Do you source large volumes of technical candidates and you find manual sourcing boring and ineffective? People aggregators can scan millions of profiles in a second and provide a candidate’s full details including email addresses.
What are People Aggregators
People aggregators are search engines that look for people’s data across dozens of social media, community webs, public profiles or professional networks. It can combine a person’s profile from Linkedin, technical information from StackOverflow and contact information found on Facebook or Twitter. It creates its own database of profiles that is quickly searchable. Information that a human sourcer would take hours searching for is available almost instantly.
There are dozens of people aggregators on the market with the best-known ones being Hiretual, TalentBin, Entelo or AmazingHiring. In this article, I’ll focus on AmazingHiring that quickly became an essential tool for our recruitment team at STRV. It specializes in IT talents and indexes more than 200 million technical profiles, like front-end developers, back-end developers, IOS, Android, data scientists, QA engineers, UI/UX designers, DevOps, and other tech specialists.
AmazingHiring – Introduction
At first glance, AmazingHiring looks sort of like another LInkedIn. You can do searches based on skills, locations, job titles, employers, education or keywords while using the AND, NOT and OR operators. You get a list of candidates and you open their detailed profiles to see their work history, skills, education and so on. Unlike
Search with synonyms
AmazingHiring automatically includes synonyms in your search to make it broader and not to forget anyone. This is particularly helpful when you search for technologies. A candidate that knows javascript doesn’t have to have the actual word “javascript” on his profile, but he might mention a javascript-related technology such as React or Angular. Amazing hiring automatically includes these related technologies into your search for you.
Search result
Once the search is done, you can use additional filters to narrow it down even more. You can filter by seniority, length in position, and available contact information. You can also look for “Hidden starts” – candidates without a LinkedIn profile.
When clicking on a candidate, you open up their full profile and see his/her photo, work history, education, skills, and social profiles. Unlike Linkedin, the profile is not made by users, but it’s generated by consolidating relevant information AmazingHiring could find from public sources such as Github or Stackoverflow and therefore provides a better picture of the candidate’s technical stack.
The most amazing feature is the contact information. The system is pretty successful in finding a candidate’s email and approximately 95% of all profiles do have the contact address. This is the single most useful feature that can save you a lot of time. You don’t have to buy InMails, include messages in Linkedin invites or source emails one by one.
Candidate Pre-Screening
Analysis of professional activity on the web reveals candidate’s tangible (rather than declared) skills — a critical distinction for selecting top few prospects among thousands found. AmazingHiring uses AI-based algorithms to analyze candidates‘ background and rate talents based on their professional activity. It helps boost and improve the pre-screening stage. It means you can verify a candidate’s expertise and reveal top performers.
Organizing the pipeline
There are several useful features to organize the talent pipeline. You can create folders and move candidates to them, change a candidate’s status inside folders for each recruitment stage, tag candidates and write notes. This can even replace a simple ATS.
AmazingHiring provides integration with other systems as well. It can be connected with an ATS, such as Greenhouse and simply transfer candidates there. We also integrate it with our mailing system called MixMax to launch bulk email sequences.
Chrome extension
AmazingHiring has a free Chrome extension that allows you to find accounts on various social networks. The plugin activates when you browse someone’s profile on Facebook, Linkedin, GitHub or another social network. A console opens at the side of your screen where you can find additional information about the person such as their email and social profiles.
How we use it
Having access to millions of technical profiles with their full contact information while integrating it into our mailing tool to handle hundreds of email sequences is very tempting. Spreading recruitment spam has never been easier. But it would be a short-sighted tactic. After all, it’s still the quality of your message, precise targeting, your reputation on the market, work with the community and the power of the brand that really makes the difference. AmazingHiring is a great tool that should be used wisely.
Costs and ROI
One license of AmazingHiring costs $3,600 USD per year, which is significantly cheaper than other top aggregators. Moreover, it saves an incredible amount of time. All you have to do is prepare the search criterions, play with filters to narrow down your results and select the profiles with the most potential to contact. Super quick and super easy.
I’m a big fan of automated sourcing tools. Finding data on the internet is a job that machines can do better. Humans should use their creativity to rather focus on communicating with candidates or delivering a great experience. A technical recruiter equipped with AmazingHiring can really multiply his capability and delivery.
There’s a growing concern about privacy protection, and also social networks tend to lock their data and monetize them by themselves (e.g. Linkedin). People aggregators rely on publicly accessible data and might have a tough time in the future. But for the time being, they represent a solid competitive advantage with a great ROI.