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Sourcing News and Knowledge – Beyond the Obvious


Shally Steckerl

Shally Steckerl, EVP Arbita, Inc. is a globally recognized recruiting leader who over the last 15 years has helped build sourcing organizations for companies like Microsoft, Google, Coca-Cola, Cisco, and Motorola. Mr. Steckerl advises recruiting leaders on how to successfully embed key sourcing initiatives into their current efforts, improve the performance of their existing sourcing teams, and establish sourcing functions from the ground up. Often compared to a shot of adrenalin for recruiters held back by confusion, hesitation or fear, Shally is passionate about encouraging people to experiment in their search for talent and color outside the lines with audacity. Because of his unparalleled obsession with sourcing, and his continuous drive to probe for practical solutions where nobody has looked before, Shally delivers the courage recruiting leaders need to walk the edge to success in today’s over-informed world. Raised in Colombia, South America, Mr. Steckerl is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer who earned a Bachelor of Science from Rochester Institute of Technology and now resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

Articles by Shally Steckerl

Social Media

The Best of SourceCon 2011, #4 — Five Fatal Social Recruiting Mistakes

by on Dec. 27, 2011

1 comment

social media overload

Editor’s note: Shaly Steckerl’s article was the 4th most popular article on SourceCon in 2011. It originally ran in September.

Our Recruitment Genome Project demonstrated that 85% of surveyed staffing leaders utilize Social Recruiting avenues yet 70% of them lack any form of strategy. With all the choices available and potential legal, audit, or regulatory entanglements many recruitment leaders are confused or even paralyzed by fear. Hiring organizations know the recruitment world has made a dramatic shift, and recruiters know they need to meet prospects where they already are, but without a clear strategy many end up jumping blindly into social recruiting and make easily avoidable mistakes.

If you think the best way to recruit with social media is feeding your jobs RSS feed through Twitter but then get distracted with new entries into the social networking space such as Google+, we wrote this series just for you and hope this helps you avoid an epic #fail by falling victim to some of the most common mistakes.

Keep reading »

Social Media

#Fail: Why Your Facebook Recruiting Campaign Didn’t Work

by on Sep. 9, 2011

1 comment

facebook fail

If you have a Facebook page for your social recruitment efforts but are getting little to no traction, fear not — you are not alone. Use this guide to repair, revive and relaunch your Facebook page. If you haven’t started a Facebook campaign then you can read this as a road map for building one from scratch while avoiding some of the most embarrassing pitfalls the platform has to offer and allowing yourself to focus on something that is built right from the start.

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Social Media

Five Fatal Social Recruiting Mistakes

by on Sep. 2, 2011

2 Comments

social media overload

The Arbita Recruitment Genome Project demonstrated that 85% of surveyed staffing leaders utilize Social Recruiting avenues yet 70% of them lack any form of strategy. With all the choices available and potential legal, audit, or regulatory entanglements many recruitment leaders are confused or even paralyzed by fear. Hiring organizations know the recruitment world has made a dramatic shift, and recruiters know they need to meet prospects where they already are, but without a clear strategy many end up jumping blindly into social recruiting and make easily avoidable mistakes.

If you think the best way to recruit with social media is feeding your jobs RSS feed through Twitter but then get distracted with new entries into the social networking space such as Google+, we wrote this series just for you and hope this helps you avoid an epic #fail by falling victim to some of the most common mistakes.

Keep reading »

Social Media, Technology & Resources

Five Tips to Writing Awesome Tweets that Get Read and Re-tweeted

by on Aug. 11, 2011

1 comment

retweet

Recruiters can use Twitter to advertise jobs, build employment brand, spread influence, and improve reach or popularity. However, before any of this can be accomplished, the first step is to get people actually reading your tweets! A tree falling in a forest may make a sound, but if no one is around to hear it then who cares…right?

Twitter’s growth has exposed a weakness in the recruiting world. We can cover up bad writing with templates and canned messages, but it is very tough to “fake it” in 140-characters or less. Uncompelling tweets heavy with slang or abbreviations, or with little discernible value, are common and banal and serve more to damage your brand that to strengthen it. Twitter accounts consisting of nothing more than spam robots spewing out job posting RSS Feeds can be easily ridiculed or banned, or just plain ignored.

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Technology & Resources

How To Source Using Digital Anthropology

by on Aug. 4, 2011

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digital anthropology

The study of human anthropology is observing humankind and the social relationships of human beings. Naturally, with the onset of digital social networks, there is a new way to study human behavioral patterns: digital anthropology. After all, online social networks are our evolutionary reaction to the digital age, and mimic real-life intercultural proclivities. Anthropology consists of studying people’s online social relationships, habits, and patterns. Because online life reflects real life there is much to be learned by observing the activities and ‘bread crumb trails’ left by individuals via their social networking interactions.

Of course, with these new ways to observe people’s everyday lives, we as sourcers are also provided with new tools with which to study our prospects, develop profiles, and conduct outreach to potential candidates. Two such tools that have proven to be extremely useful for sourcing include event sites and location-based services.

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Technology & Resources, The Sourcing Function

Why is Semantic Search Important to Sourcers?

by on Jul. 21, 2011

5 Comments

computer screen by altemark

There is just too much confusion about so-called “Boolean search” so I’d like to clarify a few basic things:

  1. Booleans are simply three LOGICAL OPERATORS: AND OR NOT.  In search engines you don’t need the AND because its always assumed by default, so forget about it. That leaves you with two: OR and NOT. The The OR is called a logical disjunction, sometimes an inclusive disjunction or alternation in mathematics. In English grammar or is a coordinating conjunction, and in ordinary language it sometimes has the meaning of an exclusive disjunction. Bottom line is that when you use OR the result is “true” whenever one or more of the words are matched. There, now you know Boolean search.
  2. When recruiters talk about “Boolean search” what they are really talking about is creating search strings, sometimes using advanced commands or complex search syntax to query specific fields inside of databases.
  3. Well, that’s the end of my list.

Search syntax has been around since the beginning of databases. Each “database” (lumping in Monster, Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook under that term) has its own set of field search commands. When searching a database what we search are “fields;” for example, “Company Name,” “Email Address,” and so on.

You use fields to search your Outlook when you ask for people with a specific name or when you query by “job title” on Monster or LinkedIn. The “big search engines” also use fields and they share some in common, such as intitle, inurl, site, and filetype. That’s what recruiters and sourcers often misconstrue as “Boolean search.” In fact, the only Booleans used are the assumed AND between every search term, the occasional OR as with (intitle:resume OR inurl:resume), and the rare use of the NOT or AND NOT when applying negative search terms such as -jobs or -submit.

Search can be as simple or complex as we want it to be, but at the end of the day we are limited only to words in the fields of a database. That is, until the promise of Semantic Search.

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Technology & Resources

The Importance of Synonymous Job Titles in Your Sourcing

by on Jul. 12, 2011

2 Comments

synonyms

Showing up to the requisition intake meeting from a position of immediate value is one of the fastest and most effective ways to gain your hiring manager’s trust and build your credibility. Sourcers and recruiters alike can do this by bringing with them a few key pieces of information they can confirm or validate with the hiring manager. Job titles from competitors or from organizations that hire similar talent are important criteria in developing the sourcing strategy. But where can you quickly get job titles in preparation for your hiring manager meeting?

There are numerous sources for researching job titles. Here are my favorites:

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Social Media

Eight Elements That Get Your Recruitment Message Noticed Among the Social Media Madness

by on Jun. 29, 2011

1 comment

social media wordle

Whether you’re announcing your job postings or announcing your expertise to the world, getting noticed online these days is like being heard while whistling into a tornado. It takes a considerable amount of effort, planning, and trial and error to stand out among the millions of status updates competing for attention. So how do you get your signal widely detect through the noise?

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Leadership, Metrics, Social Media, SourceCon

Is Your Sourcing Team Good Enough?

by on Feb. 2, 2010

No comments

ssteckerl_web

The Arbita Recruitment Genome Project research in early 2009 demonstrated that most companies’ sourcing functions are not taking advantage of the shift in candidate behavior. In the third quarter of 2009 we conducted a new survey and once again, thousands participated. We then compared the results to our baseline data and noticed some improvement. Here is what we found:

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) continues to be the least utilized lead generation tactic. About 37% of respondents felt they had a good strategy for marketing their employment opportunities using pay-per-click, direct ads and other SEM techniques. This is up 19% from survey results in early 2009.

However, Google’s Keyword Tool shows that each month at least 775 million searches are conducted on Google, about 226 million of them job-related. That means that just under a third (and quite possibly more) of the questions being asked on Google are related to job search. Are your sourcing efforts taking advantage of this passive candidate traffic goldmine?

Among the thousands of respondents, we found an amazing 16% increase in confidence around having adequate training on Internet research and sourcing, now 63%! That still leaves over a third of the population with unsatisfactory sourcing skills. But even the strongest sourcers need to stay up to date. Learning and improvement is a continuous process.  So how should your team keep up with best practices and changes in sourcing technologies like data mining techniques, sourcing automation, semantic search, social and emerging media sourcing, etc.?

Other survey results indicated that of the respondents:

  • 43% feel they have a good strategy for SEO, up 17%.
  • 52% are happy with their career web sites, up 5%.
  • 53% were satisfied with job boards, identical to our survey earlier in the year.
  • 53% feel they have a good plan for finding candidates using search engines like Google and Bing.com, up 6%.
  • 56% feel they have a good strategy for finding candidates on social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, up 9%.

The future is very near, and as economic recovery turns the corner employers need to prepare for the coming rise in demand. Proliferation of social and emerging media brings with it the promise of convergence, integration and portability. Soon more true contact management features will integrate social and emerging media into your ATS/HRIS systems, rich media analytics will track any of your sources ad-hoc, career microsites will bring online social networks together into dashboards and integrate them with your CRM.

Join us at Sourcecon on Sunday, March 14th to experience more of the above learnings from your peers and our industry leaders. We’ll also discuss how certain sourcing techniques can build or erode your employment brand. Transparency in the social Internet increases both positive and negative exposure, and with the obliteration of privacy, brings to light how sourcers can quickly build or ruin an employment brand. See you in March!

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