Sorry about the clickbaity headline but now that you are here, riddle me this.
Did you know that there is StackOverflow is a truly open source platform where you can query their database in SQL format and get an output of all the developers who contribute to StackOverflow?
Developers are notoriously difficult to hire. I tell my friends – “If you search hard enough, you will find god but not a great developer”. Jokes aside, the pain with hiring amazing developers is that some of them can’t be found at all the usual places. Least of all LinkedIn. The usual recruiting playbook doesn’t work very well with this community. They have an aversion to job boards and reaching out to them on LinkedIn generally doesn’t really work very well.
One way we find developers is building boolean searches on google and going through specific sites like GitHub and StackOverflow. It takes hours and has a really low signal to noise ratio. However, there is a better way to search stack overflow than building boolean queries. You can generate SQL queries to query data.stackexchange.com. For example, let’s say you are hiring developers who have experience with python in Bay Area, you get about 135 top notch developers. Going too wide, let’s go a little narrow and find everyone talking about Django in Bay Area. You get a list of 18 incredible developers from companies like Google, VMWare and some people who have written professional books on programming! I could not find 6 of these developers on LinkedIn. That means if you sourcing only on LinkedIn, you will be missing out 1/3rd of a qualified candidate database.
Wanna try it out yourself?
Remember, if you are looking for people in a particular language, make sure you include all the different versions of the language. That way you won’t miss out on some great candidates.
Query to source python developers on stackoverflow
SELECT u.Id AS [User Link],
u.DisplayName,
u.Location,
u.WebsiteUrl,
u.AboutMe,
u.Views,
u.UpVotes,
u.DownVotes,
u.Age
FROM Users u
JOIN (
SELECT DISTINCT UserId
FROM Badges
WHERE LOWER(Name) IN (‘python’, ‘boost-python’, ‘cpython’, ‘ipython’, ‘ipython-notebook’, ‘python-2.6’, ‘python-2.7’, ‘python-3.x’, ‘python-3.6’, ‘python-asyncio’, ‘python-3.5’, ‘python-datetime’, ‘python-decorators’, ‘python-docx’, ‘python-imaging-library’, ‘python-3.4’, ‘python-idle’, ‘python-mock’, ‘python-module’, ‘python-internals’, ‘python-multiprocessing’, ‘python-multithreading’, ‘python-requests’, ‘python-sphinx’, ‘python-unicode’, ‘python-xarray’, ‘python-3.3’, ‘mysql-python’) AND
Class IN (1, 2, 3) AND
TagBased = 1
) tag_badges
ON tag_badges.UserId = u.Id
WHERE LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%bay area%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%san francisco%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%santa clara%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%san jose%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%silicon valley%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%cupertino%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%palo alto%’
Query to source Django developers on Stackoverflow
SELECT u.Id AS [User Link],
u.DisplayName,
u.Location,
u.WebsiteUrl,
u.AboutMe,
u.Views,
u.UpVotes,
u.DownVotes,
u.Age
FROM Users u
JOIN (
SELECT DISTINCT UserId
FROM Badges
WHERE LOWER(Name) IN (‘django’, ‘django-admin’, ‘django-cms’, ‘django-class-based-views’, ‘django-forms’, ‘django-models’, ‘django-migrations’, ‘django-authentication’, ‘django-celery’, ‘django-allauth’, ‘django-queryset’, ‘django-socialauth’, ‘django-testing’, ‘django-users’, ‘django-rest-framework’, ‘django-orm’) AND
Class IN (1, 2, 3) AND
TagBased = 1
) tag_badges
ON tag_badges.UserId = u.Id
WHERE LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%bay area%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%san francisco%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%santa clara%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%san jose%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%silicon valley%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%cupertino%’ OR
LOWER(Location) LIKE ‘%palo alto%’
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