For building and utilising professional connections for the purpose of recruiting, it’s important that both yourself and your business have a well-developed online presence, for which LinkedIn is one of the strongest and most effective tools available.
To get the most out of the service it’s important that you don’t give too much weight to location when scouting talent; if the role is right, the candidates will come.
Instead, focus on looking for the right skill-sets first and foremost, because if you don’t you’ll find yourself making unnecessary compromises in quality for the sake of a more favourable postcode.
The search
The beauty of LinkedIn and job boards such as Jobsite and CW Jobs, is that they’re a direct portal into a pool of passive candidates for whom location isn’t necessarily a concrete condition in the open market.
When you’re searching for candidates in a particular field such as IT, it’s possible for you to go directly to the source and find them in their natural habitat on sites like GitHub and Stack Exchange.
If you don’t feel comfortable searching for your own talent in this way, a good recruiter with much greater resources will be able to do it for you.
The ‘Cambridge Cluster’
On the topic of Silicon Fen, one of the primary reasons for its success being fairly localised is its proximity to the much more prominent East London Tech City.
The benefit to Tech City is that it is a product of well-timed political and economic opportunities, with a location that is within a commutable range of many of the other startup hubs in the South-East.
The ‘Cambridge Cluster’ is just one example in a growing number of tech-specific communities that includes Silicon Gorge, the M4 corridor and even parts of Scotland.
It’s important to note that the opportunities available in this area of Cambridge are different to that of Silicon Roundabout in both quantity as well as category.
In the year between March 2012 to March 2013, more than 15,000 businesses made Tech City their home, a number that eclipses that of any other startup hub – but Silicon Fen’s specialty for hardware companies keeps it from being directly competitive with Tech City’s predilection for software.