Using Meetup.com as a recruitment tool

Here’s my hack for using Meetup.com to recruit developers and designers.

1. Join a local Meetup.com group with a matching skill profile, e.g. JavaScript developers if that’s what you’re looking for.
2. Go through the member list and try to write down the names in a spreadsheet to as many as you can muster. I haven’t found a smart way of qualifying the candidates on Meetup.com so that’s a separate step (see #3).
3. Go through the spreadsheet and do a Google search on “Firstname Lastname” site:github.com for each person. For designers, replace github.com with dribbble.com.
4. A similar search but with site:twitter.com can give additional contact information, or at least a link to a personal website.

I consider contributions (can if needed be quantified with “Total Contributions number” on the user profile) on GitHub to be a great way of vetting developers. A strong Dribbble profile is a similar measurement for designers. I don’t care about LinkedIn.

Yes, the above process can take a bit of time. When I feel lazy I get help from my virtual assistant from GetFriday to collect the data.