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Community as a recruiting strategy

By Humand Talent Team · 7 June 2026

The best technical hires we make rarely come from a job advert. They come from a conversation at a meetup, an introduction from a former colleague, or a talk someone gave two years ago that we still remember.

Why community beats sourcing

Cold outreach on LinkedIn is a numbers game with diminishing returns. Community is the opposite: it compounds. Every event we run, every speaker we book, every founder we introduce to an engineer builds a network that pays back for years.

What we invest in

We host and sponsor Leaders in Tech Oxfordshire, Women in Tech Oxford, DevOps Oxford and AI for Business — plus one-off dinners for founders and CTOs. None of these are recruiting events. They're spaces where people who care about deep-tech get to know each other.

The measurable outcome

Around 40% of our placements last year came from someone we met at a community event, not through a search brief. That's not luck — that's the network doing its job.