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Sourcing News and Knowledge – Beyond the Obvious


Industry News, Social Media

Which Industries Are LinkedIn Users In? Majority Are In Higher Ed, IT, Financial Services, & Retail


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LinkedIn is still a major player when it comes to finding and sourcing potential employees. But among those 150 million users, who is highly represented on LinkedIn and who still lags behind?

The question is an important one as you look at where you should spend time as a sourcer or recruiter. 150 million members is a lot of people but it’s not close to everyone. If you know you’ll have a better chance finding a particular person in an industry, you might focus more or less time on that particular source.

So who exactly is on LinkedIn?

Social Media

Facebook Following Google, Adding Real-Time Analytics To Pages


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If you’re a big time Google Analytics fan like I am, you know that last year they added real-time analytics to their popular web analytics service. Once in the realm of either paid services (or more limited, single use type services), real-time gives you visibility into what’s popular now. And by now, they meant right now. It’s a great resource.

For those using their Facebook page to advertise jobs or even just as a branding exercise, you know how much Facebook Insights, the name of their analytics service, rarely lived up to its name. It looks like at least one component of this service will improve dramatically: the timeliness of updates.

Contract Sourcing, Corporate Sourcing

Should Your Job Title Really Be “Phisher”?


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If you are one of those recruiters that uses a keyword search resume bot in conjunction with a mass email to every result that gets returned, you are NOT a recruiter, you are not a sourcer, you are not a Talent Acquisition Specialist. You are a phisher, also colloquially known as a SPAMMER.

There was a firestorm this week on one of my online moderated discussion lists (technology focused). We have a free job posting page, where any recruiter or hiring manager can post their job description, contact info, and application information. What started the whole “discussion” was this message:

Editor's Corner

And The New Editor of SourceCon is…


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I know many of our readers have been waiting with bated breath for this announcement. You’ve been clicking refresh on your browser. Or perhaps you’ve been waiting for the announcement to leak out via Twitter.

Well, the wait is over. The new editor is me, Lance Haun, former Community Director and Contributing Editor at ERE Media (SourceCon’s parent company).

For a community full of sourcers, that should be enough, right? Perhaps, but let’s at least get an official story out there.

Industry News

Referrals, Job Boards Dominate While Social Media Lags in Latest Sources of Hire Report


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After two years of looking internally to fill vacancies, companies in 2011 again began to hire new workers, relying on referrals and job boards for nearly 50 percent of their external hires.

Social media, though it accounted for only 3.5 percent of those external hires, evidences a much greater impact on hiring than the numbers would suggest, influencing candidates whose hiring ends up being attributed to other sources.

These are but a few of the findings in the just released 2012 CareerXroads Sources of Hire survey. Conducted now for a decade by the talent consultancy of Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, the annual survey queries the recruiting leaders of America’s largest companies about where they source the hires they make. Additional questions touch on emerging trends.

While Crispin and Mehler caution that the results reflect only the hiring practices of the participating companies, the survey has come to be an industry standard, occupying the top Google results for “source of hire,” and is one of the tools recruiters use in developing their own recruiting strategy.

This year’s survey found that in 2011 the 36 participating companies, which collectively have 1.2 million employees, filled 59 percent of their 213,375 openings externally. It’s a dramatic change from the last two years when half the openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions.

Leadership, The Sourcing Function

Relationships: Your Ticket to Recruiting Success


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What’s the common denominator in successful organizations? Access to the right talent when and where it’s needed. But even with a large pool of unemployed workers available, finding the right people remains a challenge.

Across industries, qualified talent remains elusive. One approach that can separate the winners and losers in the talent war is a more relationship-driven approach to recruiting.

However, merely seeking to forge new relationships and cultivate better ones isn’t enough – candidates have to be managed and nurtured properly if they are going to be valuable to the organization’s recruiting efforts. Technology is playing an increasingly large role on this front, with organizations relying on candidate relationship management platforms to keep in touch with prospective candidates, share new opportunities, and offer other relevant information to build the company’s employment brand.

What should you think about when sourcing for success?

SourceCon

SourceCon: The Ultimate Talent Community


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When I try to explain SourceCon (the conference) to the uninitiated, it sounds rather geeky and strange. A bunch of us recruiting types get together to discuss data, search technology, and deep candidate research. We impress each other by sharing LinkedIn hacks or discovering obscure mobile apps. We fired up our laptops at a bar to discuss candidate tracking software.

We check in a lot. And we tweet. A lot. We zap QR codes and trade search strings. And we talk about talent communities.

What’s a talent community? Like sourcing, the concept of talent communities defies definition. It is what you want it to be. I like to believe that a talent community, like sourcing, results in candidates and hires. Not everyone agrees with me.

I think that SourceCon, and the community that has developed around it, is a great example of a talent community. Perhaps the original intent was not to build a pipeline of sourcing professionals, but the end result is an active, real-time candidate pool. Doesn’t matter who owns it, or who uses it. If you’re looking to hire a sourcer, start with SourceCon.

The brilliant Chris Havrilla has already explored the territory of SourceCon and Talent Communities. But I will forge ahead, maybe extend the analogy. I’m stubborn like that.

Editor's Corner

The Sourcing Body


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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.

The Sourcing Function

Some Thoughts on Sourcing Skills vs. Tools


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I talk to a lot of sourcers –I ask them about their work and which tools they use. You might say as a marketer, blogger, and speaker within the industry, I’m a keen observer of sourcers and recruiters.

One of my favorite questions to ask is this: What sourcing tools do you use?

A popular answer is LinkedIn Recruiter. Now, I am not a sourcer myself — but as a sourcer, does that make you upset? Does it make you worried?

It probably should. LinkedIn Recruiter is an effective (albeit expensive) tool that, for all intents and purposes allows people to call themselves sourcers. No research background necessary, no Boolean strings, no X-Raying Google or Bing, no geolocation tricks. And certainly, no need for telephone sourcing.

Is this how sourcers are trained now?

Social Media, Technology & Resources

Gmail Tools To Help You Source


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As a sourcer, your time is valuable — in fact, if you’re on commission, your time literally is money. As such, it goes without saying that maximizing your day-to-day efficiency is of the utmost importance. So why not start in the most obvious place for our digitally connected world? Your email, of course!

If you use Gmail in some manner when you’re sourcing, there are several tools that can aid you in your search efforts. Aside from enabling every Labs feature known to man, take note of these valuable external tools that link easily to Gmail.