DevScanr vs LI Recruiter Lite

DevScanr is a new tech talent search and analytics platform. It’s designed for tech recruiters and CTOs / leads who occasionally hire. To help you decide if this tool matches your requirements, we’ve conducted a detailed comparison between it and well known LI Recruiter Lite. An experience with either platform is not necessary to understand the below content.

General Overview

As it follows from the above table, DevScanr is a specialized product for tech recruiters who share the interest or, at least, would like to experiment with skills-first talent search. Another part of our audience are CTOs or team leads occasionally solving recruitment tasks themselves.

DevScanr is strongly focused on STEM and IT in particular. If the majority of your recruitment tasks fall outside this spectrum – LinkedIn or another general-purpose platform will serve your needs better. And vice versa, if tech stars are in your sphere of interest – you may appreciate the convenience and unique features of a dedicated tool.

We described the difference between resume-first and skills-first approaches in details here and here. Please check these blog posts if you’re interested in or unfamiliar with the idea. In short, we think that skills-first is better because it is more efficient: provides more information to make a decision (resume + complementary data vs of just resume) and yields better prospect → lead → candidate ratios.

It’s finally worth mentioning that LI Recruiter Lite is a part of the huge LinkedIn platform and ecosystem that are mature and feature-rich. It’s priced accordingly higher. DevScanr is developed by a small team of HR-tech enthusiasts. The idea behind the comparison is that LI Recruiter Lite is well known, not that both solve the same tasks and/or are direct competitors.

Profile Data

The above table compares abstract profile sections. LinkedIn is a resume-centric platform with some extras like testimonials, certificates, etc. DevScanr evolves around so-called dev. profile which aims to be an objective representation of personal skills (mostly hard skills). The distinction boils down to the forementioned resume-first vs skills-first dichotomy.

LI Recruiter Lite is an end station in your recruitment journey. All data and functionality is there; you work in an isolated bubble, which is both good and bad. DevScanr is more of an entry point and a friendly helper. You can think of it as a convenience wrapper around GitHub and other public dev. platforms. Reinforced by AI and graph algorithms that take talent data (and your quick understanding of prospect strengths and weaknesses) to another level.

With DevScanr you’re encouraged to use other resources, including (free) LinkedIn, Google, etc. – if it’s necessary at some phase of your analysis. You get different information and insights from different sources.

DevScanr Talent Page UI

Search Filters

DevScanr is a sourcing platform at heart, so we put a lot of time to make search fast, intuitive and convenient. We described the difference between normalized and denormalized data and how it affects our practice here and here. The gist of the benefit is that you don’t have to spam “potentially matching” boolean queries anymore.

Another major difference between resume-centric and skills-centric approaches concerns years of experience. A factor that is as much critical for recruiters. Neither resume nor dev. profile will tell you exact experience of a person. Because it’s the most vague and subjective question. Does your company (or client) count freelance experience? How do they count part-time employment: for students or during a profession change?

The final point worth mentioning is a company- or industry-based filters. Due to the information available to each platform, it’s much easier to implement with resumes than dev. profiles that typically lack such historical data. Which does not mean you can’t access this data indirectly but, for now, there’s no way to filter or sort profiles by that.

DevScanr Talent Search UI

Candidate Engagement

Let’s be honest, LinkedIn was made for HR professionals, not for engineers or developers. They try hard to become a social network for both by adding courses, more social interactions, and whatnot. On the flip side, GitHub is a resource made for developers that also gradually obtained some social network features. Which audience prefer which platform is a complex and debatable question. DevScanr team believes that LinkedIn attracts developers more focused on career. There’re many job hoppers and money seekers concerned about impressions of their profiles more than the actual work. Good for them, not so good for their employers.

People who spend more time on GitHub (StackOverflow, or any other dev-first platform) are arguably more interested in qualification and personal tech achievements. They would rather read PRs, issues, or release notes than career-related articles. Subjectively, and on average, they are better performers.

DevScanr acknowledges a strong industry need for more effective candidate outreach and engagement. We have some novel ideas in this area, and we’re going to put even more effort into corresponding functionality. Personalized messages, connection points and graphs, common interests, etc. will be incorporated in DevScanr’s engagement block.

Instead of a Conclusion

This article highlighted the differences between LI Recruiter Lite and DevScanr. Both platforms are different enough to make 1-to-1 comparison difficult. A lot of LinkedIn functionality does not and will not exist on DevScanr. And there are features unique to DevScanr which LinkedIn can’t replicate while staying a general purpose recruitment platform.

LI Recruiter Lite claims that their features are “Best for individuals hiring just a few people a year, who need basic sourcing capabilities”. It’s a well-known, trusted and time-tested tool to which DevScanr can be seen as a supplement or as an alternative.

Who will benefit most from DevScanr?

IT Recruitment Agencies, Internal HR Teams

Recruitment teams should have various instruments in their sourcing arsenal. DevScanr adds a whole new database (GitHub by itself is pretty weak as a sourcing engine). It features a new approach that will take some time to master but, eventually, will increase the productivity of search, engagement, and hiring pipeline in general. It’s not only a platform for your recruiters – public talent pages are full of technical insights and are meant to be shared with employers. DevScanr has very few (if any) action limits, so it won’t become a bottleneck at scale.

Solo Recruiters

Freelancers prefer to look for candidates manually, using free tools and techniques such as X-ray. DevScanr helps them to save time on mundane tasks (boolean queries, data surfing) in favor of high-level things. Like actual communication and better project descriptions. Friendly prices and flexible tiers will preserve your one-person budget. DevScanr can easily become your best professional investment.

Small Companies, Startups

Some companies are too small or too young to support their own HR department. Tech guys concerned with hiring love DevScanr because of its focus on tech skills and GitHub metrics that are more clear and trustworthy than resumes. Maybe your potential colleagues already follow your organization or starred your public repositories? It’s only logical to start your search from them to minimize explanations and engagement.

Influencers, Bloggers

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