Sourcing for Devs on Dev.To

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Dev.to is a relatively new site where developers discuss how to build software, and it is quite a Sourcer-friendly site. 😉

A profile can have a location, education, skills, links to other profiles, content keywords, and, often, public email contact:

Internal search for members is too weak to be useful. But we can X-Ray the site for profiles like so:

site:dev.to -site:dev.to/*/* “united kingdom” javascript.

Since Google recognizes hashtags in search, and the site widely uses hashtags, we can search in a more targeted way, for example:

site:dev.to -site:dev.to/*/* #javascript “gmail.com”.

With a Google search like the above, it is not hard to scrape the results and get a list of prospects along with emails. It is a matter of picking the right scraping tool.

Please note, we are going to run an updated version of our always-popular Scraping Webinar on Tuesday, February 11th. If you are curious about the topic, it is a place to be.

This Custom Search Engine – http://bit.ly/devtoprofiles (X-Ray Dev.To) – will look for Dev.to profiles. Using it eliminates the need for the operator site: and allows to search for members’ profiles, for example:

#javascript amsterdam

There is not a whole lot of “structure” on the profiles (much less than on Github’s, for example), but we can search specifically for bios with a Custom Search Engine:

more:p:person-description:java.

I hope the resource will prove useful to some! Let me know if you have any questions.

We are running the How to Find and Attract Technical Talent on Tuesday, February 18th. Join to get a complete IT Sourcing toolbox. (Some tools are cross-industrial.) Seating is limited.

 

 

 

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