eBook How to Hire Tech Sourcers and Recruiters - Celential.ai

How To Hire TechnicalSourcers & RecruitersIn A Talent Shortage

A Practical Guide To Scaling YourRecruiting Team

The rising demand for tech recruiting professionals

Tech sourcer vs. tech recruiter: differences in responsibilitiesand salaries

Straight to the source: how to find tech sourcers andrecruiters

Interview questions and exercises to evaluate techrecruiting candidates

How to scale your recruiting team with tech sourcers andrecruiters

Where to find tech sourcers and recruiters beyond the traditional methods?How do you find a non-traditional candidate with a skill or background fit?How do you select a candidate pool?

Interview for technical sourcersInterview for technical recruiters

Ratio of sourcers versus recruitersCommon recruiting team structures

Table ofContentsA Practical Guide To Scaling YourRecruiting Team

2

The rising demand for techrecruiting professionals

In March 2022, there were more than 350,000 "Recruiter" jobpostings on LinkedIn in the United States. For comparison, therewere around 225,000 for "Software Engineer" in that same month.

The recruiting market is red hot, but why is this the case when it wasa mostly undervalued role just three years ago?

As a result of these two macro-trends, companies are either scalingor trying to recoup their losses of employees during the pandemic.They have a plethora of roles (especially technical) they need to fillwith ambitious growth goals for 2022.

To attract top talent, many companies are offering flexible workoptions, higher salaries, and more benefits than ever before.

The problem is that talent acquisition teams can’t keep up. They oftendon’t have the experienced personnel to help fill crucial tech roles thatare the backbone of any modern company.

We’ve developed this ebook to provide organizations with practicaltactics to secure technical sourcers and recruiters when it feels likethere aren’t any left.

We are living in a time of enormous societal and economictransformation. Numerous headwinds are pushing the demand forrecruiters to new heights. To name a few:

“The Great Resignation” of 2020-2021 left a considerable gapof personnel at almost every company. In 2021 alone, 38 millionpeople left their positions to reevaluate their careers and for abetter work-life balance.

2021 was another record year for investment and growth inmany industries. U.S. startups raised $329.9 billion in ventureinvestments in 2021, nearly doubling the previous annual recordof $166.6 billion set in 2020.

3

•

•

celential.ai

Technical sourcer and technical recruiter are two common roles intalent acquisition teams. How are they different?

The two have to collaborate closely and be in constantcommunication. As recruiters tend to manage more responsibilities,they edge out the sourcers on compensation.

Here are some market salary data to help you plan headcount andcompensation targets for tech sourcer and recruiter roles.

Tech Sourcer Tech Recruiter

Entry-level totalcompensation*(0-2 yrs experience)

$69,745$47,341/yr base$22,404/yr additional pay

$79,382 $53,382/yr base$25,703/yr additional pay

Senior-level totalcompensation(4-7 yrs experience)

$93,209$52,597/yr base$40,657/yr additional pay

$95,787$64,412/yr base$31,375/yr additional pay

New benefits for 2022

Tech sourcer vs. tech recruiter: differences in responsibilitiesand salaries

A tech sourcer in San Francisco Bay Area is compensated$117,000 on average but one in the Dallas-Fort Worth Areareceives around $76,000. The premium senior tech recruiter at a well-established techcompany like Meta can receive up to $136,750, while an entry-level tech recruiter at a smaller company like Mondo would receivecloser to $50,308.

First, take into account that pay may significantly vary depending onlocation and company:

Also, keep in mind that most recruiters and sourcers are paid variablyand expect to receive additional commissions for hires they make.

The chart below shows the average compensation for entry-level tosenior-level recruiting professionals in the United States based ondata from Glassdoor.

* Total compensation includes base salary, commission, cash bonus, and stock options.

100% work from homeUnlimited PTO

Fridays off in the summerTuition assistance

Tech recruiters are essentially project managers for hiring processeswho play a major role in interviewing and closing candidates, but canalso take additional responsibilities for posting jobs and sourcingcandidates. They are judged on meeting hiring goals with metrics liketime to hire and volume of hires.

Tech sourcers play more of a specialized team member role toidentify and qualify passive candidates. They are evaluated by thequality of candidates submitted and the present-to-interview ratio.As the technical talent pool is primarily passive, companies are addingmore tech sourcers to scale and optimize their recruiting operations.

4

•

•

•

•

• •

• •

celential.ai

Standard job boards like Indeed or Monster were once the go-to platform for talentacquisition departments. Now, many companies struggle to get any viable candidatesafter the first month of posting.

How to find tech sourcers andrecruiters

Straight to the source:

“Volume can be a detriment – rather than a boon – if you’re attracting the wrongtalent. Your recruiters will have to spend their time screening unqualifiedcandidates out; time that could have been spent on creating great experiencesfor their highest-priority candidates.”

Lever's Blog

Instead, you might try goingstraight to the source — thereare multiple alternativechannels where recruitershang out that could createcloser matches to your idealcandidate.

5

Where to find tech sourcers andrecruiters beyond the traditionalmethods?

Recruiting/HR Newsletters Slack and LinkedIn Groups

There are countless newsletters aimed at recruiting professionalswho want to stay on top of industry trends. Try leveraging thesenewsletters’ massive mailing lists by advertising with them: it’s agreat way to access proactive professionals and an attractive qualityin a tech sourcer candidate.

A few of the most popular recruiting and HR newsletters you can signup for.

HR and recruiting Slack groups offer a semi-casual setting to build outyour professional network and share job postings. Many of theseSlack groups have dedicated channels for you to post recruiting-specific openings, so feel free to list that tech sourcer position.

Morning Brew's HR Brew

ERE Media

Recruiting Daily

Recruiting Brainfood

......

01

Resources for Humans, OneReq, PeoplePeople, and CultureAmp aregreat places to post and look for candidates.

Linked:HR, HR Professionals, Future of Work, and Global DEI in theWorkplace are a few large LinkedIn groups each with a different HR orrecruiting focus.

6

Recruiting for recruiters, sourcing, the day-to-day inrecruiting, talent acquisition

Stacy Donovan Zapar

Future of work, internal communication, DEI & genderdiversity in the workplace, remote work

Meghan M. Biro

Work tech, the future of talent acquisition, digital talent(and wrote a book about it)

Matt Alder

Recruiting best practices, global recruitment differences,candidate experience, data collection, recruitmentconsulting

Greg Savage

HR & HR/recruiting tech, recruiting best practices

William Tincup

Followers and repliers to HR influencers

Looking at users who spend time commenting onposts or tweets from HR influencers is another way tofind potential tech sourcer candidates. Thesecandidates are clearly invested in recruiting alreadyand want to push the collective conversation forward.

Some influencers worth checking out:

7

... •. ►

□ 0

Virtual Recruiter

Relevant Subreddits

Specialized Job Boards

If you prefer more down-to-earth interactions, heading over to arecruiting subreddit might be the way to go if you want to have acandid conversation with candidates.

Hung Lee of the previously mentioned Recruiting Brainfood has apodcast episode covering sourcing on Reddit. If you want to check itout for yourself first, the leading HR and recruiting subredditcommunities would be an excellent place to start.

Despite the decline of general job boards, new, more specializedpages have arisen that are more on one specific industry or workingstyle.

If you are a startup, angel.co is the #1 option to find people withexperience in the tech industry. If you are looking to tap into remotetalent, workingnomads.com, remoteok.io and flexjobs.com are at theforefront of skilled professionals looking for flexible opportunities.

If you want to build a pipeline of students to hire, wayup.com andhandshake are the most popular.

An alternative option that saves you fromsearching for tech sourcers andrecruiters is to hire an AI-PoweredVirtual Recruiter. It finds and engagespassive technical candidates like anexperienced sourcer, but is moreaccurate, efficient, and personalized.

Submit your job description and seehow it works in action!

8

Recruiting Skills Candidates withtransferable Skills Possible roles/fields

Consistently applied,well-crafted, anddata-driven process

Candidates who havehad to follow strictprotocol and use datato inform decisions

Healthcaremanagement,investigativereporting, publishing,law, accounting

Track metrics andadjust approachaccordingly

Candidates whodirectly collect,manage and analyzedata

SaaS marketing,analysts, economics,supply chainmanagement

Strongcommunication skillsand ability topersuade

Candidates in heavilypeople-facing rolesthat reward strongnegotiation skills

Litigation, sales,insurance,advertising,brokerage, lobbyist

Spot red flags, aswell as the potentialfor long-term fits

Candidates who needto use their judgmentskills and intuitionconsistently and thinkon their feet

Paramedic,technician, teaching,retail or food service,venture capital,construction or heavyequipmentengineer/manager,on-call production &process engineers

Now that you know where to look for tech sourcers, it’s time tofigure out how to find the candidates that might go overlooked.

They’ll come from non-technical backgrounds but have a strongcapacity for soft skills like communication, organization, efficiency,and building a robust workflow process.

According to LinkedIn, 35% of recruiter candidates transferred fromHuman Resources-related roles. 12% came from Sales, 9% fromOperations, and an even tie at 5% from support, administrative, andIT roles, between April 2020 and June 2021.

To the right are the most critical skills for a tech recruitingprofessional and some suggested roles that demonstrate experiencewith each skill.

Candidates with transferable skills

How do you find a non-traditionalcandidate with a skill orbackground fit?

02

9celential.ai

Try searching for profiles with a STEM degree (mathematics, physics,etc.) who may be in non-tech people-facing positions such ascustomer service. Candidates with a GitHub link on a public profile or listingprogramming or web dev as interest on a resume are likely to havetechnical skills too.

Tech sourcer candidates who have some technical knowledge will have amajor edge at identifying candidates with strong technical skills.

Before starting your search, decide on the general knowledge level you’relooking for in a technical candidate to save time by ensuring your hiringscope is adequate for your needs.

Candidates with a technical background

10

•

• =--_ - □ =--_ -

i::::::I;!!!!:: □ =­=--_ - □ =--_ -

How do you select aCandidate Pool?

Think about what skills and abilities your organization values most and whether acandidate’s direct supervisor will be able to teach soft skills to a technical candidatemore effectively or technical skills to a candidate with strong transferable soft skills.

Are you a startup seeking a technical sourcer with a narrow set of technicalexpertise that you can’t compromise on? A candidate with a technical backgroundwill align better with your open role.

Are you an enterprise firm looking for a candidate with excellent persuasion skillsthat can handle high volume hiring over finding “dream” candidates? A transferableskills candidate seems like the way to go.

Here are our tips for upskilling your non-technical recruiting team.

NOTE: Knowledge of the intended verticals the candidate will be hiring in is key to eithercandidate pool. Some candidates may also not fit neatly into either category, and you may wishto target both pools.

03

11

Interview questions andexercises to evaluate techrecruiting candidates

12

.• ... • .•;·?•.·

... ·

'·· ::··. ,·.

·, .. _ ... ~: ,: " ~ '·

• -··

·, .. :·:·~·. ••·::· •.

-:::;: ~~;\{~_):.}:~-~;£::~:{)

Interview fortechnical sourcers

A focus on process

Data-driven approach

Interview Question #1: Can you walk me throughone of your successful hires?

Often, asking about how candidates have handled situations in the past gives you the best idea of how theyreally operate and their individual strengths.We’ve crafted three interview questions to help you review a candidate’s experience and identify the hardskills, soft skills, and abilities crucial to successful technical sourcing.

Key competencies to evaluate:

Including concrete examples of tools they use, such as professionalnetworking sites for sourcing candidates and posting jobs or anApplicant Tracking System (ATS) for organizing candidates.

Due to sheer numbers of candidates, organization is vital for keepingtrack of requirements, contacting candidates, follow-up messages,and other responsibilities.

The most effective sourcers track their metrics (such as number ofcontacted candidates per day or email open/reply/interested rates)as they are constantly analyzing their own processes to identifyinefficiencies, drop-off points, and ways to iterate on establishedprocedures.

Communication skills

Commitment to candidate experience

Interview Question #2: What is your approach tocandidate experience?

Key competencies to evaluate:

Many people think tech sourcers don’t need the soft skills of arecruiter, but this isn’t the case. Sourcers often create the firstimpression for candidates on behalf of your company by craftingoutreach messages that will appeal to them.

It’s important to follow up with all candidates and prioritize givingthem a polite and timely answer, both for ethical recruitment andmaintaining a positive brand image.

13

0

celential.ai

Technical knowledge

Judgment of mutual fit

Domain expertise

Interview Question #3: Which technical roleshave you successfully hired for?

Key competencies to evaluate:

This is a prerequisite to evaluating hiring managers’ needs, screeningcandidates, and determining mutual fit to a role. It’s also a must forunderstanding jargon-filled resumes, judging proficiency in necessarytech skills, and discerning the impact of a candidate’s contributions tocoding projects.

A good tech sourcer will quickly get a feel for your company’s cultureand norms, estimate the selectivity of previous employers, and gaugea candidate’s likely career trajectory — key info for determining fit.

Many sorcerers come from a technical background, and others mayhave picked up the knowledge on the job and have more or lessexperience in certain tech areas such as fintech, health, or cloudservices.

Compare 2-3 candidatesgiven a particular JDTake-

home #1

Take-home

#2

Write a sample JD or samplemessage to a candidate

This exercise resembles the tasks sourcerswill perform daily. It tests candidates’technical knowledge, familiarity with socialmedia and search methodology tools, andtheir ability to identify and prioritize essentialelements on a resume or profile.

The ability to envision the candidate’s point ofview, sell the opportunity, and effectivelypersonalize outreach pitches to generateinterest and excitement about a role is crucialto tech recruiting efforts.

14

For additional interview questions and take homes, check out ourblog article.

[ill]

Q

Hiring technical recruiters isn’t easy, as a great one needs to excel inmany areas. For starters, they require all the skills tested by the top-of-the-funnel questions above.

Here are our top interview questions and role-playing assessments toevaluate proficiency in the essential skills needed throughout therecruiting process.

Interview for technical recruiters

Use of metrics

Question #1: How do you measure yourperformance and define success?

Key competencies to evaluate:

Time to hire (24 days on average in the US)Quality of hire (a standard measure, annual retention, is 86.8% fortech)Cost to hire (around $32k on average for a software developer)

Effective recruiters rely on metrics to identify and eliminate theinefficiencies and bottlenecks in their processes. This includes:

Self-reflection

Long-term fit

Question #2: Have you ever hired a candidatewho wasn’t a good fit or left shortly after hire?What did you learn from the experience?

Key competencies to evaluate:

Hiring the wrong candidate is devastating, as employees often take8+ months to become fully productive at work.

While not every hire works out, great recruiters reflect when acandidate turns down an offer or leaves shortly after employment toavoid repeating the mistakes.

By listening well, good technical recruiters are able to gauge culturefit and the ability to work well on a team.

They are also able to identify potential stumbling blocks aroundsalary, workplace arrangements, and opportunities to grow andadvance. Detecting and addressing candidate concerns early andthroughout the hiring process makes a long-term fit much more likely.

15

• •

•

0

celential.ai

Question #3: Have you ever encountered acandidate who was difficult to close? How didyou convince them to say yes?

Key competencies to evaluate:

Sales ability

Employer branding

This relies on identifying effective pitch points to use in JDs, reachoutemails, and interviews. The ability to craft a compelling narrative isalso crucial to maximize candidates’ chances to convert to hire.

Great recruiters make companies stand out to candidates. They arealso representatives of your company who uphold your brand’s valuesthroughout the process.

Mock Phone Screen

Role-PlayingExercise

1

Role-PlayingExercise

2

Handling a Difficult HiringManager

In this role-playing exercise, a recruiter calls atechnical candidate to evaluate theirbackground while simultaneously pitching theopportunity.

This exercise simulates a scenario recruiterswill encounter on a near-daily basis and canbe repeated with other parts of therecruitment funnel, such as presenting acandidate to a hiring manager or negotiatingan offer.

Adding a small amount of conflict to yourexercise can be a valuable way to give yourpotential recruiter a chance to demonstratetheir ability to handle disagreementconstructively.

For example, a candidate might be a recruiterwith startup Precisionly.ai; you play Greg, ahiring manager unhappy that the last threecandidates fell through at the offer stage.

16

For additional interview questions andtake homes, check out our blog article.

[ill]

How to scale yourrecruiting team with techsourcers and recruiters

17

. . . . ... . ,.

···~ .... ~ .-•:-:. ! ... ~. ·: .•• : : .. • ••.

•• • •• ,# ......

- F.- ~ ... "''!•

.-

3

Finding the perfect ratio for your recruiting team can often be anuphill battle. In general, you can never have too many sourcers. Butyou also don’t want to rely too heavily on recruiters where it ends uplike having too many cooks in the kitchen.

Many organizations have developed models that have proveneffective to a certain degree.

Let’s first take a look at the data for ideal ratios and then go over themodels.

The 2018 recruiting trends report by Entelo suggested a ratio of onesourcer for every two recruiters. Gitlab has since updated this ratio tokeep up with the increasing demand to 1:1 recruiter to sourcer ratio.

Ratio of sourcers vs. recruiters

Factors affecting the ratio

How do you define a sourcer? Does your sourcer takecare of finding candidates only, or contacting them,handling replies, and even screening them? Increaseyour ratio of sourcers depending on how much of thefunnel they handle.

Type of role you are sourcing for: Sourcing for atechnical role with specialized domain experience (suchas cloud management, blockchain, SMB fintech…) willtake much longer => you need more sourcers.

If you’re scaling very quickly => Need sourcers toincrease the number of candidates available.

If you have a high-quality bar => You need sourcers tohunt down qualified passive candidates.

18

Common recruiting team structures

The ideal way to structure your team may vary depending on the size of your company, the level of technical knowledge needed, and your hiringgoals.

Here are three methods commonly used to structure a recruiting team.

In this method, the sourcer handles the first part of the recruiting process (finding and contacting candidates), and the recruiter handles the secondpart (driving candidate engagement from the first call to offer).

This allows your team to become more efficient by specializing.For example, a sourcer might hone their researching and pitch-writing skills, freeing up a recruiter to focus on engaging andclosing candidates. This team works well for modestly sizedstartups to quickly generate a large volume of hires with a verysmall team.

With multiple people involved in the chain of communication,this team setup can add time to the hiring process. This methodalso poses a challenge in ensuring what is learned actually getscommunicated between sourcer, recruiter, and hiring manager.Feedback on sourced profiles, changes to the ideal candidateprofile based on hiring manager needs, and what is learned ininterviews can potentially get lost.

Specializer team

Advantage Disadvantage

19

Sourcers handle passive candidates in this setup, and recruitershandle active candidates.

Closing StatementWe hope this ebook gives you the knowledge you need to find and interview a batch of stellar tech sourcer/recruiter candidates during this difficulthiring period. Once you have the people with the right skill set for your recruiting team, you can focus on building out your vital technical roles

This type of team includes a recruiting head supervising “mini-teams”consisting of sourcers and recruiters.

Divide and Conquer Model Scalable team

Candidates truly do have a single point of contact —someone who is well-versed and invested in theircandidacy from start to finish. It is also easier to addaccountability to the process when one person is in chargeof one candidate.

This setup is ideal for hiring nontraditional candidates assourcers, as they have the opportunity to work with and learnfrom more experienced team methods. These candidates growwith you, becoming ready to take on more work as yourbusiness scales. This method also works very well fordeveloping, comparing, and testing new approaches, as you canroll out new strategies to part of the team and measure how wellthey perform compared to your baseline.

Dividing and conquering means hiring generalists for bothroles with research skills, written pitching skills, and verbalpitching skills. This method is often less efficient. After all,it is slower and less effective to have a dozen peoplebuilding a car each than having one person in charge ofwelding, one person in charge of wiring, etc.

The main disadvantage of this method is that it requires a moreinitial investment of time and cost in your team’s infrastructureand thus may be difficult or unnecessary to implement forsmaller teams. It may be wise to specialize further and addcoordinators to handle the administrative aspect of hiring.

Advantage Advantage

DisadvantageDisadvantage

20

How can Celential.ai helpscale your recruiting team?

It can kick-off candidate searches immediately and deliver 20-40quality engineering candidates every month, ready for interviews. No need to spend time onboarding and managing new team members.Add or subtract Virtual Recruiters anytime according to your needs.

With a proprietary talent graph of 5M+ technical talent, our VirtualRecruiter can identify the best-matched passive candidates andpitches your opportunities with highly personalized emails. It results in a response rate of up to 30%, so your recruiters can focuson enhancing and scaling candidate engagement.

If you are in the market for tech sourcers, consider using our AI-Powered Virtual Recruiter instead.

If you are looking to add more tech recruiters to your team, we can helpyour current and future hires become more efficient.

I have depended on Celential in finding great talent forover 3 years now, and their Al-driven virtual recruitersolution fills the pipeline for my open roles quickly.

Their AI + human approach helps us access an extensivetalent pool beyond our regular coverage, and delivered astrong, engaged pipeline starting from the first week.

Celential has been crucial to helping us build a talented,diverse engineering team at Monograph.

David Ting, VPE

Long Vo, COO

Moe Amaya, Head of Engineering

Schedule a call with us to learn how we can quickly providevetted, high-quality tech candidates straight to your hiringpipeline — all with no friction or added learning curves.

21

~~ Nylas

•

• •

ft OneSignal

•

•

C,Monograph

celential.ai