’re getting if you hire them to find candidates for you.
Read More: Good vs Great Developers: How to Tell the Difference & Hire the Best
Conclusion: Do I Need a Tech Recruiter?
To put it simply: yes.
Tech recruiters do extremely important work when it comes to “thinning the herd” of software engineering candidates for top positions. Also, they help your company by engaging high-quality passive candidates that wouldn’t respond to your job ads themselves — and they’re usually the best talent you can find.
At Arc, we take the difficulty out of sourcing software engineers. Browse our pre-vetted candidates and only pay when you make a hire. If you’re looking for how to hire a technical recruiter to help you find and hire talented developers, give us a shot!
You can also try Arc, your shortcut to the world’s best remote talent:
⚡️ Access 350,000 top developers, designers, and marketers
⚡️ Vetted and ready to interview
⚡️ Freelance or full-time
