Apr 13, 2021
How do I prepare before approaching candidate.
Well.. another “spam” message from HR. It’s a rather common image of Sourcers/Recruiters for the majority of tech people. That’s pretty understandable since you get dozens of messages every day. Many people think it’s just about mindless copy-pasting and bulk messaging, however there is always some dirty work behind the scenes.
In this post, I would like to talk about the preparation process for each role, which we have to follow before approaching a certain group of candidates.
Work on every new role always starts with some research for me. I’ve recently graduated from the Technical University, so it is easier for me to understand the tech roles and empathize with candidates better. Some roles, however, can nicely surprise me, bringing a challenge, so I feel like a boxer who steps into his important career match! Sometimes, I can even dive deep into it and look at the basic code structure and totally forget about the main purpose of what I am trying to do, but I do my best to control myself.
After the research I prepare some notes and questions, and we usually have a kick-off meeting which is arranged by recruiters and hiring managers to start hiring for the certain role.
These meetings are mostly about the role description, team objectives, requirements, selling points and certainly deadlines for the specific role. Bearing that in our mind, we usually think about a back-up plan for each position and ways to expand our search. The market is not a Universe, so it is limited to some point. So, if you are a full-stack developer approached with a Front-end role, don’t get frustrated before reading the job description or asking questions to the Talent team. ;)
The next step is usually asking one or two technical questions. This approach is not very common among sourcers, but it really helps on both sides to filter better and save time, since the answers are directly sent to the hiring managers.
Once we agree on requirements and questions, the last part is always sourcing for a certain amount of profiles (roughly 5–10) and sharing them with the hiring team for calibration. Once we get their approval and feedback, hunting starts!
On this subject, we do have a brand-new Front-end role opened at Wrike, feel free to apply or ask me a question, before the ship has sailed!
