As a tech recruiter, one of the most challenging aspects of my job is negotiating with top talent in the industry. The competition is brutal, and it takes more than just offering a generous salary package and a bunch of benefits to be able to hire talent. It requires a set of negotiation tactics that can help to attract and recruit the best tech professionals.

I want to share some effective negotiation tactics that have helped me secure strong tech talent for my clients. These tactics are mirroring, tactical empathy, and labeling the candidate’s emotions.

Mirroring: building rapport and establishing trust

Mirroring is a subtle technique that involves mimicking the other person’s body language, tone of voice, and choice of words to build rapport and establish trust. It can make the candidate feel more comfortable and relaxed, reducing tension and creating a favorable negotiating environment.

To effectively mirror a candidate, you need to pay attention to their tone of voice and choice of words. 

At the earlier stages of the recruitment process, you have written text (reach-out messages) or phone/video calls as your only way to communicate with the potential candidate. 

Since you don’t see each other in person, as a recruiter, you should focus more on their choice of words and their tone of voice. However, be careful when matching someone else’s tone of voice. If they sound frustrated or aggressive, your tone of voice should remain calm and balanced. So instead of mimicking them, try to establish trust with a calm and measured attitude.

Matching the tone of voice

Matching someone’s tone of voice starts with analyzing their communication style. Before I even start writing to the candidate, I take a moment to explore their style. I look at the language they use when posting on LinkedIn or other social media channels or when replying to comments or posts. This gives me a pretty good understanding of how the candidate likes to communicate. 

Once I have analyzed the candidate’s communication style, I try to use a similar language style when writing to them. I use words and phrases they are familiar with, and I try to use a similar tone and voice.

However, keeping it professional is key since you represent a company, and the candidate probably doesn’t know you in person.

Another key aspect of matching someone’s tone of voice is ensuring your message is clear and concise. This means I avoid complex language or technical jargon unless the person uses them themselves. 

Lastly, when matching someone else’s tone of voice, it’s important not to lose yours or fake a communication style. It’s not about duplicating the other person’s style; it’s more about finding common ground that works for both of you. 

Tactical empathy: understanding the candidate’s perspective

Tactical empathy is putting yourself in the candidate’s shoes and understanding their perspective. By doing this, you can gain valuable insights into what motivates them, what their concerns are, and what they are looking for in a job. This information can help you tailor your negotiation approach to meet their needs and interests better.

To practice tactical empathy, I do active listening. I pay close attention to what the candidate is saying. I then ask open-ended questions encouraging them to share more about their perspective. The more I learn about their attitude, objections, concerns, and needs, the better I can tailor my negotiation approach. 

I sometimes also use one of the so-called reflective listening techniques – I summarize what they have said and check if I have understood their point of view correctly. For example, “I don’t want to change my job right now. I am happy doing what I do in my current company especially considering that they are a growing startup and I got a big stock share there.” I could add to this, “It seems it’s not an easy decision to leave a startup that offers you an interesting job and great stock options.” 

Instead of jumping into bringing arguments and shouting about facts on why they should leave their current job, I summarize what they say, and this helps the candidate feel heard. 

Labeling the candidate’s emotions: validating their feelings

We all experience emotions, whether positive or negative, about our jobs. Labeling the candidate’s emotions involves validating their positive and negative feelings. By doing this, I show the candidate that I understand and respect their emotions. This helps me build trust and strengthen my relationship with the person I am in contact with. 

When talking to the candidate, I pay close attention to their verbal and nonverbal cues (if the conversation happens in person). When I notice the candidate is experiencing a particular emotion, I try to label it by saying something like, “It sounds like you value work-life balance a lot” or “It sounds like you feel excited about an opportunity where you can take the lead on X, Y, Z” or “It looks like you are frustrated by the lack of proper processes for managing X, Y, Z.”

By doing this, I am demonstrating empathy and showing that I am paying attention to their concerns. This can help to build trust. Later, when the time is right, I can use all that has been said to me to try and “sell” the work-life balance or the nicely-established processes in a company I am offering them to join. 

Final notes

Mirroring, tactical empathy, and labeling the candidate’s emotions are great negotiation tactics I use regularly. However, the key point for success here is that I don’t rush their decision-making. I’ve had candidates on my radar for months, if not years, whom I’ve been in constant contact with. I kept listening to their perspective and gathering insights about them until I could offer them the right opportunity that would minimize their objections (that I already knew of) and maximize the possibility of them agreeing to attend an interview or speak with my client.

Author: Tatev Blbulyan

Why Hire Female Leaders (especially in a small market) 

How many women do you know in leadership positions? Are they good? How do you feel about having more female leaders in a small market like Armenia? 

In small markets, gender diversity is still a pretty sensitive topic. We don’t talk about it enough. 

However, women bring a set of unique values to organizations. And I feel strongly about hiring them. 

Gender diversity and inclusion are critical issues that have started being addressed in certain areas of the world. However, despite progress in many fields, discrimination against women in small markets still prevails. 

Women often face unique challenges that most men do not – for example, they are often perceived as too emotional, not confident, or assertive enough. 

As a female leader, it takes a lot of effort to get business-critical decisions approved. You need to provide enough context and enough evidence to make your voice heard and your judgment supported by other women and men equally. 

Additionally, you often have to explain things (and yourself), unlike men whose thinking or decisions are not questioned so often. To be fair, a lot of male leaders do support women. But, as a female leader, I’ve heard things like, “Yes, problems exist, but don’t overthink them. Just act and do what you are good at.”

My understanding is that you overcome a problem by thinking it through, speaking it out, and opening up a conversation around it. Experiencing a problem and ignoring its existence is like hiding an elephant in a room, isn’t it? 

So here is the problem – as a woman leading a tech recruitment agency in a small market, I think not believing in women and not giving them the chance to lead teams is a huge mistake based on gender bias.

Why should business owners or managers in a small market consider hiring women? The answer is – women bring a unique perspective and skillset to the table that can help a business grow and thrive. 

Women are often better at addressing the unique needs of female employees

One of the first housekeeping and women-centric decisions I made when I joined meettal was introducing period leave for women and adding hygiene products for women in the office. These two simple yet oftentimes overlooked little perks usually make a big difference for women employees by significantly affecting their comfort and productivity. 

Employee engagement is boosted

Research shows that companies with more women in leadership positions have higher levels of employee engagement. This is because women tend to be more collaborative and inclusive, which creates a positive work environment. Employees who feel valued and included are more likely to be motivated to perform their best work. 

Women in top leadership roles increase productivity and earnings

Studies have also shown that companies with more women in leadership positions tend to have better financial performance. 

A study by Credit Suisse concluded that companies with 25% of women in decision-making roles had a 4% higher average return on investment, and companies with 50% of women in senior leadership had a 10% higher cash flow return on investment.

This is likely because female leaders tend to be more risk-averse and focus on long-term goals, which can lead to more sustainable growth.

Female leaders bring a diversity of thought to the table

Women have historically been underrepresented in leadership positions. That’s why now they bring a unique perspective to the table – ideas and values never really heard of before, especially in male-dominated markets. 

While it may take us, women, more time to validate a decision, our unique values can lead to a better workplace environment, improved employee morale, and boosted work ethics. Because we have to explain our choices so often, we are often more careful and thoughtful in our decision-making, which can result in more long-term success for a business. 

Disclaimer: representation matters, but it’s not a rule

Having women in leadership positions is a powerful message that women, too, can achieve their career goals. However, breaking down barriers and creating a more diverse workforce might not be the top priority for an average business in a small market. 

For business owners, a few business-critical priorities are employee engagement and productivity and higher return on investment. If a female leader can get the business there, they should be given the chance to do that. 

I am by no means arguing that women lead better than men do. However, women should be provided an equal opportunity to lead and help a business thrive. Because, more often than not, women prove to be great at doing that. 

Author: Tatev Blbulyan

If you’re having goosebumps listening to the word plagiarism, I can relate! Let’s explore this a little further.

A Brief Historical Overview: Plagiarism as a phenomenon is not new but it got the official name back in 1601 referring to literary theft aka copy/pasting, paraphrasing, accidental/image/data stealing. 

It can be a social media post or an academic work, a Pinterest image, or a Youtube video: if you’re copying, then you are plagiarising. 

Why Do People Plagiarise: It’s similar to asking why people steal. The short answer: They lack their own ideas.

 

The longer answer includes reasons like:

• Using others’ thoughts seems easier.
• People can be lazy by nature.
• Time constraints.
• Lack of self-confidence/knowledge.
• Not realizing they’re plagiarising.
• Fear of failing with their own ideas.
• Disregarding ethical honesty.
• Believing they won’t get caught.

How to Overcome Plagiarism and Stay Real: If you can relate yourself to any of the above points, that’s great. Why? Since you’re one step behind from making another plagiarism. We could go point by point, but at the same time we can just state- Stop it! 

Anyway, if you’re still struggling with this:

• Develop research skills to form your own conclusions.
• Prioritise tasks to have time for original thinking.
• Work on your writing skills. Even if you are expressing your thoughts but doing it with someone else’s style of writing doesn’t keep you away from plagiarism
• Starting with citations could be a thing for the first steps. So be aware of how to use them (see at the end of the article).
• Ethical honesty/awareness, anything that starts with the word ethical is already a matter of subjective perception, still, there are non-written rules we should follow.

Impact of Plagiarism on Business:

• Reputation Damage: Copying damages a company’s reputation, leading to lost trust and customers.
• Legal Consequences
• Financial loss to the other company which can later also result in legal issues 
• Missed Partnership Opportunities.

What to Do If You Are Plagiarised: Well, you can write such an article as I did 🙂 Or if that doesn’t work you can take action by gathering evidence and contacting the plagiarizer. For academic or professional work, involve authorities if you’ve copyrighted your content.

Final Notes: In today’s AI-dominated world, where the temptation to use tools like ChatGPT/Bard at every opportunity is increasing rapidly, keep your genuineness, since at the end of the day that’s one of the core things that makes us differ and stand out.

References:

Fixgerald, Fixgerald website, August 17, 2023. https://fixgerald.com/blog/plagiarism-in-business

ChatGPT, ChatGPT website, August 17, 2023. Chat.openai.com, proofreading

Author: Rita Marinosyan

Pattern-based sourcing (PBS): How to Use Retrospective Information for the Company’s Best

Hire like-minded people

We often use the hyped expression “cultural fit”. In the same breath, do we understand our own company’s lifestyle, and can we determine if a person suits us or not?

Pattern-Based Sourcing (PBS) or sourcing based on the retrospective information of the company is the way to decrease the number of rejections based on culture fit. PBS is a framework to put into use the information about the current employees and lessen the number of rejections on the last stages of the employment process. Dean Da Costa is a prominent supporter of that method, I will try to elaborate on the topic and give practical use to the theory.

Referrals

When thinking about PBS, the first hiring tool  that comes to mind is the referral program. If you want to find candidates similar to your team, it makes sense to ask your existing employees to be your recruiter. Make it clear for the team, explain why you approached them, point out what   you like about them and what kind of people you are looking for. If you skip that part and let people decide on their own you will end up with recklessly chosen candidates – your employees may enjoy their company, but they are not necessarily suitable for the position.

 

Active PBS

Before jumping to an active phase of PBS you need to put together as much information about your team as possible. Here is what exactly you need:

1. Current role in the company
2. Current responsibilities, stack, the grade
3. Ex-employers
4. Previous positions
5. Education (grade)
6. University
7. Local / Relocation
8. Source of hiring: how did we find that exact candidate?
9. Social media profiles and accounts on the professional networks
10. The exact date he/she joined the company

We will use this data to level up the sourcing game.

Step 1: Find people inside the company 

Consider team members who are engaged in the most similar activities. If it’s a new position or if you, for example, have never recruited people working on that stack look for people working on the same grade but in other departments. It’s important to find 3-5 people so that the sample is representative. Choose the best performers if the number of staff allows you.

Step 2: Accumulate information about those employees

Collect the information on the points listed above and look for patterns. Maybe, all of them are alumni of the same University. That’s rare, that is why look at their major. Maybe all of them studied Computer Science or Physics and decided to go with programming only after. Or all your best employees used to work at the financial companies at some point. Or maybe your best data scientists were analytics who later on found their interest in data science.

Step 3: Analyse the results

Not to spread the efforts in all directions possible, you can ask your target group about their social footprint. Make a detailed table and ask them to fill in all the info:

The channels are different for every position. If you are looking for a designer, don’t forget to mention Behance and Dribbble. Looking for a JS developer, include NPM.JS, while for data scientists the source is Kaggle.

Step 4. Start sourcing candidates at the chosen channels

The information we’ve collected will help with the first iteration – to identify  the most suitable candidates. And only after screening those profiles there is a point to move forward. It’s good to source from 25 up to 250 candidates for the first iteration. The number depends on the position and the location. In case you have sourced 500 and more candidates in the first iteration, that means you can  narrow your search by finding more patterns.

Let’s go through the cases and see how we can come up with the searching query for different positions:

> position: big data engineer with java AND kafka

> location: UK

> university: cambridge

> channel: linkedin

> string: linkedin university search string

> position: backend engineer with python

> location: Denmark

> university_major: “computer science”

> channel: linkedin

> special_note: not a freelancer

> linkedin x-ray string: site:dk.linkedin.com/in OR site:dk.linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir “computer science” python (intitle:engineer OR intitle:developer OR intitle:programmer) -intitle:freelance -intitle:freelancer

> position: ui ux designer

> location: Germany

> channel: behance

> special_note: with programming skills

> behance x-ray string: site:behance.net “work experience” germany (“ui” OR “user interface”) (html OR css OR javascript OR frontend OR “front end”) -inurl:following -inurl:”collections_following” -inurl:appreciated -inurl:followers

> position: mobile engineer w/ swift

> location: Sweden

> channel: stack overflow, github

> special_note: high open source activities

> string: github top rank by git-awards, SoF users rating

Special Notes are the data we’ve retrieved from our employees, and are ready to use in sourcing new candidates.

Pattern-based sourcing and D&I

At first sight, PBS contradicts the principles of diversity and inclusion, as looking for like-minded people we can end up hiring look-alike people. All the developers will come from Cambridge, Oxford, and ETH Zurich. All of them we enjoy skiing in the winter with, watch TEDx and celebrate Christmas in the countryside.

PBS can be used for both look alike AND look un-alike demographics. As a theory, it is neutral in its core and the approach to use is to exclude several patterns so that different demographics can be targeted. Even if you see that the whole development team consists of guys aged 25-28, it doesn’t mean you can use that as guidance for future sourcing.

Kind of patterns you need to ignore:

• Gender
• Age
• Origin
• Physical features
• Sexual orientation

If you explain to the sourcing team why you decided to use PBS and make clear instructions on how to prevent discrimination of the candidates, you will stay away from the problems.

 

Let’s sum up the keypoints:

– Search people inside the company

– Use referrals

– Don’t overvalue the company culture

– Diversity is cool

– Analysing your results can be helpful in future hiring process

 

This post is the result of a collaboration between Brainfood and Tatev, co-founder at Meettal.com.

Meettal is a team of topnotch recruiters with a brand new approach for building tech teams. Along with recruiting, we create long-term relationships with candidates based on trust, fun and tech-love.

For those of you who don’t know who the f*ck is Edgar Degas, WELCOME. For those of you who know about Edgar Degas, but don’t understand how he can be connected to startups, MORE THAN WELCOME.

The story begins like this. Fresh morning air of Lori region, some unknown “Art Collection” book and my 2.7 years of experience reading Startup related books make me to come up with this Mixture and Intersection of Startups and Art. Sounds fancy, right? I also believe so 🙂 Anyway the first touch will be one of my Com Si Com Sa favorite painter, Edgar Degas.

So Called Bio: To be concrete as possible, Edgar Degas is one of the eminent French painters. He is considered as one of the founders of Impressionism, or as he liked to call himself a “Realist” artist. He is most famous for hisBallet Dancers drawings. For more Google…

It’s time to start my research and “curious” observations. (Right now I feel like a Soviet Union spy from the “Bridge of Spies” movie. BTW worth watching if you have a free time and focused mood.)

10* Ideas “proving” Edgar Degas’s Startup Mindset

*Could be more, but I am lazy…

# Target Niche Market: He selected the dance field as the industry where he wants to operate and, particularly, ballet dance as the niche market.

# Conduct your Market Research: Before starting each of his masterpiece, he was doing a thorough research on the color palette, which shop to choose for the drawing equipment, and the drawing personas.

# Talk to your customers: He was personally going and seeing the ballet dancers in order to understand their feelings, emotions, and movements. He was trying to see from their perspective.

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Edgar Degas

# Do experiments; Do A/B testing: He was constantly doing experiments with chosen materials, colors, and ideas. He was trying to paint the same picture with different color styles to see which one works and sales better.

# Pivot considering the market need: He shifted from painting history paintings to contemporary paintings. He was primarily painting in the beginning of his journey, such as Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–60; Sémiramis Building Babylon in 1860; and Young Spartans around 1860.

# Don’t follow the crowd & Market Differentiation: In technical terms, Degas differed from the Impressionists in that he continually shifted from their practice of painting en plein air (meaning open air paintings).

# Do First Sales as a Founder: He was selling his own picture by his own, and his financial situation improved through sales of his own work. Just for the information, gained money he used to pay off his brother’s debts.

# Bringing Innovation through identifying problem: The lack of color in the 1874 Ballet Rehearsal on Stage and the 1876 The Ballet Instructor arose his interest to explore the new technique of photography.

# Have advisers, mentors, and huge network: Throughout his career, he was surrounded with a lot of advisers and mentors, like Édouard Manet, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier. Moreover, he has a huge network of painters and press media representative, because of visiting art exhibitions quit often.

# Influence Marketing: He photographed many of his friends, such as double portrait of Renoir and Mallarmé. This made his reputation to increase even more through times of his friends’ audience.

Bonus point for compensating my laziness 🙂
# Learn, Grow, Change: His whole working mindset was dependent on these three notions: Learn New things, Grow his personality and professionalism, and Change himself overall.

This story ends with the continuation. I have decided to jump from Degas to the topic “Selecting a painting for the exhibition collection, like choosing a team member for your team.” What do you think?

“Make Art, Create Startup OR Create Startup, Make Art.”

When reading this title any developer is going to ask “why the hell?”, and the question is going to be the same for a tech recruiter. Well if you are really interested, here is a short story that hopefully, in the end, will satisfy your curiosity.

Two years ago, I was a student at the American University of Armenia studying computer science, and as every junior programmer, I was searching for that perfect start of my career as a web developer. After a very very long time of searching, finally, I found an internship at one of the outsourcing companies. The main languages that I was using were jQuery, PHP, also worked with WordPress and Joomla.

In the beginning, it was so much fun. I enjoyed every single code line that I wrote; there was so much learning, coding was all I did. I enjoyed working with DB and even started working on my own little project with Vue.js and MongoDB.

But the issue with outsourcing companies is that if the client wants you to write your code with PHP, you simply have to write it with PHP. There is no time for you to experiment and play around, say with Node.js. There is a deadline and you have to finish it on time.

As time passed and I was still doing the same thing going through the same routine, I couldn’t stop thinking “Is programming, that I was dreaming so long about, this boring?”. And the thing is when you get bored at work, your productivity will never be the same. I somehow started missing deadlines and lost the spark and the enthusiasm that I had before.

At the time, I had already developed a rule for myself — if you are not fully enjoying what you do in life, you must change stuff.

That was it for me — time for changes! But as a typical Gen z and a university student, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

It’s funny, we always need to learn new things, its like hunger of knowledge that always needs to be fulfilled. This should be considered by the employers, otherwise, you will lose your employees.

I truly believe that companies always need to be ready for experiments, give their employees space to learn new things. The employees will still be doing the job, but feeling much more provided with fun space to play around and learn new things.

Going back to my story, I came to the decision to try a completely new thing and I came across this very funny job announcement — “if you like communication and tech, and have քթի ծակ” and more of this kind of phrases. The position was called “tech recruiter”.

Honestly, I had no idea what it was but decided to give it a shot. It turned out that there were people who work with different IT companies and developers and try to match them by various factors such as company culture, specific job requirements, salary, and more.

This was a new world for me. It’s like looking from the other side of developers. It was very funny too when you get to look at yourself from recruiters’ eyes.

Let me describe a very typical process of tech recruiting. Say X company is looking for Y developer, they send you the JD (job description) and the first thing you do is go over it and take out keywords such as Python developer who worked with Django and REST APIs with two years of experience. Easy right?

Then you start doing what we call “sourcing” in recruitment or research, call it as you want. It’s when you combine those keywords in google in a way it helps you get maybe 30–50 LinkedIn profiles of developers. Imagine when you have a DB and you are writing a query to find a specific set of data.

A side note: if you are a developer keep your LinkedIn updated.

The next step is to start communication. Here is the thing about developer/recruiter relationship, some developers don’t like recruiters because they think they just randomly write developers and suggest a job that is not relevant to them, or recruiters only care about the company and how fast they can sell it to developers. Well, guess what — not true.

Before writing a message to the developer, we look through all possible profiles that we can find on them and, trust me, we can even find out what your cat’s name was when you were three years old. Just kidding or am I 😉 ?

After making sure that the developer is really the person to work at X company, we message or have a call with him/her.

This is where my technical background helped me a lot. I was able to talk with developers in their language and understand their technical background.

The funny and probably the most shocking thing that I ever learned was that a recruiter, who doesn’t have a technical background, knows a loooot about the tech industry. So the stereotypes, that I had, just faded away. Maybe they can’t write code as well as developers, but they know how things work. Sure as hell!

And still, during the whole process you are going to read a lot of messages like “not interested,” “no,” “*blank” aka ignore, and some other harsh answers. On the other hand, there is the one awesome emotion when your candidate gets hired.

At that time, the recruiter is the happiest person on Earth. Imagine you are working on a product and finally, the day comes for release, and everything works perfectly and people love your product. Or you just built a model with 0.9 accuracy.

You might ask, do you miss coding? Yes, I do sometimes. Do you think you will do recruiting for a long period? Who knows. Do you regret leaving programming? Nope. Will you ever get back to it? Maybe, why not.

I hope this will help in taking a look at both sides and building a better developer/recruiter relationships.