How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 18] - Going Above & Beyond

Top engineers can be insanely hard to close, especially as you're often competing with FAANG for them. From this lesson, you will:

- Learn the importance of building a personal relationship with candidates throughout the interview process to increase the chances of closing them successfully
- Discover strategies for multiple touchpoints, such as sending personal emails from the team or senior leaders, to make candidates feel valued and wanted
- Understand how unique gestures like meeting in person or sending personalized gifts can significantly enhance the candidate's experience and likelihood of accepting the offer

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 17] - Push & Pull Factors

It's hard convincing great engineers to leave their current jobs. From this lesson, you will:

- Understand the importance of increasing your candidate acceptance rate, which can significantly reduce workload throughout the recruitment funnel
- Learn how to identify and leverage push and pull factors that influence a candidate's decision to leave their current role or join your company
- Discover the value of tailoring your closing approach to individual candidate motivations to enhance offer acceptance rates
- Gain insights into conducting honest Q&A sessions during the closing call to ensure a good fit, thereby increasing long-term retention on your team

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 16] - Follow Up

If at first you don't succeed, try try again. From this lesson, you will:

- Learn the impact of follow-up emails, which can significantly enhance response rates when sent in addition to an initial email
- Discover tools like Mixmax and features within ATS systems like Ashby that can automate the follow-up process and track email openings
- Understand the strategy of escalating outreach, involving higher levels of management, to engage high-value candidates effectively

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 15] - Initial Contact

You only get one first impression, so you must make that initial outreach message count. From this lesson, you will:

- Discover how to craft an engaging subject line and personalize the content to stand out from typical recruiter communications.
- Understand the importance of keeping the email concise, with a clear, brief point that invites the recipient to engage further.
- Learn optimal timing for sending emails to maximize response rates, avoiding busy times like early Monday or late Friday.

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 14] - ATS Lookup

When recruiting, you should do your best to ensure the best candidate experience. This is critical during the outreach phase. From this lesson, you will:

- Understand the necessity of verifying candidate information in the ATS to ensure they have not been recently rejected or contacted for other roles
- Learn about different ATS platforms like Greenhouse and Ashby, and how they can help manage candidate interactions
- Discover how to coordinate with recruiting teams to cross-check a list of potential candidates to avoid redundant or inappropriate contacts
- Gain insights into the typical cooling-off periods between rejections and new outreach, which can range from 6 to 12 months depending on company policy

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 13] - Get Their Email Address

Even though it's been around forever, email is still a great way to reach people. From this lesson, you will:

- Learn about Clearbit and its tendency to provide corporate email addresses, which may not be ideal for reaching out to potential candidates
- Discover how to use Gmail to predict personal email addresses by experimenting with common naming conventions
- Understand how to use social media handles as a potential lead to guess a candidate's email address
- Explore the use of MailTester to verify the existence of an email address by checking against SMTP servers
- Gain insight into Rocketreach as a highly recommended tool for retrieving personal contact details from LinkedIn profiles

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/Een)

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 12] - Outreach Basics

So you've found a great candidate - Now it's time to get them into your interview loop. From this lesson, you will:

- Understand the benchmark for a good response rate when sourcing candidates, with 15% as the target for moving candidates forward in the recruitment process
- Learn that email outreaches typically yield higher response rates than LinkedIn InMails and why finding a candidate’s personal email can be more effective
- Discover the advantages of outreach coming directly from an engineering manager rather than a recruiter to significantly increase the likelihood of a response
- Explore tools and methods for finding candidate emails, including using services like Clearbit and experimenting with Gmail to predict email addresses
- Gain insights into how personalizing the outreach process by handling initial replies and interactions can make a meaningful impact on recruitment outcomes

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/​](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/%E2%80%8B)

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 11] - Meetups and Conferences

When it comes to relationship building, you simply cannot beat in-person interaction. From this lesson, you will:

- Understand the value of making personal connections at meetups and conferences to stand out from the noise of digital outreach
- Learn strategies for building a network by engaging with people at events, collecting their contact information for future outreach
- Discover how creating and hosting your own events can establish your brand as a company and attract potential candidates
- Realize the benefits of long-term recruitment through sustained relationships with event attendees and speakers
- Explore how relationships with speakers at your events can evolve into hiring opportunities for top talent in the future

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 10] - Friend-of-friend

Friendship is magic, especially when it comes to hiring great engineers. From this lesson, you will:

- Learn how to ask people for recommendations, without pre-filtering candidates, to identify strong potential hires
- Understand the importance of not pre-filtering based on market availability, as some candidates may be interested even if they aren’t actively looking
- Discover how using the recommender’s name in outreach can improve response rates

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 9] - Source-a-thon

You don't need to only look outwards for candidates - They can often come from within, stemming from your current team! From this lesson, you will:

- Learn how to organize a Source-a-thon by creating a spreadsheet and having your team contribute potential candidates from their networks
- Understand the importance of warm outreach, including using a team member’s name for higher response rates
- Discover the benefits of conducting a Source-a-thon in a collaborative environment to generate more high-quality leads
- Realize the value of leveraging your team’s connections to source candidates who are likely to excel in the role based on previous work experiences

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/​](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/%E2%80%8B)

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 8] - School Websites

One of the biggest predictors of engineer quality is the university they went to. From this lesson, you will:

- Learn how to use Google and school directories to find potential candidates, particularly for new grad PhDs or specialized fields like machine learning
- Discover how to locate personal web pages of grad students and alumni by using targeted search queries, such as searching for specific domains like “site:[stanford.edu](http://stanford.edu)”
- Understand the advantage of sourcing candidates through school websites as a way to reach individuals who are less inundated with recruiting contacts compared to those on LinkedIn

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/​](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/%E2%80%8B)

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 7] - LinkedIn Search

If you work in tech, it's impossible to escape LinkedIn and this applies for engineering hiring as well. From this lesson, you will:

- Learn why LinkedIn search is a go-to tool for sourcing candidates and why a LinkedIn premium subscription is recommended for engineering managers
- Understand the limitations of LinkedIn’s free tier and the benefits of upgrading to LinkedIn premium, including unlimited search results and in-mail credits
- Explore the differences between LinkedIn Premium and LinkedIn Recruiter and why LinkedIn Recruiter may not be cost-effective for engineering managers
- Gain practical tips on how to use LinkedIn search effectively, including filtering by title, company, and school, and leveraging Boolean searches to refine results
- Discover how to maximize the value of your existing network by searching through first and second-degree connections before expanding your search

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/​](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/%E2%80%8B%E2%AC%A4)

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 6] - Root Sourcing

Root sourcing is a powerful tactic for finding top engineering talent. From this lesson, you will:

- Understand the concept of root sourcing and how it leverages industry leaders’ networks to identify strong candidates
- Learn how to find and connect with industry leaders on LinkedIn to access their networks
- Discover how to comb through connections of industry leaders to find potential candidates in specific domains
- Gain insights into how privacy settings on LinkedIn can impact your ability to view connections and how to work around these limitations

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 5] - How Sourcing Is Unintuitive

All hiring starts off with finding the candidate, otherwise known as sourcing. From this lesson, you will:

- Understand the importance of targeting candidates from companies where your key skills are valued, not just from top-tier tech firms
- Discover how sourcing from the right places can improve long-term retention on your team
- Gain insight into why company brand can be overrated in predicting candidate performance
- Explore how to find candidates who are not only skilled but also a strong cultural fit for your team

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

How Managers Hire Great Engineers [Part 1] - How This Course Works

With this lesson, you’ll begin your learning journey of how to effectively manage the recruiting process to build a strong team. [John](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/) shares personal experiences and actionable insights for hiring success. We go through the course objectives, and after this course, you will:

- Understand the importance of prioritizing recruitment and building a robust candidate pipeline
- Learn how to evaluate and troubleshoot the recruiting funnel to ensure a steady flow of qualified candidates
- Discover strategies for sourcing top talent, especially when resources are limited
- Gain techniques for closing candidates who have multiple job offers, including specific tactics and phrases

Connect with John Egan on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwegan/>

Become An Open Source Master [Part 1] - Course + James Intro

This course is a methodical guide to get you involved in open source. The course is led by James Pearce, a former engineering director at Meta. While mastery might be a lifelong journey, we'll cover the basics to get started.

- Gain insights from James's experience running one of the world's largest open source programs.
- The course will focus on individual involvement in open source (not running a program).
- Meta/Facebook has a strong open-source culture, using and creating software like React, Cassandra, and PyTorch. Here's the talk James gave at OSCON 2015: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBbDAk5WYEo>
- James has built his own open-source project called [tinybase](https://github.com/tinyplex/tinybase), a data store for local-first apps. Watch this course so you can contribute!

Connect with James: 

- GitHub: <https://github.com/jamesgpearce>
- Twitter (X): <https://twitter.com/jamespearce>

Grow From Junior To Mid-Level Engineer [Part 19] - Go Deeper: Follow Through

Take the related courses:

- [Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/course/level-up-your-code-quality-as-a-software-engineer/)
- [Ask Great Questions That Get Great Answers Quickly](https://www.jointaro.com/course/ask-great-questions-that-get-great-answers-quickly/)
- [Become The Go-To Expert As A Software Engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/course/become-the-go-to-expert-as-a-software-engineer/)
- [Nail Your Promotion As A Software Engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/course/nail-your-promotion-as-a-software-engineer/)

Grow From Junior To Mid-Level Engineer [Part 18] - Done Is Better Than Perfect

We all make mistakes. In fact, we'll all make a lot of mistakes as software engineers, especially when we're junior. This lesson teaches you:

- The many types of dumb things you will inevitably do as a junior engineer (and continue doing as a mid-level/senior/staff/principal engineer)
- The simple growth mentality and formula you should follow to speed run the junior to mid-level engineer
- Why it's awesome to be the dumbest person in the room
- A simple mathematical way to understand the difference between a fast-growing junior engineer and a slow-growing junior engineer

Learn how to learn from your mistakes here: ["How to turn a string of silly mistakes into a mature positive outcome?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/JybGyc935lsYbM8dAo7Y/how-to-turn-a-string-of-silly-mistakes-into-a-mature-positive-outcome/)

Grow From Junior To Mid-Level Engineer [Part 17] - High-Level Roadmap

There's a bunch of different skills you need to develop as a junior engineer to grow to a mid-level engineer. To make things trickier, the order in which you develop them matters *a lot*. This lesson teaches you:

- The 4-phases high-level roadmap to grow from junior engineer to mid-level
- How long it takes to go from phase to phase on the mid-level engineer growth trajectory
- The necessary components you need to have to establish a strong presence on your team, strong enough to merit a mid-level engineer promotion

Grow From Junior To Mid-Level Engineer [Part 16] - Show Your Work

It's not enough to do the work - You also need to do the work to get full credit for it. This lesson teaches you:

- The 2 big components behind showing your work properly
- The differences between junior engineers and mid-level engineers when it comes to showing their work
- How mid-level engineers give far more effective status updates compared to junior engineers, explained with an in-depth example

Learn how to write an excellent project update post here: ["How to get more visibility on work?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/XA0X51AypDLCeVeleJv4/how-to-get-more-visibility-on-work/)

Tech Career Growth Videos

Our instructional videos provide software engineers with insights needed for career growth. Masterclasses go incredibly in-depth on a specific tech topic while case studies are real examples from established engineering leaders.