Social Media Recruiting: How To Source International Candidates

Posted by Jim Stroud
June 2, 2008

If you had to recruit candidates from overseas (and you did not want to spend money on a job board), how would you go about it? If you have no clue, then continue reading… I discovered some resources online that had me thinking in that direction.

Are you aware of, The Global Information Technology Report?

What is it?

Sponsored by Cisco Systems, the Global Information Technology Report series is a joint project between the World Economic Forum and INSEAD (a prestigious graduate Business School), drawing upon several key indicators of the economy and technological readiness in a country. The Networked Readiness Index, a comparative and benchmarking framework that is the highlight of the GITR project, was developed at INSEAD in order to capture the state of the technology readiness in the 127 countries worldwide.

According to the latest report, these are the top 10 countries for technology:

1. Denmark
2. Sweden
3. Switzerland
4. US
5. Singapore
6. Finland
7. Netherlands
8. Iceland
9. Korea
10. Norway

Source: World Economic Forum

Hmm… For some reason, this had me considering what where the top programming languages used around the world? So, I dug around and found the TIOBE Programming Community Index. In case you had not heard of it, here is a quote from their website.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings.

As of May 2008, these are the top 10 programming languages:

1. Java
2. C
3. Visual Basic
4. PHP
5. C++
6. Perl
7. Python
8. C#
9. Ruby
10. Delphi

Source: Tiobe

After reviewing both of these bits of data, I thought to myself, “Self, this is good material for sourcing international candidates.” So after scratching my head (and a few other places) I began to wonder, “How popular are the top programming languages in the the most technologically advanced countries?” To answer this question, I performed a search on Yahoo for resumes in said countries that have the aforementioned programming languages cited therein. I started to use Google, but Yahoo has a bigger index of documents.

Here are a couple of examples of the searchstrings I used:

And these are the results:

Can you see the Excel sheet? If not, these are some of the stats, excluding USA data.

Overwhelmingly, the results were slanted towards USA. However, I am unconvinced that this is the most accurate way to measure resumes on homepages. What if someone in Yugoslavia posted their resume on Geocities? What this does suggest to me is that candidates in other countries are less likely to post their resumes on their homepages; unless they are from Sweden, the Netherlands or Switzerland. So where is the best place to find resumes of non-USA based candidates? Experience tells me that there are several ways, but today I am sharing only one – Social Networks.

If you are looking for candidates outside of the USA, I strongly suggest that you set up a presence on a Social Network that is popular for the region you are targeting, make friends and start asking for referrals. (At least, that’s what I have done in the past and to great success.) Alas, how do you know which Social Networks are popular for that country? Fortunately, I found something online that will help you out. This is a map showing which Social Networks are most popular in different regions of the world.

Source: Le Monde

What is conspicuously absent from this map is LinkedIn (bummer) and I wish that was not the case, as I would be curious to see how that lined up against the others. Oh well… I would be curious to know which Sourcing strategies have worked for you when recruiting for non-USA candidates. Care to share?

Happy Hunting!

-Jim


EmployeescreenIQ provides background checks to employers globally.

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International Recruiting, Social Media Recruiting

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Comments
Comment by Jacob from JobMob on June 3, 2008 @ 2:16 pm

Great article, Jim. I have to admit that I’m surprised Israel isn’t in the Top 10 countries for technology, but perhaps it’s a question of sheer numbers.

Stumbled this one for you

Comment by Jim Stroud on June 4, 2008 @ 10:59 am

Thanks Jacob! I was surprised too that it was not in the top 10.

-Jim

Comment by Srinivas on June 4, 2008 @ 8:33 pm

Good post Jim. I wonder if recruiters are exploring Spaces on Windows Live for non-US Tech bloggers. Was surprised LinkedIn not on top of the list.

Comment by Mark Soper on June 13, 2008 @ 9:03 am

Jim, I’m afraid I missed this post originally but am very glad I found it. As a software engineer building technology to help tech professionals stay in the loop by relating social media content to career-relevant trends like programming language popularity, I see value in what you’ve done from another angle.

While this seems to have been written with recruiters in mind, this insight is also important to professionals looking to stay on top of their careers along technology and geography dimensions to make decisions about which languages to learn and where to look for work – an excellent example of what one might call “career analytics”.

The pointers to the Global Information Technology Report and TIOBE’s Programming Community Index are much appreciated as well.

I look forward to seeing more stuff like this, especially related to programming language trends.

Mark Soper

Comment by Russell Crowe on June 25, 2008 @ 1:17 pm

Fascinating post Jim. Always interested how Social Media can attract people for certain challenges, especially ones that involve finding talent like me.

Russell Crowe
International Recruiter/Sourcer
rcrowe34@yahoo.com

Russell
International Recruiter/Sourcer
rcrowe34@yahoo.com

Comment by grandmasterjer on August 7, 2008 @ 2:50 pm

z0mg. RC is a Sourcer??

Comment by grandmasterjer on August 7, 2008 @ 7:53 pm

hey russell i just sent you a couple emails – i believe i am the first to find all of these:

RC
PJ
sm
jd
hb

YAY ME

Comment by SourceCon Sourcing Dude on August 8, 2008 @ 2:24 pm

Hope you all had fun playing challenge number 3.

Thanks to Jim for letting me hijack one of his posts :-)

Out and see you in September

SourceCon Sourcing Dude

aka Russell Crowe

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