I want to share my experience sourcing a Mathematica Engineer (Palo Alto) on Reddit, Discord, and a professional forum. I followed advice from Wim Dammans and Erin Mathew, who are experts in this sort of sourcing.
Here is what I learned. Mathematica Engineers working outside of Wolfram’s Mathematica are rare primarily because it is expensive and not open-source software (here is another “closed” in the scenario!) Our client does not require their customers to purchase Mathematica; they do calculations on their server. Mathematica is widely used at universities; our candidates were likely to be recent grads in CS or any sciences.
LinkedIn search returned little, so I explored “closed” channels.
Knowing the unfortunate perception that “recruiters are spammers,” I started asking on the relevant Reddit forum, where could I post such a job? I also included a link to my LinkedIn profile, as Wim teaches us. Reddit hides personalities and revealing who I am was to reassure people. Also, I could check who viewed my profile. The channel moderator asked for details which I happily shared by editing the job link into my post.
Sharing a similar message on an internal Mathematica forum received a warm welcome. The long-time site admin contacted me and no less than helped enhance the job post and my profile. (I also tried to aggregate user profiles, but the details were too slim to identify potential candidates.)
Going to Discord, I felt bold and posted the job upfront, receiving a positive reaction.
Though the search initially seemed hopeless, we now have two people in the next interview stages. (Knock on wood!)
Join us this week for a fully updated 90-minute class
How to Find and Attract Tech Talent
on Wednesday, November 30th.