I had the pleasure of interviewing Marc Woodford, the Senior Tech Recruiter for Infrastructure at Hopin. Marc has been involved in Tech for the entirety of his professional career and has worked with small VC-backed startups, to scale-ups, to massive tech behemoths such as Facebook.
Marc focuses on hiring for Infrastructure Engineering and particularly enjoys the sourcing aspects of his role. When he is not out crawling the web for Cloud Engineers, he spends his time keeping up to date on Sourcing best practices, attending conferences, sharing his knowledge with other Recruiters, or mentoring his more junior colleagues.
In his spare time, he enjoys wildlife photography and playing the acoustic guitar.
Thank you so much for joining us!
What motivated you to choose technical recruiting as your professional career?
Marc: When I first got into Recruiting, I was at university for Psychology and wanted to find a job to gain work experience while studying (as well as earn some money!). I started working as a part-time in-house Recruiter for all kinds of different roles. Sales, Marketing, Engineering, HR, you name it, I hired for it!
However, I was always more drawn towards the technical side of Recruitment. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been interested in technology, I remember playing with Lego Mindstorm robots as a child and dialling into the world wide web with our AOL modem to explore everything the internet had to offer back then. I was even building out graphical interfaces and writing scripts for a popular video game back when I was still in school.
It seems only natural that I ended up being more excited about roles in Tech, and since then have specialised in recruiting for Infrastructure.
What is it that excites you about tech recruiting?
Marc: The ever-changing landscape of tech means my job never gets too repetitive. Sure, the underlying processes may not change much, but tech is constantly developing and reinventing itself, which means that I get to speak with many different and talented people. It’s also exciting because I get to be the bridge between organisations that are building products which will help shape the future of the world and the people that want to get involved!
What has been your biggest challenge in tech recruitment?
Marc: I think the biggest challenge by far is standing out from the crowd. There must be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Recruiting messages sent daily. The real challenge is differentiating yourself from the noise and making every message you send as personal and as relevant to the candidate you’re addressing as possible. Sending copy-paste LinkedIn messages just isn’t good enough anymore, you have to go above and beyond doing just the bare necessities.
Other than that, I think understanding that your role as a Recruiter goes beyond just “filling bums-in-seats” – you need to be a consultant to your hiring managers, an advocate to your candidates, and sometimes have some tough conversations with HR too when it comes to building out competitive offer packages.
What do you think is the future of tech recruitment, and what state-of-art problems do you think need to be solved?
Marc: Ironically, I think it’s less about automation or AI/ML or whatever the latest trend is and more about being an actual human being. For Recruiters, I believe that means building a great personal brand and solidifying and positioning yourself as an expert in your field. You want to be the go-to person for your area of focus, both for the business you work for as well as the candidates you’re trying to attract. That means taking a genuine interest in both the people you work with as well as in the technology they use.
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a tech recruiter who’s about to start their journey in tech recruitment, what would they be?
Marc: Develop your personal brand. Build relationships from the earliest possible stage. Keep on learning.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Marc: You can find me on LinkedIn and on Instagram.
Thank you, Marc for joining us! Your remarkable visionary and experiences will definitely encourage recruiters all around the world. ( And a few guitarists too :))
Excellent!