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Sourcing News and Knowledge – Beyond the Obvious


Social Media, Technology & Resources

3 Cool Social Tools From SourceCon

by on Oct. 31, 2011

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SC tech

Those of you who attended SourceCon two weeks ago may have noticed a couple of new technologies we used during the conference. Since we are geared more toward the “nerdy” side of recruiting, we wanted to try out some new things in an attempt to make your conference experience a little richer.

As a little present for those of you who weren’t there in person and a supplement to those of you who were, today I am giving you a quick snapshot of the tools we incorporated into the conference experience: Holler, Vizibility, and Hashcaster.

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SourceCon

The Nike Talent Acquisition Team SourceCon Experience

by on Oct. 28, 2011

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Tanja and Arati

We (Tanja and Arati) recently attended the SourceCon conference in Santa Clara, CA. Having written previously about the collaborative styles we have when working together, to  fill Nike’s job openings, we definitely wanted to experience this event as a team as well. When we approached our manager about attending the conference who was supportive and said go for it!

Here are our experiences from attending SourceCon as a team. 

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Industry News, Metrics

Mid-Size Companies Choosing Tech Over Talent

by on Oct. 27, 2011

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Deloitte-mid-market-trends-report1

“Technology — rather than hiring — is on the minds of most executives of mid-market companies.”

So says Mid-Market Perspectives: America‘s Economic Engine – Competing in Uncertain Times, a Deloitte survey of almost 700 executives at companies with revenue of $50 million to $1 billion.

A majority of the executives expect both revenue (61.2 percent) and profitability (52.6 percent) to increase next year, despite limited faith in any significant improvement in the national economy. What drives their optimism is a continued focus on cost controls and increased productivity.

Of the 70 percent of executives reporting an increase in productivity, the average saw a 6.1 percent improvement since the beginning of the recession. The majority of executives credit the rise to improvements in business processes (62.2 percent) and technology (50.3 percent), especially the automation of business operations and increased use of data analytics for business intelligence.

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Leadership, Metrics, Social Media

10 Common Mistakes of Sourcing

by on Oct. 26, 2011

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JHascheRIS11

During her presentation on sourcing strategies that produce results this Monday at the Recruiting Innovation Summit, which took place at Facebook in Palo Alto, CA, Jennifer Hasche, a Senior Sourcer at Intuit, shared her list of top 10 sourcing mistakes that are typically made within a recruitment organization. These mistakes are often the cause of missing the right candidates, taking too long on a search project, not understanding your business, and most frustratingly the misuse of available sourcing talent within an organization.

Read through the following list and make sure you aren’t making these mistakes yourself!

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Industry News, Social Media

Recruiting Innovation and Sourcing

by on Oct. 24, 2011

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Susan Strayer opened up the Recruiting Innovation Summit today by telling attendees not to replicate anything that they learn today.

Say what!?

What that means, Strayer continued, is that the concepts that will be shared over the course of the event, held at Facebook in Palo Alto, CA, are guidelines and attendees need to customize the things they learn on how to bring their recruiting strategies to the next level based on what their individual companies and teams need — not just on what other people are doing.

Matt Millunchick, Technical Project Manager at Facebook, kicked off by sharing some stats about Facebook users this morning (800 million active users per month; 700 billion minutes spent on Facebook each month; 30 billion pieces of content shared… wow) that laid out the future of recruiting (and sourcing) innovation — it’s about data of course, but it’s about reaching people by analyzing and then appropriately applying that data into compelling messaging.

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Industry News, Technology & Resources

LinkedIn Introduces Talent Pipeline

by on Oct. 19, 2011

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LI Talent Pipeline

LinkedIn said there would be surprises at its Talent Connect user conference in Las Vegas this week. The company didn’t disappoint.

During a keynote session this morning that had more in common with a Hollywood spectacular than sober recruiting kickoff, CEO Jeff Weiner wowed the audience of 1,800 with Talent Pipeline. Now it might be that the biggest applause — and some actual cheering — came when he uttered the magic word Free, as in free for those licensing LinkedIn Recruiter. But, those cheers would have been equally appropriate for the product itself.

Weiner left the driving to his VP of product, David Hahn, who tour-guided Talent Pipeline on five massive screens, demonstrating its ease of use, its utility, and a little less obviously, its potential to replace the most basic of ATS programs in use.

Hahn said the development of Talent Pipeline was driven by the challenges talent specialists face in managing pipelined prospects over many months. And not just prospects sourced from LinkedIn. Talent Pipeline, declared Hahn, is the single place to manage all your talent prospects, whatever the source.

What’s particularly special about Talent Pipeline is how it connects prospects and information. Any old ATS will take applicant resumes and sort them into a searchable database. More sophisticated systems provide notes fields, calendaring and scheduling functions, automated messaging, and the like. What Talent Pipeline also does is to pull information from a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, match up their connections, essentially building a portfolio private to the recruiter and tracking all activity between the prospect and employer.When a prospect in Talent Pipeline updates their LinkedIn profile, the recruiter is alerted. In the rare event that a prospect isn’t on LinkedIn, a profile-like portfolio is built from the resume employment history.

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Industry News, Social Media

LinkedIn’s Talent Connect Event Kicks Off Amid a Changing Social World

by on Oct. 18, 2011

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LITalentConnect

As LinkedIn’s annual user conference got underway in Las Vegas today, it took on an import that goes well beyond the quality of the agenda. This is its first conference since becoming a public company and the first since its dominance as the Internet’s leading business network was challenged — directly or otherwise — by such powerful brands as Google, Facebook, and Monster.

The sessions the company has planned for the three-day event are heavy on the training with a strong mix of sessions devoted to recruiting strategies and social media. The speaker lineup is first rate and the agenda promised enough variety and practicums that it should be easy enough to answer the boss’s “What did you learn?” questions.

On another level, though, the conference is spectacle, a physical manifestation of the reach LinkedIn has achieved into the recruiting world in just a few years. Founded as a sales and marketing leads business, LinkedIn has morphed into a jobs-focused social network. Today half its revenue — approaching $500 million — comes from recruiters.

But in just the five months since LinkedIn went public in May the world has changed.

Google launched a social network, Monster launched BeKnown, a careers network, BranchOut, a startup careers network, announced a partnership with CareerBuilder, and, perhaps most significant of all, Facebook detailed sweeping changes to its 800-million-user social network that could trump the need for a separate business network altogether.

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The Sourcing Function

Ask Jackye: Three Million Networking Contacts and Counting

by on Oct. 18, 2011

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jackye clayton

How do you source for high demand diversity professionals?

Great question! I had a boss who always told me, “You have over three million people to choose from in the U.S. alone!” Sure there are, but you and I both know that there are not three million qualified, ready, and willing candidates. And diverse candidates are not always easy to find. So get your message out there and let everyone you get in contact with know that you are sourcing for a position for a company with a focus on diversity!

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Corporate Sourcing, Leadership, SourceCon

PNC Case Study at SourceCon: Four Steps to Developing a Successful Sourcing Team

by on Oct. 17, 2011

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Jillian Snavley SC 2011

Jillian Snavley has built a phenomenal sourcing function at PNC Financial Services. And she has the data to prove it, as she very effectively demonstrated during her keynote presentation at SourceCon on Friday morning. This is something that sourcing leaders, practitioners, and corporate executives alike need in order to justify the very existence of a sourcing function within a company. Conference attendees were treated to a stream of useful knowledge to bring back to their individual companies to help build a case for both developing a new sourcing function as well as investing into existing ones, based on the successes shared by Snavley during her presentation.

Snavley appropriately divided her presentation, titled “Revving Up Your Sourcing Function,” into four “laps”: Building, Developing, Strategy, and Refining. Each “lap” of building PNC’s sourcing function (which was non-existent at the beginning of the process) presented challenges which were overcome by providing business cases, data and metrics, and examples of success from other areas that have led to a highly successful and very unique group of sourcers, who have earned the designation of “in-house agency” partners for various business units.

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Metrics, The Sourcing Function

High Volume Sourcing Trends: Creating a Pool, Not Sinking

by on Oct. 14, 2011

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Think you have a stressful sourcing job? What if you had two weeks to fill 20 positions, and then were asked to repeat that demand over and over again? These are the tasks that many high volume sourcers tackle on a daily, rigorous schedule. It’s a constant uphill battle to fill positions, meet tight deadlines, fill classes and satisfy hiring managers.

Carl Kutsmode’s presentation on High Volume Sourcing Trends at the SourceCon conference yesterday addressed those key issues and offered insightful tips on how to effectively manage your time and resources and create an attractive pool of talent to more efficiently and effectively fill your high volume positions.

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