I spent the last week in the north woods of Wisconsin deer hunting — sitting in a tree, watching, waiting, hoping my preparations were done right, hoping I was in the right spot. I spent the week without a 3G signal on my cell phone. My phone was suddenly just a phone – no news feeds, no Internet, no emails.  Like a primitive caveman, all I had was the single function of dialing and receiving calls.  So of course, my mind started to wander and I had time to reflect and compare how very similar hunting and sourcing really are.  And since there were no emails, text messages, or social media invitations to distract me, I had time to think about methodology for hours on end. I thought about past searches, future searches, tools I would like to create and build in hopes of saving time down the road, and how all that technology that I didn’t have access to could help me. I worked a little bit, but I did it old school style with a phone conversation and a pen and paper to jot notes down on. A little after mid-week it hit me that no matter how much technology we have at our fingertips, the most precious piece of sourcing is connecting with the candidate, talking with them, and understanding them.

As sourcers, when taking on a project or effort we are often given a list of specific requirements that the ideal candidate will possess. With that, our search begins and we hit the proverbial pavement armed with our list of wants and needs looking for that person and conducting our searches with keywords, Boolean strings, and all the tools we’ve developed over the years. We burn through resume after resume and profile after profile flipping them into folders and buckets based on whether or not the right word or phrase is on that resume. Did you know there’s a whole population of viable candidates that get passed by because they don’t show up in your keyword search?

Yes – this candidate population is in the military.