3 tips to hire top talent on Reddit

If you’ve never heard of Reddit, it’s a social media platform that has been around since 2005. It’s a forum where members can discuss, curate and promote content through voting. Despite an astounding 52 million active users, this platform is typically overlooked by recruiters.

In a previous blog post, we established why Reddit is a relevant talent attraction channel - especially for tech startups.

But how can you implement the channel into your talent attraction strategy? We’ve gathered 3 tips to help you attract top talent for your startup.

1. Join relevant communities

There’s more to Reddit than memes, opinions and inside jokes. In fact, you can find more than 2.8 million different subreddits and 27 million unique monthly visitors to technology communities.

There is a community for every topic imaginable. So, if you’re looking for candidates with specific technical skills (i.e. engineering), joining the subreddit for that particular skill should be your first move.

Not only will you find a forum where the relevant candidates are present, but it will also be the perfect place to brush up on your industry lingo and familiarize yourself with the challenges that candidates in your industry are facing. You may even find out what they’re looking for in a new job.

Learn how Digital Hub Denmark reached more than 4 million tech users on Reddit by engaging and advertising in relevant tech communities.

There are also plenty of communities that are relevant for recruiters and active job seekers to explore, such as:

• r/hiring
• r/forhire
• r/jobs
• r/techjobs
• r/resumes
• r/iwantoutjobs (Jobs for people who want to relocate/expatriate)

2. Sourcing for talent

If you’re an experienced recruiter, you’re probably familiar with all the search engine tricks to find the perfect candidate. However, Reddit is not your usual search engine and although it may seem more time-consuming to find talent, you can lessen the workload by using Reddit boolean search strings.

Let’s say you’re looking for a developer in Denmark. Your Boolean search string could look like this: “developer” AND “for hire” Denmark

As you can see, this search immediately results in us finding a developer looking for a job on Reddit:

3. Engage before you reach out

You can’t follow the same recruitment procedure on Reddit as on other channels. This also means that you can’t just send an InMail or private message. You have to build trust before you offer a job. On top of this, you have to be an active user.

The Reddit community is a tough crowd and self-promotion is a red flag for Reddit users. If they find your message or even just your comments on a subreddit suspicious, they will look at your profile.

Some of the things Redditors usually check for are 1) how long you’ve been on the platform, 2) how high/low your Karma Score is and 3) you’re previous posts. If they can see that you haven’t engaged in any subreddits or the only thing you post is job ads, they will most likely not engage with you.

So how can you go about this?

You can start by genuinely engaging in the different communities, for instance by commenting on posts, sharing information and even joining discussions. If you have spotted a potential candidate, you can start a conversation by commenting on their posts - and then reaching out to them.

Some even recommend that recruiters try to find candidates on other social media networks for the actual outreach (e.g. LinkedIn) if you can figure out their identity. Tech talents will often give away their identity pretty easily if they share their Github profile along with a project in one of the subreddits.

It’s a long game, but as mentioned before, there is an untapped goldmine of talented techies on Reddit that you probably wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Even though Reddit may be unconventional, you can find tech talent who are not as active on other than traditional social media networks like LinkedIn or job boards like Glassdoor.

As mentioned above, Reddit can be an excellent add-on to your talent attraction strategy combined with other channels. Are you ready to change the way you recruit?