Talent mapping is the identification of a group of individuals that fit a certain job profile. The profiles can also be targeted by industry and location. In our last post by Anastasia Antonova, she talked about talent mapping and tools useful for the process. Now we’d like to talk about how to do this from scratch using free resources.

This approach to talent mapping is done by aggregating; by sourcing from multiple sites. First, identify the talent pool. Then identify all the sites / social networks that this talent pool may gather in. Then factor in your location if you are building a talent map for a specific area.

Real World Example

For example, let’s say you need to identify all the Full-Stack Javascript developers in the Kiev, Ukraine area. Start by building out a list of potential sites with accompanying searches for each one:

1. GitHub – Target profiles with a Google string:

site:github.com “block or report” (nodejs OR node OR react OR reactjs OR expressjs OR express OR fullstack OR “full stack”) javascript (kyiv OR kiev OR ukraine) -inurl:followers -inurl:following

2. Meetup – Target many groups and their users:

https://www.meetup.com/Kyiv-ReactJS-Meetup/

Once you have your group targeted, you can source individually or extract them all via an API call and do some cool data enrichment automatically.

3. LinkedIn – source within LinkedIn and from Google:

site:linkedin.com/in (developer OR “software engineer” OR programmer) (fullstack OR “full stack” OR nodejs OR node OR react OR reactjs) javascript (“kiev region, ukraine” OR “kiev ukraine”)

4. Stack Overflow:

site:stackoverflow.com/users (fullstack OR “full stack” OR nodejs OR node OR react OR reactjs) javascript (kyiv OR kiev OR ukraine)

5. Facebook (Search by groups):

https://www.facebook.com/ReactKyiv/

Or by individual profiles that have specific job titles / experience (search within Facebook’s interface or using this Google string):

site:facebook.com “profile photo” (fullstack OR “full stack” OR nodejs OR node OR “reactjs” OR “react” OR “javascript”) (“software engineer” OR developer OR programmer) (kyiv OR kiev) ukraine

6. Personal Websites:

“about me” (engineer OR developer OR programmer) (nodejs OR node OR react OR reactjs OR expressjs OR express OR fullstack OR “full stack”) javascript (kyiv OR kiev) (site:ua OR ukraine) -jobs -site:linkedin.com -site:github.com

7. Javascript User Groups:

There are many of these out there. Besides those found on Meetup, you can find ones hosted on other platforms:

https://github.com/nodeschool/kyiv

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Clicking on the “Watch” button will reveal the entire list of users who are interested or a part of the group. Many are in the right area and have the right experience.

8. Country specific sites (Like Dou, which can get you user profiles with strings like this):

site:dou.ua/users (developer OR “software engineer” OR programmer) (fullstack OR “full stack” OR nodejs OR node OR react OR reactjs) javascript

Skipping Sites?

Now I realize that I didn’t talk about sites like ZoomInfo, ContactOut, Crunchbase or others, but that’s because they would only work if the engineers actually wrote something like “Javascript Engineer” or “Full Stack Engineer” in their title. Those tools are good if the job can be expressed as a title like Product Engineer or Marketing Director. For searches related to a specific programming language, you will need to source using the other sites that I mentioned earlier in this post. For example, a search like this in Google:

site:zoominfo.com/p (reactjs OR react OR javascript) (“software engineer” OR developer OR programmer) (kyiv OR kiev OR ukraine)

…Will only yield a small amount of matches in comparison to the other sites. So it’s up to you if you wish to include them in your results or to even bother.

In Conclusion

There are more sites bedsides these, and there will be duplicates between all of them. The most efficient way to deal with this is to use an aggregation tool or scraper and remove duplicates automatically. As you can see, this process works really well as long as you understand how to pull the right candidates from each site and what information is available to you on each site. This list of sites and methods will change depending on your search. Some sites do not work for certain searches! If you are wondering how the above search strings were created, please check out SourceCon Academy for all the answers.

I hope you enjoyed this post. This is my holiday gift to the SourceCon community. Hope you like!

“When fishing, cast the right net in the right waters”