Ok so usually sorry I don’t post enough on here when I dropped the very modest $$$ to get my own dot com I foolishly promised I would post more often and well the real world got in the way of that so sorry for anyone expecting weekly updates I officially give up ever being consistent. But fingers crossed I have a list of 4 or 5 other posts I want to write so maybe I can get more into blogging. As always I have digressed.

This post started as much more of a rant after seeing someone in DBR share a post written by a certain CRM or “talent operating system” as they prefer to be called on how to source on GitHub. 9/10s of it was total crap! So here is my hopefully more honest and sweary way to source on Github

Accept that it isn’t easy or and there are no perfect solutions!

I see lots of people acting like setting up a github account is a silver bullet and that you’ve found the candidates that you could never find before and it will be an unlimited mine of hires for you. You will find candidates that have lots of information about them, their contact details readily available, some who have an alias and 1 repo from 4 years ago, and of course sods law says that the latter is the superstar engineer.

Learn the how to navigate the profiles and repos.

Knowing how to quickly find someones commits in their personal projects is the quickest ways to get email addresses (If you don’t know how to find emails on github there are a million blogs already written on the subject). If you find commits that have a company email double check their LinkedIn for how long they have worked their for and check again for repos outside this time frame and check some of the non company repos for other contributors maybe they have a 2nd account, or don’t makes my life easier. 🙂

Quantity != Quality!!!!

My biggest bug bear is people who say the following “The number of followers is a great indicator of the skills or reputation of an Engineer” or “50 or more stars is a great indicator of high quality work” and it’s total crap. By that logic a repo with these stats would be one of the most technically advanced works going.

In fact it is a compilation of the beginner program “Hello World” written in every programming language (please note this is no commentary of the abilities of the engineer who created this in fact he looks like a pretty kick ass Linux engineer).

Read the descriptions and read me files, some can be a little dense from time to time but this is a great excuse to spend time with your engineers, ask them to review some profiles with you and ask if this repo is of interest or not.

Also be aware of thinking lots of followers means a good engineer. Some are great engineers, some are just people who were popular at university or doing some basic work that lots of engineers need to use in the early days of learning to code. Like I said, no silver bullets to sourcing on github.

Tangent Source!

This is the closest thing to a silver bullet when it comes to sourcing on Github. Tangent Source!!! Start by identifying your top engineers on github look at who they are following. That’s a pretty great endorsement of someone’s quality. Look through those profiles and look at those who those people are following. Look at who they have collaborated with, search for people from their previous companies. Yes I appreciate this isn’t perfect even your best engineer will probably follow a crap engineer or 2 and from a diversity point of view this can be a problematic approach if you don’t have the most diverse workforce to begin with.

Instant Data Scraper

Not often do I give Egg Tart any credit but fair play to a certain Mr Lakhani for helping me figure this tool out. In truth it’s not that hard but it’s a massive time saver. My advice: find this Chrome extension, install it and play around until you figure it out. My quick hints don’t try to be quicker than 20 seconds per page, don’t pull any list with EU candidates that you can’t action in 24 hours else you deserve the GDPR police coming and kicking your arse, accept you need to kiss a few frogs to find the best candidates (the search I did trying to find to find iOS Engineer at Twitter but found every iOS Engineer who included their twitter handle on their profile page springs to mind here).

Search for CVs

In a hurry to get those roles filled? Got hiring managers breathing down your neck for a role they only told you about last week? Recruitment Manager threatened to PIP you or given you a crappy review to tank your bonus because you pointed out that they said they were “Data Driven” but they have totally miscalculated pacing and passthrough rates? Yep been there and it sucks no names but if you know you know. I digressed again but damn it’s cathartic isn’t it.

Anyway fortunately for us many engineers post their CVs to Github and you can also easily filter by when they posted it just play around with some basic boolean and the pretty simple to understand advanced search functionality and you might get some quick wins.

Personalise, Personalise, Personalise!

Seriously you spent 20 minutes trying to find out who this obscure GitHub username belongs to, digging their email out of a 7 year old commit, and checking with your engineer if it’s as good as it sounds and you are going to send a generic template message?!?!

Mention repos you found them from, mention what caught your eye, mention your current employees who follow them or who they follow. GitHub profiles are a damn treasure trove of things to personalise about them. One thing I will say is don’t try to act like you know more than you do 99% of the time you make an arse out of yourself you are an expert in finding people not coding and there is no shame in that.

Anyway that’s my rant/point of view hopefully I didn’t lose too many of you in my many digressions and you got some help out of this. If not feel free to call me something insulting in the comments and let the fun begin.

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