Best Practices
Search, evaluate, organize, and contact candidates more effectively.
Use these practices to improve sourcing quality, evaluate candidates more carefully, organize your pipeline, and manage Credits efficiently.
Be specific about your hiring criteria
When launching a search, include the target role, location, seniority, key skills, and the evidence you care about most.
Instead of:
Find AI engineers.
Try:
Find infrastructure engineers who have worked on LLM inference optimization, ideally with vLLM or TensorRT experience and active open-source contributions.
Use progressive refinement
If you have not finalized the role requirements, start with a high-level direction and let DINQ ask follow-up questions. Guided refinement can help clarify location, experience level, academic background, evidence signals, and must-have or must-exclude criteria.
Start small, then scale
When starting a new sourcing pipeline, run a smaller test search first, such as 10 to 20 profiles. Review the initial results before expanding the search volume or creating a Talent Radar.
This helps catch prompt alignment issues early and manage Credit usage.
Cross-check claims with public signals
Use GitHub repositories, academic papers, project pages, personal websites, and public profile links as supporting evidence. Match Scores and AI-generated notes are useful starting points, but they should not replace your own review.
Organize shortlists by role or project
Create shortlists around specific openings, active projects, or review stages. Clear shortlist names make collaboration easier and help your team understand why each candidate was saved.
Ground outreach in context
When contacting candidates, reference a specific project, open-source contribution, paper, or public work signal from their profile. Contextual outreach is more relevant than a generic message.
Monitor Credit usage
Searches, Talent Radar runs, advanced profile analysis, and contact information lookups consume Credits. Review your Credit balance and usage history under Settings & Billing > Pricing & Credits so your sourcing activity matches your plan.