The Source Newsletter

Regular Contributor post from Marvin Smith

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SourceCon would not be SourceCon without Jim Stroud. Whether it is his cutting edge humor, his energetic vibe, or his dancing ability, Jim sets the tone for SourceCon. A great sourcer, trainer and creative force in sourcing, Jim assumes his master of ceremonies persona just prior to the first speaker and carries that routine through the remainder of the conference. It is quite a hoot!

It was Jim (along with Glenn) that provided me a platform at Microsoft – I will always be grateful for their support and friendship. But professional relationships do not end with working for the same company. We are part of something greater — a sourcing community that gathers annually at events like SourceCon to share memories, ideas and dreams about what could happen. And Jim is the cheerleader for our community.

One thing that we imagined about at Microsoft was how we can find a better method of attracting and developing passive prospects. We are Employing Talent Communities to Rehumanize the Recruiting Process. I will discuss our approach at SourceCon 2010. I invite you to be part of the presentation and conversation. I am the last speaker on Monday, so as you plan your departure from SourceCon, take a later flight and please join me.

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Make sure to join us March 14-15th in San Diego at SourceCon – register today!

Are you attending or thinking about attending SourceCon 2010? Glen Cathey is going to be the keynote speaker for the event, and he will be presenting on Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Cognition when it comes to sourcing and matching. Even our regular contributors are eager to hear what Glen has to share. Here’s what our own Marvin Smith had to say:

“A person that I want to meet is Glen Cathey. I read his blog and know him from the point of view as an author, but want to learn more about his story in recruiting and sourcing. Glen is the type of writer that shares the secrets of our craft, yet is a man of mystery with respect to himself.

“As an alumnus of the previous two SourceCons, I have found that the venue and the agenda foster conversations and sharing. It provides opportunities to make new friends with thought leaders like Glen.”

We asked Glen to give us a teaser of what he’ll be presenting…

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If you’re curious to know what kinds of things I’ll be addressing during the session, here is a sneak peek:

1. The intrinsic and often overlooked challenges associated with sourcing resumes
2. What artificially intelligent semantic search and match applications claim to do and how they actually work
3. The limits of artificial intelligence
4. What people can do that semantic search applications cannot
5. The 5 levels of semantic search
6. The 4 levels of secondary/e-sourcing
7. What I think is the ideal candidate sourcing solution

If you’ve ever wondered about the fantastic claims that some of the semantic search application vendors on the market make as to how their solution can mimic a senior recruiter when finding candidates, then you will be very interested in hearing what I have to say about the reality of what they can do.

If you’re a sourcer and you’re concerned that your role/position might eventually be replaced by sourcing software, you will be encouraged by my analysis and supporting arguments that explain why the abilities of creative and investigative sourcers will always be in demand – tomorrow and 50 years from now.

I hope you will be able to attend SourceCon 2010 – I know I’m looking forward to it!

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About our guest author:

Glen Cathey started out as a technical recruiter in January 1997 and has accumulated 13 years of experience in the recruiting and staffing industry. He currently serves as the Vice President of Recruiting for a billion dollar staffing firm. His experience spans full life cycle recruiting “at the desk” to hiring, training, and managing large recruiting and delivery teams, as well as training hundreds of Technology, Defense, Finance and Accounting, and Healthcare recruiters who are responsible for nearly 10,000 hires nationally on an annual basis.

There is no shortage of ways to source effectively outside the confines of an office cubicle. Whether you have a smart phone such as an iPhone or Blackberry, or use a laptop or netbook, there are countless sites, networks and tools to tap into for sourcing. By now, nearly every sourcer on the planet is either a member or active user of social sites, knows what RSS is and how to use it, understands bookmarking and tagging, and lives in the Blogosphere. If you’re by chance still caught in the stone age using only job boards and your career website, the following may seem “advanced.” Let’s explore a few areas you should consider for sourcing while on the move:

Use Search Sites and Tools
Google is a must have regardless of your mobile device. They’re the undisputed king of search, but also offer a wide range of other products you can access on the go. Take Google Reader for example. Try setting up RSS feeds of resumes from sites such as VisualCV, eMurse and other career or resume sites using FeedBeater. This way you can get notifications of fresh resumes hitting those sites on your mobile device. AutoSearch is a great “catch-all” search tool that scours search engines, LinkedIn, Twitter, ZoomInfo and Jobster for profiles and resumes based on key words. The real-value to sourcers with this tool is in the search strings it automatically sets up for you on the fly. If you’re an email junkie, try reMail for the iPhone which offers fast full-text email search in your pocket.

Tap into Social and Business Networks
Over 100 million people currently use the Facebook application from their iPhones compared to total membership of 400 million people on the site. That’s 1 in 4 Facebook members that are mobilized. The Facebook iPhone application is very robust and offers nearly every feature of the main site. This means you can search, chat and manage your pages from almost anywhere. The same goes for LinkedIn’s iPhone application. For Twitter, try using TweetDeck which offers the ability to form groups of those you follow to stay organized and set-up searches for active and passive job seekers based on key words. Also check into mobile social networks such as Mocospace.

Take Advantage of Utility Tools
Want to stay connected to all things on your work PC? Start embracing the cloud, as in cloud computing, or cloud recruiting in our case. There are a plethora of tools such as Diigo, which allow you to clip pieces or entire pages of websites and tag them for later viewing. Build a library of names, profiles and resumes, and access them anywhere using Diigo. Think of it like a portable information warehouse or a bare bones ATS while you are mobile. Take a good look at Evernote as well which offers similar features. If you need a backup plan for all your documents, try SugarSync. Need to manage your blog while at a client meeting or on the subway, platforms such as WordPress offer mobile applications to get your work done.

Use Mobile Specific Applications
Smart phones in particular were born to be workhorses for people as they go about their busy work days. Sourcers in particular will find a number of great applications that were made specifically for iPhones, Blackberrys and the like.

Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt are three in particular to pay attention to. These social network related applications revolve around the new “location-based” craze. All offer ways to find and connect with new people. Siri is a newer application that acts as a “virtual personal assistant” running searches for you based on voice commands and even performs tasks such as emailing you reminders. TweetMic is a tool worth investigating. It allows voice recordings that tie into Twitter. If you consider mobilizing your website, careersite or blog, Movitas is a solid platform to get it done right as it has many popular social network plug-ins and features for Twitter and YouTube in particular.

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About our guest author:

Geoff Peterson is the owner/founder of General Lead. He has 10+ years experience in recruiting, sourcing, Internet research and social media and has held successful engagements with IBM, ADP, UnitedHealth Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, GEICO and other Fortune 500 clients, mid-size organizations and small businesses.

We have a winner! Lisa Offutt won the challenge after a late start. We had participants from five continents this time and the field of contestants was very engaged. We even got the attention of a hacker who played along for a couple of days, pretending to be someone else, who looked like a front runner for a little while. Former winners Mike Notaro and Irina Shamaeva must be warming up for the Grand Master Sourcing Challenge (GMSC) next month, because both of them also solved the challenge.

Lisa Offutt has been sourcing since 2007, when she was recruited to work for BizWerks. She does mainly internet sourcing for technology positions, and the occasional electrical or mechanical engineer. She works remotely from her home, and is very excited to be going to SourceCon and meet in person some of the smart, talented sourcers she knows of through online communities. When not wandering the back roads of the internet, she enjoys reading, live music, organizing service projects for the children at her church, and working with a local organization to reduce pollution and toxic waste in her community.

Be sure to join us next month in San Diego to meet Lisa, Irina, Mike and Katharine Robinson, since all  of them are preparing for the conference and the GMSC. It is shaping up to be one that will go down in the history books. The women have dominated the field so far this year, but Mike is currently undefeated as the GMSC Winner. Rumors have even been circulating that SourceCon may even make an unprecedented appearance too, although I strongly deny any such rumors to be true.

Stay tuned for the break-down of how Lisa solved the 3rd Challenge….

Regular Contributor post from Marvin Smith

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Technological advances are unprecedented. In fact, thinking about technological changes is mind numbing. In recruiting and sourcing, our current technology is so sophisticated that most of our process can be automated. Think about it–we automate how candidates find jobs on the web (Search Engine Optimization—SEO); we automate the application process and much of the interview process (Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS); and we would automate the actual interviews if we could. As sourcers and recruiters our goal has been to use technology to guard our time and only speak to people that are qualified for a position. We hide behind this wall of technology in our corporations so that we can operate anonymously to everyone except the chosen few that are candidates for a job.

There is a downside to our anonymity. I invite you to step into the experience of a person that stumbles over one of our jobs.

Imagine you are at work. You are researching a special project. You put your keywords in your favorite search engine; as you skim the results in Bing you notice a job advertisement from a competitor. There staring you in the face is the seemingly perfect job. You press the link and read the job description. Many questions come to mind. You press the link that says “apply” to see if your questions can be answered and to further investigate the opportunity. You are directed to an electronic form and offers you the opportunity apply for the job. You think to yourself—do I have time to apply for this job? What if my boss walks by? You wonder how long can an application process take—you conclude that this is the 21st century and it should only take a few minutes. 30 minutes later, you are still being asked questions about your life history. You are feeling uneasy since you are at work. A colleague walks by and you quickly close the window on the screen in order to protect your privacy. You have just wasted 30 minutes of your life. And your competitor has just lost a great opportunity to meet you.

The above scenario is played out daily. This is one of the byproducts of the amazing technology age—prospects for our opportunities become frustrated with our process and drop out of our application process. Before you dismiss this as isolated, Gerry & Mark at CareerXroads have some research that suggests that not completing the application process can occur over 60% of the time. If you think about it, it is not the active job seeker that drops out of the application process, but a more passive person who is just sort of kicking tires. And if you are like me, it is that passive prospect that I need because the number of active candidates do not meet my numerical or quality requirements need to fulfill my hiring objectives.

I believe we can use technology to reverse this trend of passive prospects dropping out of an application process. The solution isn’t just shortening the application process (although, I am in favor or that); we can use technology to engage is conversations with these passive prospects. I believe that we can and should use technology to rehumanize sourcing and recruiting.

At Microsoft, we are Employing Talent Communities to Rehumanize the Recruiting Process. I will discuss our approach at Sourcecon 2010. I invite you to be part of the presentation and conversation. I am the last speaker on Monday, so as you plan your departure from SourceCon, take a later flight and please join me.

If you read the speaker’s bio on Eric Jaquith, it understates the real talent and influence that Eric has on the sourcing world. I think of Eric as the sourcer’s sourcer. If a sourcer needs a deep dive on a technology or a process, then Eric should be on your speed dial.

Last fall at ERE, I was discussing travel plans with a friend. I knew he had commuted from Atlanta to the conference by car with Eric. He mentioned that he was flying back to Atlanta and I curious why he did not want to travel by car with Eric (frankly, I cannot imagine a more interesting trip than being locked in a car for eight hours discussing sourcing, recruiting and business from Eric’s perspective). My friend replied that his brain still hurt from the trip down.

I doubt that Eric will fry our brains in 75 minutes, but I am looking forward to what he has to day. I still refer to notes that I have taken from previous sessions with Eric.

One of the aspects of SourceCon that I enjoy is learning and sharing. While most of my time will be spent learning from others, I also have an opportunity to share with the SourceCon audience. While I do not believe they are saving the best for last, I am the last speaker of the last day (Monday) and invite you to take a later flight and join me in a discussion of Employing Talent Communities to Rehumanize the Recruiting Process.

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Make sure to join us March 14-15th in San Diego at SourceCon – register today!

Hi, some of you may know that my name is Sue Pike, and I am an IT Recruiter in Seattle. After so many of you reached out to me, I did a little research myself. I have a friend who is very tight with SourceCon. Unfortunately, he’s very underground in his recruiting practice and does not usually like socializing with others. He will make you pass through a test before he is willing to talk with anyone. Especially after that last NSA ‘misunderstanding’.

Finish this challenge and he may be willing to talk with you, but please keep your firewalls up and your anti-virus up to date during this challenge. Best of luck, I wish I could be more help to you, but I am too busy right now.

I couldn’t find any current info, but I did find an old photo that might be of help. I think one or all of these three might be involved..

The caption on the back of the pic may help, but the handwriting is terrible.

Our friends over at Broadlook Technologies are sponsoring this challenge – thanks guys!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/challenge3

Regular Contributor post from Kristen Fife

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I recently had a phone conversation with someone I’ve crossed paths with in the local Seattle recruiting community but  have never met personally.

This is a question a good sourcer gets asked fairly frequently. My skill set, which like any good recruiter includes agency/corporate full lifecycle recruiting, has a strong Sourcing component. And by sourcing, I’m not talking about a junior recruiter doing a keyword search based on a profile or generic job description.

A good Sourcer enjoys research, marketing, and building long-term relationships with people. As I said in my conversation earlier this week, Sourcing as a separate specialty in Recruiting is a fairly recent “job title” as a senior recruiting role. Before the advent of major Applicant Tracking Systems, almost *all* recruiters had to be strong in both sourcing and account management. My Mom was a nurse recruiter back in the 80’s and her eyes glaze over when I talk about Boolean search strings and the various ATS’s I’ve mastered over the years. It’s only when I talk about posting a job or attending a live networking event that she actually has a frame of reference. For her it was about picking up the phone, reaching out to her professional colleagues for referrals and recommendations, and meeting with both campus and industry candidates.

In the 90’s, technology took much of the human element *out* of recruiting, while streamlining the recruiting process and allowing recruiters to handle much higher requisition loads in the process. I believe that search technology (thank you Google) has brought about the advent of “Sourcing”. Now that we can run targeted searches on large numbers of candidates, “sourcing” has become even more valued as a skill.

But Sourcing is more than just being able to run a Boolean search query. Much, much more. Sourcing is also about employment branding. As the first line in a *proactive* recruiting process, we are the initial representative of our organization. A large part of our success depends on creating long-term relationships, keeping them warm, and building trust and reliability. On top of that, we need to know the state of the industry both locally and nationally so we are aware of employment trends. Strong research and analytic skills are key to our profession.

And of course there is the very real human element. Like any good recruiter, we must be comfortable picking up the phone and talking to people. One of the best parts about being a senior sourcing professional, for me, is the luxury of forming strong professional relationships and gaining a reputation as someone to “send” trusted friends and colleagues to.

And last but not least, as the forerunner of the recruiting arm of an organization, candidates and potential candidates are almost *always* happy to hear from me.  I am calling them to talk to them about their professional expertise. To get to know them, what motivates them, and to make them feel valuable and to be interested in their careers. Who doesn’t like that?

The Arbita Recruitment Genome Project research in early 2009 demonstrated that most companies’ sourcing functions are not taking advantage of the shift in candidate behavior. In the third quarter of 2009 we conducted a new survey and once again, thousands participated. We then compared the results to our baseline data and noticed some improvement. Here is what we found:

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) continues to be the least utilized lead generation tactic. About 37% of respondents felt they had a good strategy for marketing their employment opportunities using pay-per-click, direct ads and other SEM techniques. This is up 19% from survey results in early 2009.

However, Google’s Keyword Tool shows that each month at least 775 million searches are conducted on Google, about 226 million of them job-related. That means that just under a third (and quite possibly more) of the questions being asked on Google are related to job search. Are your sourcing efforts taking advantage of this passive candidate traffic goldmine?

Among the thousands of respondents, we found an amazing 16% increase in confidence around having adequate training on Internet research and sourcing, now 63%! That still leaves over a third of the population with unsatisfactory sourcing skills. But even the strongest sourcers need to stay up to date. Learning and improvement is a continuous process.  So how should your team keep up with best practices and changes in sourcing technologies like data mining techniques, sourcing automation, semantic search, social and emerging media sourcing, etc.?

Other survey results indicated that of the respondents:

• 43% feel they have a good strategy for SEO, up 17%.
• 52% are happy with their career web sites, up 5%.
• 53% were satisfied with job boards, identical to our survey earlier in the year.
• 53% feel they have a good plan for finding candidates using search engines like Google and Bing.com, up 6%.
• 56% feel they have a good strategy for finding candidates on social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, up 9%.

The future is very near, and as economic recovery turns the corner employers need to prepare for the coming rise in demand. Proliferation of social and emerging media brings with it the promise of convergence, integration and portability. Soon more true contact management features will integrate social and emerging media into your ATS/HRIS systems, rich media analytics will track any of your sources ad-hoc, career microsites will bring online social networks together into dashboards and integrate them with your CRM.

Join us at Sourcecon on Sunday, March 14^th to experience more of the above learnings from your peers and our industry leaders. We’ll also discuss how certain sourcing techniques can build or erode your employment brand. Transparency in the social Internet increases both positive and negative exposure, and with the obliteration of privacy, brings to light how sourcers can quickly build or ruin an employment brand. See you in March!

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About our guest author:

Shally Steckerl is the Executive Vice President of Arbita. He is a talent acquisition consultant, strategist, speaker, and also the Founder and Chief CyberSleuth of JobMachine, Inc., the premier provider of sourcing consulting services and workforce development. A pioneer in recruitment Internet research, accomplished author and celebrated speaker, he is a regular contributor to many industry publications. Shally is frequently requested to present at leading domestic and international recruiting conferences and conduct private workshops. He now spends his time consulting with organization interested in building passive candidate pipeline generation and recruitment teams, and developing their advanced sourcing skills.

Sara Chi, who along with Anthony Knierim and Andrea Mitchell is a former SourceCon Spotlight, is a Corporate Information Optimizer. She is a sought-after business intelligence provider, best known for harvesting knowledge to enable smart decisions for businesses. She has more than 15 years of business research and competitive intelligence experience in management consulting, financial services and technology sectors and has worked for PriceWaterhouseCoopers (Taipei, Taiwan), McKinsey & Company (Taipei and Toronto), and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (leading bank in Canada). Some of the projects on which she has worked include helping clients enter different markets/countries, launching new products/services, and attracting new customers. Recently, Sara has expanded her horizon into recruiting research, including attracting new talent.

Sara is a firm believer that behind every good business decision is an Information Professional. It is her passion and mission that research serve more than just one function. Sara believes that the information must also be relevant to the business requirement and that it has to be easy to understood by end-users.

Sara is fluent in both English and Mandarin and is currently a freelancer. She resides in Toronto and helps clients globally.

We love Sara’s extensive background in our sister function of competitive intelligence. We are thrilled to have her perspective from business research as well as another international viewpoint on recruitment research and sourcing.