Chris Gould and Tim O’Connor have built a successful global sourcing function at Hewitt Associates. But they didn’t get where they are today by not taking chances or making some mistakes along the way. They graciously shared with us at SourceCon some of the learning lessons along the way that helped them reach the success levels they’re at today.

Three years ago, Gould shared that they were structured as a full cycle recruiting team. He said that they outsourced a lot of the sourcing tasks, they didn’t track metrics, the technology was lacking, basically they had a lot of things that needed to be changed in order to grow. His vision was to make drastic changes and bring sourcing to a centralized, internal function in order to accomplish three hiring goals – increase quality, increase quantity, and decrease cost. In order to do this, Gould started with defining the sourcing roles – what would the responsibilities be, where hand offs would occur, instilling a culture of teamwork and not individualism, measuring results, etc. Team effort would help everyone focus on getting the fundamentals right and would create the unity needed in order for the sourcing efforts to go global.