Outbound vs Inbound vs Referral Hiring

I’ve given a lot of thought this year to hiring. We continue to add to our team. We are very selective in our criteria, which means that finding good people becomes a numbers game – the more people that we can filter, the more successful the hiring process will be.

It has been easier to fill sales and marketing positions for our team than developer positions; so while we continue to hire for both, most of my thoughts are centered on growing the engineering team.

In this post, I share thoughts around 3 different pools of applicants:

Inbound

In the past, we have largely relied on inbound applicants. We’ve found many great people this way. These are those that apply for a job because they heard about us from their own search and proactive outreach. The big benefit of this group is that we already know they are interested and available. However, the vast majority of this group is unqualified for the work.

I’ve written previously about the vetting process we use to narrow down this pool of inbound applicants. That filtering process continues to work well.

Outbound

The inbound process is not yielding the flow of new hires that we need. So we’ve started to reach outbound. In some cases, we’ve reached out to people that we’ve attempted to hire in the past to see if there is a match now. In other cases, we have reached out with cold introductions inviting the prospects to consider the opportunity.

The outbound process yields a set of candidates that are more likely to be qualified for our positions. However, there is a high likelihood that those that we contact are unavailable for our positions for a variety of reasons.

Referral

We’ve had some great hires come by referral. These are when someone we trust provides a lead on the prospective hire. As a pool, this set of applicants is more likely to be higher quality than the inbound pool and also more likely to be willing to consider the position than the outbound pool (else their friend wouldn’t have provided the referral).

The tougher part of dealing with referrals is handling the decline of someone’s friend. However, this is mitigated largely by having hiring standards and processes in place through which all applicants must pass.

On rare occasion we’ve not required an applicant to go through our standard technical vetting process. This typically only occurs when we have other strong indicators of the applicants qualifications (such as strong contributions to online communities in our space or publicly available code that we can analyze).

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It takes time and effort to find the right people, more than is often anticipated. If you have any referrals for us, please let me know. We are looking for ace developers of C++, especially those with expertise in CUDA or OpenCL.

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What are your thoughts on the different inbound vs outbound vs referral hiring? What do you do to find the best candidates?

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