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Featured Articles

These articles were featured on SourceCon in recent days.

The Sourcing Function

5 Ways to Improve Your Outbound Effectiveness

by 3 days ago

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How do you approach outbound messaging? Are you in the “spray and pray” camp? Are you spending upwards of an hour crafting that perfect email only to find that it gets no response? We’ve spoken with hundreds of recruiters in the last year and have distilled what we’ve heard about what’s working into five tips:

Tip #1: “Go custom.”

If you’re sending form emails to people, the odds of success are low. It might even reflect poorly on your company’s brand. Many in-demand people get dozens or even hundreds of these messages every month. There’s nothing wrong with templates but there is a better way.

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Social Media

When Should You Be Posting On Social Networks?

by 6 days ago

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So when are the best times to post content to social networks (especially content you want clicked on)? It seems like a big question that should have a fairly straightforward answer.

Maybe you’ve done the click tracking on your own. You’ve found the sweet spot for when you post that gets the maximum level of engagement and impressions. But many people haven’t (or they have the data but have a hard time analyzing it and understanding it over the aggregate).

Well link sharing service bitly has some answers over a fairly huge data set that they recently shared.

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Technology & Resources

Sourcing Mobility Part 2 – 16 NEW Apps For The Sourcer “On The Go”

by 3 weeks ago

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iPhone sourcing apps

Have you been keeping up with the latest buzz in mobile technology? Ambient social networking apps are increasing in popularity and its creepy location based services is hard to ignore. These apps stole the show at the South by Southwest Festival, the self-proclaimed spring break for geeks, and can be essentially beneficial in sourcing.

The original player in the ambient social networking game was Foursquare, which also became popular in 2009 at SXSW due to its geo-tagging addicting nature for us to check-in everywhere we go. However, unlike Foursquare, these apps leverage ambient awareness, which aims to connect contacts with one’s friends via social networking platforms by location, shared interest and common connections.

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Editor's Corner

Lies, Damn Lies and Social Network Statistics

by on Apr. 10, 2012

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Did you hear? Pinterest is more popular than LinkedIn. And by popular, we mean by traffic, not by number of members. It might be better for driving revenue than either Facebook or Twitter. And Facebook acquired Instagram to beat Pinterest so they can maintain their popularity (in both number of members and web traffic popularity).

And all of this helps you how? Sure, you could source using Pinterest. You can start connecting with people on Instagram too, hoping to find the next purple squirrel. More logically, you could use these as branding or marketing channels. Or you can get socially influential people in your organization engaged with it as a marketing exercise.

But in the tradition of SourceCon, it is time again to look beyond the obvious and question what exactly are we doing with all of this information? And more critically, what is important, real and worth worrying about.

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Editor's Corner, The Sourcing Function

The Candidate Experience And Sourcing: It Matters And Here’s Why

by on Mar. 27, 2012

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Last week, I was able to sit in on a presentation that Gerry Crispin gave about the candidate experience and the awards that he helps run called The Candidate Experience Awards. Crispin has spoken extensively about the subject and is on the agenda of many of the industry’s key events (including this week’s ERE Expo put on by SourceCon’s parent company, ERE Media).

I always assumed that candidate experience had more to do with downstream activity in the hiring process (mainly how candidates were communicated with and how interviewing progressed). As I read through their recently released report about the state of the candidate experience, it is obvious that sourcers and researchers have a major role in the process.

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Global Sourcing, Metrics

Five Reasons To Think Differently About Sources Of Hire

by on Mar. 15, 2012

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Every single time I write about sources of hire, a little red siren goes off in my head with a robotic voice saying, “WARNING: Actual results may vary!” At first glance, the latest from the CareerXroads calls into doubt the effectiveness of social recruiting. Only 3.5% of external hires come from social media? Social recruiting advocates must be wasting their time, right?

That’s where that little red siren starts going off.

Instead of trying to simplistically deduce which source is better or worse than the next and making declarations about the health of job boards, social media or anything else, maybe it is time to think about using all of the available data about how people come to see our jobs and use it to our full advantage?

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The Sourcing Function

Do Your Own Job: I’m Not Your Researcher, Sourcer or Contact Database

by on Mar. 5, 2012

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Quite frequently I get contacted by people searching for something or someone. Normally, I don’t mind that.

Actually sometimes it is flattering that a random stranger or casual acquaintance found something about me intriguing enough to think I’d be a good person to contact to get help with their situation.

In posting this I realize I may ruffle some feathers and raise some eyebrows. My intent is not to come across as someone unwilling to lend a hand or offer assistance. The opposite is probably more my problem.

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Editor's Corner

The Sourcing Body

by on Feb. 16, 2012

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human body

I am not #SourceCon. We all are.

As someone who has been in sourcing for nearly a decade now, I’ve watched the function ebb and flow through recessions and boom times. When I first started sourcing back in 2002, it was a boom time for sourcing. Everyone was excited about it and wanted a sourcer to add to their team. Around 2007, things started getting a little tight and by 2008 sourcing was one of those job functions to be cut first from company budgets because “it wasn’t a necessary function” to keep a company going. Now, sourcing is making another comeback — everyone wants to learn about sourcing; everyone wants the “secret sauce” for finding every single candidate in existence.

The problem with this is that there is no one “secret sauce” — yes, there are specific potions that will help in different industries, but when you boil it down to the basics, the “secret sauce” comes from community cohesion. And this can come in the form of your recruiting team which consists of recruiters, sourcers, and HR folks, or the sourcing community from which you can learn techniques, yes, but more importantly, from which you can learn the thought processes behind the magic of sourcing.

The whole collective effort of the community is greater than the sum of its individual parts. You — we — are all #SourceCon.

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Metrics, The Sourcing Function

Sourcing Salary Survey: Results

by on Feb. 6, 2012

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The topic of sourcing compensation is a hotly contested one. It always has been, and I suspect that it always will be. There are some who feel that sourcers are glorified administrative assistants and thus should be making right at minimum wage levels (if not less). There are others who feel that sourcing is an integral part of the hiring process as well as a valuable asset to other parts of an organization, and thus should be rewarded with six-figure incomes.

The purpose in conducting this sourcing salary survey was to take a look at sourcer compensation levels using a variety of different filters. Some results were expected, such as the fact that corporate sourcers make significantly more annually than their agency counterparts. Others were a little surprising, as you’ll see below in the infographic.

Perhaps most surprising was this: by taking your responses and breaking down, approximating, and averaging comp ranges, we discover that the average annual compensation for a sourcer is $73,000. That’s more than what most would have predicted.

Below we present the findings of the 2011 Sourcing Salary Survey.

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Leadership

Becoming a Sourcing Advisor

by on Jan. 16, 2012

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trusted-advisor

Where do you add value in the recruiting process? Do your customers see you as a recruiting consultant/advisor? Do your peers see you as an expert in sourcing? Do you mentor others? What do you do to set the strategy for sourcing? Is there something special in the screening that you do? Is there something different in the techniques you use to find candidates? Is there something different in the overall work that you can do?

I just asked a lot of questions I’ll bet you’ve asked yourself at some point in time…

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