The Life of a Tech Recruiter in Silicon Valley

My art. My Passion. My obsession.
We live in a world obsessed with data. If you run a search on the word “data” on Techcrunch you will find the following articles written in the last 13 days alone: “Sprint to offer unlimited DATA for iPhone, but will it last…” “Google now lets your export google voice DATA…” “Local business DATA provider Locu raises seed round…” “Linkedin takes a deep DATA dive on startup founder profiles…” “Microsoft sued for collecting WP7 Location DATA without consent…” “A deeper look at Blackbox’s DATA on startup failure and its top…” Every legitimate technology company out there is driven by data, but what does that look like from a recruiting perspective? One of the most popular recruitment tools out there is Linkedin Recruiter, and what I like most about this product is the reporting capabilities. Here are some very interesting numbers we pulled from Linkedin during my first 3 weeks at Storm8: profiles viewed: 1336 inmails sent: 404 inmails accepted: 19 inmails declined 6 response rate: 5%There are a couple of things that these numbers reveal. 1) My search is too broad. If I’m looking at 1336 profiles but I’m only contacting 404 people that means my search accuracy is running at about 30%. I need to refine my search so that I’m not looking at as many profiles that aren’t a match. 2) My inmail acceptance rate is low, which means I need to tweak my message to have a better return rate of interest from candidates. Selling the company is easy because I believe whole heartedly that Storm8 is a rocket ship waiting to take off, and that there is a tremendous opportunity for growth and impact in this organization. On the other hand capturing the interest of a passive candidate within a condensed paragraph via inmail is pretty tough. Tough, but not impossible. 3) We probably need to hire an additional technical recruiter (or highly skilled sourcer) if we want to triple in size within 6 months. :) We are collecting this type of data from our ATS as well, which will hopefully reveal which sources have the best ROI, where the bottlenecks are forming, and provide other insights to the overall flow of our pipeline. If you are serious about recruiting and you’re not collecting data on your candidate pipeline then you are wasting some valuable information! Like the picture says, Data is AWESOME!

We live in a world obsessed with data. If you run a search on the word “data” on Techcrunch you will find the following articles written in the last 13 days alone:

“Sprint to offer unlimited DATA for iPhone, but will it last…”
“Google now lets your export google voice DATA…”
“Local business DATA provider Locu raises seed round…”
“Linkedin takes a deep DATA dive on startup founder profiles…”
“Microsoft sued for collecting WP7 Location DATA without consent…”
“A deeper look at Blackbox’s DATA on startup failure and its top…”

Every legitimate technology company out there is driven by data, but what does that look like from a recruiting perspective? One of the most popular recruitment tools out there is Linkedin Recruiter, and what I like most about this product is the reporting capabilities. Here are some very interesting numbers we pulled from Linkedin during my first 3 weeks at Storm8:

profiles viewed: 1336
inmails sent: 404
inmails accepted: 19
inmails declined 6
response rate: 5%

There are a couple of things that these numbers reveal. 1) My search is too broad. If I’m looking at 1336 profiles but I’m only contacting 404 people that means my search accuracy is running at about 30%. I need to refine my search so that I’m not looking at as many profiles that aren’t a match. 2) My inmail acceptance rate is low, which means I need to tweak my message to have a better return rate of interest from candidates. Selling the company is easy because I believe whole heartedly that Storm8 is a rocket ship waiting to take off, and that there is a tremendous opportunity for growth and impact in this organization. On the other hand capturing the interest of a passive candidate within a condensed paragraph via inmail is pretty tough. Tough, but not impossible. 3) We probably need to hire an additional technical recruiter (or highly skilled sourcer) if we want to triple in size within 6 months. :)

We are collecting this type of data from our ATS as well, which will hopefully reveal which sources have the best ROI, where the bottlenecks are forming, and provide other insights to the overall flow of our pipeline. If you are serious about recruiting and you’re not collecting data on your candidate pipeline then you are wasting some valuable information! Like the picture says, Data is AWESOME!

  1. richardkimsf posted this