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Sourcing News and Knowledge – Beyond the Obvious


Adam Wiedmer

Adam Wiedmer has provided sourcing, recruitment, and hiring process design solutions to a variety of Fortune 500 clients. His focus to date has been primarily contracts for high-volume global recruitment efforts that have spanned industries such as insurance, automotive, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications. Aside from recruiting, Adam is a dedicated musician and spends his time attending concerts, playing bass, and writing music.

Articles by Adam Wiedmer

Technology & Resources

How To Source Using Online Portfolios

by on Sep. 15, 2011

5 Comments

portfolio

I’m going to reverse the sourcing process a little bit. Often the sourcing approach goes like this:

Job Boards –> LinkedIn –> Groups  –> intitle: –> Resume Search

Then you run out of resumes and you get stuck. That’s when I start to work backwards, because if you think about it, hiring managers want to hire candidates with a particular skill set, not because the candidate can write a great resume. In fact, it is the candidate’s work itself that defines the candidate’s skill set they write on a resume. The “resume” or “profile” of a candidate is simply the end result of their work right? So, let’s get to the source…

I call it Portfolio Sourcing, but more explicitly it is sourcing candidates where they present their work.

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Social Media

Building Talent Communities on LinkedIn

by on Mar. 31, 2011

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linkedin network

In the last few months, building talent communities on LinkedIn with like-minded individuals got a lot easier. First off, they have made a bunch of changes to groups that make it easier to host job feeds and distribute jobs to your group discussions.

However there are a couple other more subtle changes that really made an impact on building communities on LinkedIn. Until recently, one fundamental thing was missing; the ability to easily determine a user’s interests on LinkedIn, but this has all changed thanks to a ton of new developments to LinkedIn’s Updates, Companies, & Groups sections.

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Phone Sourcing, Social Media

The World’s Biggest Social Network: The Phone

by on Jan. 7, 2011

5 Comments

socialnetwork

To attract talent at the top of your game, you need a winning sourcing strategy.  Since passive talent cannot be found on the job boards, create a strategy that branches out to a wide variety of networks, social media, blogs, user groups, and so forth. Throw as much into the top of the funnel as possible. The secret is to track candidates where they are in real life. There is no one stop shop. And how many times have you seen those statistics used to pitch the use of social media for recruitment?

  1. LinkedIn: 80+ million users
  2. Twitter: 100+ million users
  3. Facebook: 500+ million users

The statistics speak for themselves when it comes to why an employer should use social media to attract talent. These statistics will only increase, considering that 98% of Gen Y has joined a social network. And while I do see the significance of social recruiting, however, there’s a few more stats that I’d like to consider:**

  1. Cell Phone: 3.3 Billion users
  2. 93% of U.S. adults own a cell phone
  3. 300+ million U.S. mobile subscribers by mid-2011
  4. In 2009, 80% of US households still owned a landline phone
  5. The mobile device will be the world’s primary connection tool to the Internet in 2020.

I’d like to introduce THE PHONE as the world’s biggest social network.

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Metrics, Social Media

Tools & Techniques for Writing Strategic SEO Job Postings

by on Aug. 10, 2010

2 Comments

Weidmer-Adam

I get it; typically someone in sourcing gets called in when ad response just isn’t getting the job done. As most sourcers do when they get a new req, we evaluate the situation; find out what’s been done, what has worked, and what has failed. However, so many times when you look at the advertisements, it’s pretty clear to see that a “lack of proactive sourcing” is not the only problem. I’ve literally seen sales ads get run on multiple paid job boards without the word “sales” in it. You might as well make your ads invisible.

And while there is usually a lot of talk on best practices for advanced search string theory, it is refreshing when that same analytical approach is applied to producing competitively written job advertisements. Because ideally, for every one candidate that applies on their own, that saves a company both time and money in proactive outreach.

When it comes to advertising jobs more effectively, there are two primary steps that I go through:

  1. Keyword Selection (How do you select the “best” keyword terms to use in your ad?)
  2. Keyword Density (How do you measure your keyword use in each ad?)

Below are some tips and tools of the trade for writing strategic SEO job descriptions.

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