The tech hiring market has been tough over the past few years. Where identifying top talent used to be like finding a needle in a haystack, it’s now like finding a needle in a haystack during a hurricane.
Data from Ashby shows that there was a nearly 250% increase in the number of applications received per hire between Q1 of 2021 and Q3 of 2024. So, it’s understandable that hiring managers and recruiters often feel overwhelmed when trying to fill open roles.
In a recent webinar, OfferZen’s VP of Product Stephen van der Heijden and Product Manager Henri Kotze shared valuable tips and tricks you can use to boost your hiring productivity and ensure you’re finding the most relevant candidates on OfferZen.
Tips and tricks to make finding the right candidates easier
With the challenges of hiring top talent in mind, OfferZen has developed a range of strategies and tools that make it easier to identify and appoint the right candidates.
Figure out your must-haves and nice-to-haves
“Be honest about your must-have and your nice-to-have skills,” said Henri. “When you’re searching for candidates, you always have a certain idea of what their skill set should be, what their experience should be and what the salary should be.”
For example, you might need a developer to be proficient in Ruby if they’re going to be in a back-end role. It might also be nice for them to know ElasticSearch, but that wouldn’t necessarily be essential to their job.
Get a feel for the market
The reality of the market might be different to what you’re expecting. Starting broadly and exploring what’s out there will help you to identify whether there’s a mismatch between what you’re looking for and what you’re offering.
“Starting broadly is a good idea. The results might not be perfect, but they will give you a sense of what the market looks like, which can show you things like if the skills combinations you’re looking for are out there and whether you’re in the right salary range,” said Henri.
There are five basic filters to use when you’re getting started with your search on OfferZen:
- Role: Remember that the same role might be called something different at different companies. For example, a candidate might be a Product Manager at one company but a Product Owner at another. Go broad and add a range of related tiles.
- Location: Identify a particular city or country where you need your hire to be based. This will depend on whether you have a remote, in-office or hybrid work policy, and whether you’re willing to relocate a new hire.
- Skills: Select three must-have skills that a hire would need to be successful in the role. Only candidates with an exact skills match will appear in your results, so avoid going too narrow to ensure your pool of candidates is a healthy size.
- Experience: Set a lower limit for the amount of experience that you’d like a candidate to have. Keep in mind that this filter is for overall experience, so it looks at overall seniority rather than experience in a particular role or skill.
- Salary: Add an upper salary bound for the role. This will keep you within your budget and potentially help you find candidates that have the skills and experience you’re looking for at a lower cost.
Although OfferZen prioritises the profiles of candidates that match your exact criteria, it also uses a data science model to recommend similar candidates based on what you’re looking for and who you’re interacting with.
For instance, if a candidate has similar skills or experience to what you require, the platform will serve you a partial match. This will be indicated with a banner on their profile.
Refine your search
Next, you can apply some advanced filters to tweak the results that you got from your initial search. This will help you narrow the pool of candidates to a manageable number.
- Candidate location: If you can’t relocate candidates and need them to be in a particular area, this filter will exclude candidates who are not based in the area you specify.
- Work authorisation: Where you aren’t able to hire candidates that require a visa to work where you business is based, you can filter for citizens and permanent residents.
- Keywords: This is where you can search for specifics, like experience in a particular industry, that don’t fall into any of the standard search parameters.
Be aware that only candidates that match your exact criteria will appear on your results page. Once again, it’s important to go broad with your keywords to avoid missing out on potentially great candidates.
Create positions
Positions are core to OfferZen. They’re essentially the job specs that define what you’re hiring for, including the role you’re trying to fill as well as the skills, experience and other attributes a candidate needs.
When you have a position in place, you’ll get recommendations based on your exact search criteria as well as from our data science model.
Shortlist your favorites
Once you’ve refined your search, you can start narrowing down your pool of candidates. Work methodically through the list of potential hires, favouriting those who immediately stand out and hiding those who don’t.
Then you can return to your shortlist of favourites, reading their full profiles, commenting and tagging other team members to get their feedback about a particular candidate before setting up an interview.
Establish a cadence
Get into a rhythm of reviewing new candidates entering the market. This will give you the best chance of grabbing the attention of top talent.
“The good people go fast,” said Stephen. “If you’re waiting three weeks to review profiles, those candidates will probably already have interview requests and they’ll be less inclined to interview with you.”
Each week, as new candidates go live on the platform, you’ll get an OfferZen batch email notifying you that there are new profiles to look at. Logging in and checking out who’s new each week can help you to get in early and will reduce the number of profiles you have to sift through in one session.
Publish your positions
It’s usually better to take a proactive approach to hiring, but there are some instances where reactive recruiting might be more effective. This is where publishing your position will come in handy.
“Companies can publish their positions on OfferZen. Qualified candidates can then see those positions and apply directly to you. This makes things a little simpler in the way that you have candidates with an interest in working for your company coming to you,” said Henri.
Although it might seem like it at first, publishing positions on OfferZen is very different to posting a job spec on an open job board.
“The difference between OfferZen and other platforms is the quality of applicants. Only about 25% of candidates make it through our curation process, so you’re only getting applications from skilled developers that are interested in working for you. That cuts out a lot of the noise and makes the process much easier,” explained Stephen.
“We send emails out to both live candidates and the rest of our base. They get these job alert emails that are pre matched to their profile, so they only get postings that are specific to them and they can only see and apply to the jobs that we’ve pre matched them with.”
More to make hiring easier
The hiring market is dynamic and OfferZen is too. We’re always designing and refining features to reduce the noise in the tech hiring market and make it easier to find the right candidate for your role.
In addition to the features explored in this webinar, Stephen noted that OfferZen is set to launch a job directory on our platform.
“At some point in the near future, we’ll also be launching a job directory for the wider OfferZen audience. This will be a great way to let developers in our community, but who aren’t necessarily active on the platform at the moment, see your opportunities and potentially apply,” he said.
To watch the full webinar, including a demo of all the features we’ve talked about, check it out here.