Geekology Blog

Personalization in Recruiting Process

Software developers today know their worth, understand the competitive landscape and see opportunities just about anywhere. If an employer takes too long to respond or has a complicated application process, it is easy for their target talent to quickly pass them up and move on to the next. Therefore, it is extremely important that companies maximize the candidate experience through the job application process.

But what makes up a good candidate experience on top of providing a smooth application and interview process? Personalization. We are fortunate to have a chance to sit down with Marvin Smith, a well-known and respected speaker and recruiting leader at Lockheed Martin, and dig in on the importance and the value of personalization.

Read more…

Let’s Build a New Image for Technical Recruiting

What‘s the first organic search result in Google when you type in “technical recruiting?”

Since Google personalizes search results, for me, the answer was a blog titled, “Why are technical recruiters so clueless?”, by none other than the creator of Ruby on Rails web development framework – David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp, known in the software community as DHH. In this blog, David Heinemeier Hansson opened with –

“Are there any recruiters working in technology who get it? Anyone putting in just a minimum of effort to appear even half-way competent? If so, they need to speak up. The reputation of their profession is being soiled by completely clueless hacks.”

DHH then included an actual email that he received from a recruiter, urging him to apply for “a rapidly expanding, VC-funded tech startup positioned squarely on top of the social media marketing revolution.” Read more…

Advice for Contacting Developers: Straight from a Software Engineer’s Mouth

I met a software engineer this week at a Node.js meetup.  We chatted about Ruby vs. Nodejs and I mentioned that I ran across a blog with interesting Ruby vs. Node benchmark data.  He gave me his business card and asked me to forward him the link.  Being a LinkedIn addict, I, of course, looked him up on LinkedIn.

The very first thing I saw on his profile got my attention immediately:

Hi! Thanks for looking at my profile. If I haven’t already reached out to you, please be sure to read the section “Advice for Contacting (_Name_)” below before contacting me.

STOP! Go back and read that again!

I’m a software engineer with experience in — brace yourselves, buzz words coming! — scalable, mission critical systems that handle big data… Read more…