Tech Talent Search & Analytics

DevScanr is exclusively a sourcing tool 🔭. The team behind the project has a decade of experience in related fields. We have worked and collaborated with staffing companies and industry experts. We’re going to blog more about our vision in the near future.

Only public data is read from GitHub, StackOverflow and other sources. The data is stored in anonymized form, excluding all privacy concerns. As for our clients... everything, obviously, stays confidential and is never exposed. For more information please check our Privacy Policy or ask us directly.

No, it’s not. We think that resume platforms are overvalued and there’re easier and less expensive ways to close positions. Best talent are already employed (statistically speaking) so their resumes are always out of date. There’re, indeed, millions of accounts on LinkedIn but what % of them visits the site at least monthly?

We strongly believe that quality beats quantity in recruitment. That it’s appropriate to explore new ways to evaluate, reach and engage candidates. Having noted this, DevScanr aggregates talent resume links, among other contacts, so you can freely visit all associated URLs. Unlimited number of times!

Nothing wrong, if you’re satisfied with single-digit response rates... More and more engineers, especially on the stronger side, abandon their resumes and corresponding sites. Why? They hate manipulative feeds, hate being spammed with irrelevant proposals and advertisements. Unread DMs accumulate, answers to everyone would take forever. One day they simply stop to care 🤷‍♂️.

Which does not mean they’re forever unreachable. If you think the world ouside of LinkedIn consists of “already hired”, “cold contacts” – you seriously miss the point. The same devs are being actively hired via their friends, subscription threads, events, etc. alternative medias and means.

We believe that your (cold lead) response rates should start at 10%, not end. That hiring can be much more productive. But to achieve that, it’s necessary to learn who your candidates really are. What are their preferences, interests, social connections. The best offers are individualized. Resumes are too formal, too generic, too boring to extract the information you need.

Recruiting platforms are mostly expensive, all-in-one solutions with rich functionality. Besides search, they include layers of automation, messaging, integrations. The downside is a steep price, typically starting from $100 per month per seat. Some platforms, like SeekOut or AmazingHiring, are even more expensive ($400+). They provide massive databases, not limited to tech talent.

The opposite side of the spectrum is represented by numerous cheap (or free) browser extensions, tools for creating boolean queries, etc. “one-trick pony” tools. They often lack support and functionality.

DevScanr aims to be a middle ground between both extremes. It’s exclusively a sourcing tool, focused on tech talent, with a number of unique features. It’s designed to integrate in your pipelines seamlessly. And we want to keep the service affordable for all recruiters.

Mainstream platforms earn money via limits on key actions. For example, LinkedIn Recruiter allows “30 messages” and “20 searches” for $180 per seat, per month. It’s expected and desired that your credits exhaust fast. DevScanr applies only a (yet informal) Fair Use policy for our clients and partners. No artificial rules to make you overpay!

Think of GitHub as a social network for IT people. Even if it’s not positioned this way – it factually is. While some other competitive platforms, like Gitlab, handle a lot of commercial traffic, GitHub stays the go-to platform for the open source. The majority of important libraries, across many ecosystems, are maintained there. Which creates a synergetic effect.

There’re a few major benefits for sourcing on such platforms. You catch people you’d never notice or reach on LinkedIn. Talented students who managed to collect follower bases before their first resumes. Seasoned developers, who don’t open their LI pages anymore (being tired of generic & spammy job messages). Introvers, more focused on code than on social activities. People who dislike how their resumes look on LI and hosting their own resume sites. So many categories...

To be fair, some % of engineers don’t trust Microsoft and avoid both LinkedIn and GitHub. Some are obsessed with HackerRank... some ignore it. The point is: it’s important to learn which communities / groups of people prefer which platform, and to act accordingly.

Another benefit of GitHub are social proofs that can be extremely helpful. DevScanr calculates a GitHub rank (using an algorithm similar to what Google/Yandex use to evalute web pages). The rank is derived from a number of followers but it’s much more involved than a simple count. To simplify, a person followed by Linus Torwalds alone would rank much higher than someone followed by an army of bots. Unfortunately, he does not follow anyone :)

So there’s Rank and Experience filters. Now by simply setting both to HIGH RANK + LOW EXPERIENCE combination you discover engineers who are ahead of others, at least in the eyes of the community. A trivial but powerful way to find promising interns or juniors.

The same network of follower/following links can be used to find social connections and seek recommendations. Cold contacts become warm if you simply refer to the right people. Or hot, if you’re referred by them... The most powerful efficiency boosters are hidden there, for those who knows how and where to dig. Or perhaps it’s easier to keep bombarding more LI inboxes with more “amazing opportunities” instead.