Bull sessions with Tech Recruiters. Hung Lee

A series of articles by Tech Recruiters for Tech Recruiters.

Please welcome our next interviewee Hung Lee and his recruiting hacks.

1. Short Bio

My name’s Hung Lee and I’m from London. I am the CEO and Co-founder of Workshape.io, a matching service for tech talent. I’m passionate about making recruitment better for people and businesses.

2. How long have you been in tech recruitment?

I’m a veteran. I’ve been in tech recruitment in some form since 2000, starting as a tech recruitment agent, trainer, consultant, in-house and now recruitment tech vendor.

3. What are the best websites/blogs to stay tuned in to?

IT is embedded in the world now, so I get input from a lot of sources. I would say sits I check regularly are Hacker News, Visual Capitalist, Exponential View. As for recruiting tech content, I have made it my secondary mission to collate the best sources in one place — my newsletter, On Hiring — is the best source of content for the discerning recruiter!

4. Tools you use to facilitate the hiring/sourcing process

• Calend.ly for scheduling
• Auto Text Expander for email
• YAMM for mail merge
• Close.io for CRM
• Doubletick for email tracking

5. Do you keep in touch with your ex-candidates?

Of course — Linkedin by default, Facebook, Twitter, also.

6. Is it a must to separate your business and personal social accounts?

Yeah of course! I gave up separation a long time ago. It’s too much work and, at root, dishonest. I’m the same person professionally as personally — like it or leave it.

7. What are your favorite candidate sourcing channels? Why?

The best way to source candidates is to support the communities they care about. If you can support the eco-system that you recruit or work in, you will become the locus for work and people. It’s about being hyper connected.

8. What makes a recruiter technical? Is the only prefix ‘tech’ enough?

I would say there are two ways to understand the term. Firstly, as his focus (i.e he recruits technical people) and secondly, through his technique i.e he has quite advanced technical sourcing skills, and perhaps specialises as a sourcer rather than as a community builder.

9. What challenges do you see in the modern tech recruitment world?

Noise. The main reason that developers hate recruiters is that overwhelming amount of digital pollution created in large part by segments of the recruitment industry. Like all forms of pollution, this has collateral impact on everyone else involved in the hard task of connecting people to opportunity. This is the main reason why I building WorkShape.io — we’re trying to create a job discovery platform which guarantees high signal/low noise.

10. Your piece of advice for young/future IT hunters

Understand that there are two parts to business — customer acquisition (sales) and candidate acquisition (delivery). It’s not human resources, it’s brokering information between two parties who might otherwise not find each other. Go and give it a shot.

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