We’ve already told you how to find awesome developers on GitHub or Reddit, and in this handbook, we’ll give you tips on sourcing the best of the best in Stack Overflow and Kaggle.

Finding a strong developer is not an easy task. As a rule, professionals of such caliber are in high demand, and it makes no sense for them to post their resumes on job boards. That’s why the process of searching for an ideal candidate may take much time and require additional knowledge and skills. Without any further ado, let’s see how sourcing on Stack Overflow and Kaggle works.

Sourcing on Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is an online platform for IT professionals from all over the world (it currently has about 20 million users). The creators of this platform claim that first and foremost it is the largest question and answer forum for coders. People from all over the world can post questions regarding technology for free and receive detailed answers from their colleagues.

This all makes Stack Overflow a great place to hunt for strong developers. A well-established ranking system employed on the website helps the headhunters to identify truly outstanding specialists – if a user gives quality answers to technological questions, their reputation grows.

Each user has a profile where their rating is posted. In this tab, you can see a detailed history of how this person earned reputation points, their occupation, the number of questions they answered. Moreover, there is a very important section for technical recruiters in the profile – tags assigned to the questions asked on the forum. These tags help to understand what the person’s strongest areas of expertise are and what technologies they are most interested in. Due to the news about shutting down the Jobs and Developer Story features you might think that sourcing on Stack Overflow is no longer relevant. Well, let us prove you wrong!

When looking for a candidate on Stack Overflow you can use keywords and set the following parameters: the required rating level (“reputation” in Stack Overflow terms), location, and necessary skills.

Sourcing on Kaggle

One more website where you can find many strong developers. Fundamentally, it is a platform for competitions. There are many big data engineers and machine learning experts among users.

Different companies post certain tasks related to data science on this website and ask to solve them for money or “experience”. Within the limits of a specific task, specialists oer their solutions. The user who provided the best answer gets the prize and ranking points.

For example, Red Hat asks to develop an algorithm for classifying customers that are of interest to the company, based on their activities and characteristics. The author of the best algorithm will get $50,000.

There are three sections in each user profile: Competitions, Kernels, and Discussions. Each of these sections has its own ranking system.

• We spoke about the Competitions above.

• “Kernels” means coding skills.

• “Discussions” means participation in different conversations.

Each of these sections contains a list of recently completed tasks, personal data, occupation, geolocation, and activity on the website by day.

The first thing to consider is the position occupied by the user relative to all the other users of the website (current rank). Moreover, Kaggle has a Top 100 users, and if a person is on this list, it is a very good indicator.

At the bottom part of the profile, there is the user’s biography, which sometimes contains the contact details of the person.

X-Ray Search

X-Ray search allows you to look for specific information on certain sites by setting parameters using the traditional Google search. For instance, if we type in the search box,

site:stackoverflow.com/users location * united kingdom

the engine will search only for Stack Overflow users who live in the UK. You can also add the skills you’re interested in.

How to Simplify the Search

Despite a large number of different services and platforms used by high-skilled professionals, searching for eligible candidates takes a lot of time. Browsing those websites, screening out specialists lacking the necessary skills, and comparing the ratings is also time-consuming.

To simplify this task, we have developed the AmazingHiring search engine. This app automatically searches for the right candidates on all the services. In other words, it browses all the sources (including websites for developers, which are not optimized for headhunting purposes, and also LinkedIn and other social media), automatically evaluates the technical skills and finds the most suitable candidate for the company.

This evaluation is based on machine learning algorithms that analyze the candidate’s code and determine their rating on professional online platforms.

Thus, this service allows you to minimize the time spent on browsing resources by doing this automatically. The app also covers “passive users” – those who don’t have accounts in the popular social media and are not accustomed to state publicly that they are considering job offers, for instance, by posting their resume on a job board.

The recruiter may set the following key parameters of the search: skills, location, companies, or job positions mentioned in the previous experience. The following information blocks in the consolidated candidate profile might help to select the most suitable specialist: contact details and information about their sources, links to all profiles of the candidate on different online resources, information about their experience, and statistics regarding the previous employers. The most important feature of the app is the detailed assessment of the candidate’s skills, citing specific technologies in which the candidate is the strongest.

Thanks to AmazingHiring, you won’t need specific knowledge to recruit technical specialists – just set the initial parameters to get the best match. The system will analyze more than 50 resources, including Stack Overflow and Kaggle, and generate a consolidated candidate profile, so there will be no need to do the sourcing on Stack Overflow or Kaggle manually. 

Request a demo to learn more!