Welcome to SourceCon:
You know what one of the differences is between a recruiter that is “good” versus “great” at sourcing? It’s not what you think.
It’s being able to see the “big picture” when it comes to finding quality talent.
Kristen Fife
Articles by Kristen Fife
What’s the Difference Between a ‘Good’ vs. a ‘Great’ Sourcing Recruiter?
by 
Kristen Fife
on Jun. 23, 2011
Kristen Fife
on Jun. 23, 2011
Using LinkedIn Groups to Source Effectively
by Kristen Fife
on Mar. 23, 2011
Kristen Fife
on Mar. 23, 2011
Have you looked on LinkedIn lately in the Groups that are dedicated to job-related networking? You know all those people that put:
Looking for an opportunity in XYZ. My background is ABCDEFGH. I accept all networking invitations; visit my profile…
I see a lot of recruiters and hiring managers share with candidates that this is an ineffective way to use LinkedIn. So, why oh why are recruiters around the globe doing almost that exact same thing when looking for other recruiters?
Recruiters Are Hypocrites
by Kristen Fife
on Feb. 24, 2011
Kristen Fife
on Feb. 24, 2011
We recruiters tell candidates to do their homework before contacting any potential employer, and what a bunch of hypocrites I am finding out there.
“Being busy” is not an excuse for laziness or poor sourcing habits. As a senior IT recruiter in Seattle, I list out the technologies I work with on my resume. I have many years of experience at Microsoft on various recruiting teams. So it’s fairly natural that I come up in keyword searches that have “Microsoft” or “.NET” or “C#” or “HTML” or on them. I’ve pretty much recruited for every type of software development position out there.
However…
Sourcing: A Passing Fad Or A Strategic Move?
by Kristen Fife
on Nov. 19, 2010
Kristen Fife
on Nov. 19, 2010
“Sourcing Strategy”. What does this term mean to you? Courtesy of Wikipedia: ” In military usage strategy is distinct from tactics, which are concerned with the conduct of an engagement, while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked.”
I’ve spent the better part of the last year helping several businesses in Seattle develop and implement “sourcing strategies”. In theory. But here’s the catch. Strategic sourcing isn’t about internet recruiting. It isn’t about having your pipeline up, filled, and ready to go in a couple of weeks. “Strategy” is a long-term investment, and it isn’t appropriate for all companies, all industry verticals, or even all recruiters.
Glass Houses
by Kristen Fife
on Aug. 11, 2010
Kristen Fife
on Aug. 11, 2010
Not too long ago, someone asked me a question about spelling errors on resumes and cover letters, and how I felt about them when I was looking at a resume from a sourcing perspective. I’m going to be more forgiving of someone out of school a couple of years than a senior industry candidate.
If I’m reading a cover letter, I’m probably a bit more forgiving about spelling errors. I’ll give you one pass, especially if it is a homonym like “there” or “their”. On a resume, some things are a bit more ambiguous. For example, I’m in IT recruiting, and the spelling for Unix or UNIX has changed over the years. Same with Xbox or XBOX. I don’t care very much. However, I was looking at the resume of a former employee a few weeks ago, and he spelled the company wrong. That is unforgivable. (He is also active on several of the social networking sites I am on and is a deplorable speller…*hello*…spell check…) I’m also not very forgiving of industry terms and titles used incorrectly or misspelled.
I don’t care all that much about spacing and grammar, as long as you are fairly consistent. (i.e. if you are using bullet points and capitalize the first word but don’t use a period at the end, no big deal, but keep the same format throughout)
We are human; spell check doesn’t catch every error, and there *are* some mistakes that humans tend to gloss over, even if we have it read by one or two people. But when it comes to job descriptions or candidate communications, I must say I am a stickler for perfection. So imagine my surprise this week as I was looking at external job sites and candidate communication templates with major errors on them. This week’s offenders:
- P&L Analist
- WIndows (on the MSFT external career page!)
- “This person’s primary responsibly will be to …” (From a candidate phone screen confirmation).
OK folks, these are stupid errors! They are singularly unprofessional. I know a lot of recruiters that are much less tolerant and lenient than yours truly when it comes to spelling on resumes and cover letters. We seem to be living in glass houses here if the above stated examples are any indication of what’s going on.
So, are we dealing with a problem with tools? Is it human error? Or something else?
Last month I wrote a post over on ERE titled ‘“App For That” Erosion‘. I hypothesized that technology is making younger professionals unable to function in a business environment, that they don’t have the basic skills to perform at the high level that their older colleagues do. And I assert that this sloppy spelling is also a symptom of not learning the basics, including proofreading with human eyes and doublechecking the end result before it gets published onto a public-facing website. There is simply no excuse for using a job posting template with mistakes in it.
Until we are literally “letter perfect” on our own publications, I say we keep our stones on the ground.
Sourcing For Contractors
by Kristen Fife
on Jun. 23, 2010
Kristen Fife
on Jun. 23, 2010
Regular Contributor post from Kristen Fife
I’ve been a recruiter in the Seattle tech market for close to seven years now. I’ve worked for one of the top temporary staffing agencies, as a contractor on numerous teams at Microsoft as both a Sourcer and Full Desk/lifecycle recruiter for their corporate openings, as the lone recruiter at a mid-size company, and currently I’m working for a consulting company that places both staff augmentation and full consulting teams onsite with our enterprise clients.
From a sourcing perspective, I use the same skills to find talent. It is the time and talent management pieces that are vastly different. I do not particularly like straight temporary sourcing/recruiting. The ‘turn and burn’ mentality doesn’t allow me the chance to build a lasting rapport and relationship with my candidates (thus also building trust), or my hiring managers. When I worked at Volt, it was all about a ‘general fit’ and profit margin vs. the candidate experience. That ‘general fit’ was 75% or more. Meaning, if the candidate had 75% of the skills the job description called for, then write up your submittal verbiage and send them over. I was lucky in that I knew what the main skills were at Microsoft for core tech positions (C#, SQL, manual testing for SDET/QA engineers). Back in the mid-90′s, it was a candidates’ market. The inability to offer relocation or to cover expenses for travel to interviews was a major detriment to hiring truly talented people, thus the same professionals were jumped on by rival agencies. However, I will say that the ‘turn and burn’ environment taught me some really valuable skills as far as learning to quickly identify, contact, screen, and move candidates through the pipeline.
My biggest frustration with corporate recruiting is how slow things can be. 45+ days to hire? Seriously? Having that much time allowed me to look like a rock star because I was able to keep pipes filled to overflowing. The advantages to corporate recruiting include the fact that most professionals want the stability and benefits of a full-time job. It’s an easy sell, and especially with a brand like Microsoft as well as the resources, it was easy to convince candidates to at least talk to us. The caveat to full-time positions is that your client is much pickier about quality from both a functional skillset and a cultural fit. It takes many more candidates to fill a full-time requisition than it does a contract role.
Right now, it’s definitely an employer’s market. Jobs are the commodity we have to sell and we get more than enough qualified candidates on every requisition. And, given the fact that I live in an area of the country that seems to be doing better than average on the recovery front, people that are able to are moving to Seattle on their own dime. For example, I heard about the layoffs at Sprint in Kansas and started sourcing project managers for the wireless openings of which we have so many. And, I have two candidates who have applied for jobs from out of state that are moving in and I’m setting up for interviews. So for me, the pipe is very full. However, that does not stop me from continuing to build those longer term relationships. To me, effective sourcing is built on the platform of growing your network during feast AND famine.
I’d say that right now, more candidates are open to contract opportunities, since a lot of companies are using contingent staffing to help weather the economy. At least in Seattle, this is a cyclical occurence. It happened in the 1998-2001 era (which I affectionately refer to as the dot bomb) and I have no doubt it will continue to do so. And part of that cycle is that contractors who have worked out well will have the opportunity to become full-time employees as companies stabilize financially. If I, as a recruiter, help my candidates find and keep a job, I get the best of all worlds, including referrals from them, because they know I care about their careers and aspirations beyond just the six-month gig at XYZ company.
Have you found that more companies are looking to hire contractors than full-time employees? Are you finding contractors easier or harder to place than full-time? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Devaluation of the Sourcing Role
by Kristen Fife
on May 3, 2010
Kristen Fife
on May 3, 2010
Regular Contributor post from Kristen Fife, originally posted on ERE
Earlier this week on WArecruit, our local HR and Recruiting discussion list, someone posted a job looking for a “top notch sourcer” (technical) for a very part-time, telecommute opportunity for a contact. The pay rate was listed as between $13-$15/hour.
Now, in some parts of the country that might be considered a fair wage, but in Seattle this is less than we pay our Recruiting Assistants and even Corporate Receptionists. I found this pay range to be insulting from a number of angles.
I wrote back and told the individual that posted the job that I hope he had told his contact that a “top notch [technical] sourcer”, such as me, makes more than twice that at the very bottom range of our compensation.
I had several people contact me offline thanking me for speaking up, and praising me for knowing the comp rate for our profession and defending it.
So why am I insulted? If I am being generous I will assume that the person looking for the “top notch” technical sourcer has no idea what a sourcing recruiter truly *does*, and is just looking for someone to log into the job boards and funnel her resumes. However, even *that* very basic skill set commands at least 25% more than was offered in this area.
If she actually understands the role of a *true* senior sourcing professional, (including building relationships with industry professionals; doing in-depth competitive intelligence; using much more complex tools than a simple Boolean search string on Monster; cold calling companies to gather names or building out a company directory during off-hours by culling their voicemail system; researching conference speaker and event attendee lists and then combining those results to find top passive talent) I find her actions despicable. She is devaluing the skill set most senior sourcing recruiters have spent years building.
I personally find it a bitter pill to swallow that Senior Sourcers already make less money than “full desk” or full lifecycle recruiters in most organizations. The work that we do to build pipelines for our account management colleagues should be valued *at least* as much. I spend time searching out and evaluating top talent to create candidate pools and pipes for my team to have available. I create long-term relationships with industry professionals in order to generate referrals and trust. The time and effort that goes into sourcing is so much more intensive than just slotting a candidate into a role when it becomes available.
Truly *good* recruiters in all industries keep their address books filled with good candidates and industry contacts, and their LinkedIn networks are filled with people that they have talked to about a role that may be something of interest in two to three years.
Toward the end of the day, I received an email from the original poster of the $13-$15/hour sourcing posting, informing me that his contact has received several “good” responses from individuals who value the chance to telecommute a few hours on their own schedule to be a fair trade-off. My final response was that I hoped his colleague gets much more than her money’s worth, because someone that truly is a senior, *good* sourcer would have to be desperate to take such a low wage. Anyone on UI in the Seattle market is making much more than that. Convenience should never be a trade-off for quality.
As one responder to my post noted, any organization that is trying to take advantage of desperate times is just positioning themselves for failure; as soon as the market picks up, and it is starting to, those people will start leaving in search of companies that value their skills and contributions. How many discussions have you been party to about lower wages and finding/retaining top talent? How can we even begin to chastise our HR departments on lower compensation ladders when we don’t even fairly value our *own*? This is the same sort of behavior that gives organizations a bad name in general in the recruiting industry. If you want “top notch” talent of any sort, you need to be prepared to offer fair wages.
As they say, you get what you pay for.
Why Sourcing?
by Kristen Fife
on Feb. 8, 2010
Kristen Fife
on Feb. 8, 2010
Regular Contributor post from Kristen Fife
I recently had a phone conversation with someone I’ve crossed paths with in the local Seattle recruiting community but have never met personally.
This is a question a good sourcer gets asked fairly frequently. My skill set, which like any good recruiter includes agency/corporate full lifecycle recruiting, has a strong Sourcing component. And by sourcing, I’m not talking about a junior recruiter doing a keyword search based on a profile or generic job description.
A good Sourcer enjoys research, marketing, and building long-term relationships with people. As I said in my conversation earlier this week, Sourcing as a separate specialty in Recruiting is a fairly recent “job title” as a senior recruiting role. Before the advent of major Applicant Tracking Systems, almost *all* recruiters had to be strong in both sourcing and account management. My Mom was a nurse recruiter back in the 80′s and her eyes glaze over when I talk about Boolean search strings and the various ATS’s I’ve mastered over the years. It’s only when I talk about posting a job or attending a live networking event that she actually has a frame of reference. For her it was about picking up the phone, reaching out to her professional colleagues for referrals and recommendations, and meeting with both campus and industry candidates.
In the 90′s, technology took much of the human element *out* of recruiting, while streamlining the recruiting process and allowing recruiters to handle much higher requisition loads in the process. I believe that search technology (thank you Google) has brought about the advent of “Sourcing”. Now that we can run targeted searches on large numbers of candidates, “sourcing” has become even more valued as a skill.
But Sourcing is more than just being able to run a Boolean search query. Much, much more. Sourcing is also about employment branding. As the first line in a *proactive* recruiting process, we are the initial representative of our organization. A large part of our success depends on creating long-term relationships, keeping them warm, and building trust and reliability. On top of that, we need to know the state of the industry both locally and nationally so we are aware of employment trends. Strong research and analytic skills are key to our profession.
And of course there is the very real human element. Like any good recruiter, we must be comfortable picking up the phone and talking to people. One of the best parts about being a senior sourcing professional, for me, is the luxury of forming strong professional relationships and gaining a reputation as someone to “send” trusted friends and colleagues to.
And last but not least, as the forerunner of the recruiting arm of an organization, candidates and potential candidates are almost *always* happy to hear from me. I am calling them to talk to them about their professional expertise. To get to know them, what motivates them, and to make them feel valuable and to be interested in their careers. Who doesn’t like that?
