The Source Newsletter

Anthony Knierim, also a former SourceCon Spotlight, began in the sourcing/recruitment world on the agency staffing side in 2004 where he worked for the Allegis Group. There, he sold Business Professional Services and IT Staffing Services. Anthony has always had an infatuation with Social Media and utilizing various channels for research/sourcing. He quickly found the potential of Social Media in business and felt it was going to drastically change the recruitment industry. He became very interested in working on the ‘other side’ (working in house for a larger corporation) in a place that had high volume hiring. In researching new opportunities he found that Accenture was hiring a new contract position as a Pipeline Generation Expert; they were looking to build out a more efficient and effective sourcing structure. Anthony played a key role in building out the onshore PGE team from 2 to about 15.  He was with Accenture for 2 ½ years working with various cross client teams and was heavily involved in leading efforts for researching and innovating ways to utilize Social Media for Employment Branding both internally as well as on the client side.

In November of 2009, Anthony left Accenture to work at Hewitt Associates as the Global Branding Manager. There, he is responsible for Employment Brand strategy focusing on building Talent Communities.

Anthony’s quick rise in our tight-knit community compelled us to ask him to be a regular contributor to The Source. He is still just in his mid-20s and therefore considered to be part of “GenY”, and we are excited to learn from his fresh perspective of the Corporate world.

Kristen Fife is a health care sourcing recruiter in the greater Seattle area. She has been in recruiting since 2004, when she was hired as a contract Researcher for the Microsoft Strategic Recruiting Group, the technical executive recruiting team. From there, she moved into full lifecycle agency recruiting for Volt Technical Services working on the Microsoft account hiring contract software test professionals. After her agency stint, she returned as a contractor to Microsoft. Kristen was involved in both technical and legal sourcing, and she also completed a contract as a full life-cycle Staffing Consultant for Microsoft Research.

In addition to Microsoft, Kristen has worked for smaller Seattle technical companies such as Varolii and bSquare. She moved into healthcare in 2009 and is responsible for sourcing strategies for all medical positions with the exception of physicians. Her current focus is leveraging Social Media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. to connect with the Millennial (GenY) group. She also volunteers her time as a moderator for the Human Resources Professional Network on Yahoo Groups (over 3700 members worldwide) and has blogs on the Electronic Recruiting Exchange and one for job seekers on issues such as resume construction, job hunting, and understanding the role of recruiting in the job hunting process.

Kristen has been interviewed for several national publications as an SME on issues related to recruiting including ABCNews, AOL, and The Wall Street Journal. She was the keynote speaker for the Gonzaga Alumni Mentoring Program for three years and often gives presentations to SIG’s and job seeker groups.

Sourcing, for Kristen, is like a puzzle. Competitive Intelligence and passive candidate generation are fun activities for her, and she enjoys connecting with the candidates as a first contact and setting the stage for establishing and nurturing long-term relationships. In today’s economy, Kristen tries to help as many people out as possible to understand best practices for job seeking and resume construction. Her basic philosophy is that building communities and networking are the keys to recruiting in the next five years.

We are so pleased to have Australia represented in our Contributors roster for The Source. Andrea Mitchell, a former SourceCon Spotlight, is the functional lead for the sourcing team at HRX, a Sydney, Australia based RPO that has clients across a wide range of industries, ranging from banking and finance to FMCG. In this role she is responsible for the training and certification of new researchers, as well as encouraging innovation and collaboration, and most importantly, keeping an eye on the trends and goings on in the sourcing and recruitment world. Andrea was previously a sourcing specialist with HRX before leaving to help set up a research function within an IT recruitment agency, but was tempted back to HRX in April 2008 and is now enjoying her dream role.

Before moving to Australia from New Zealand four years ago Andrea worked in the events industry, identifying events, groups and people that could hold conferences with the convention center she worked with. This was the first role where Andrea was challenged by hard-to-find information and where she became hooked on Internet research, the thrill of the hunt, and that feeling you get when you finally manage to track down that special tidbit of information.

Andrea is also the founder and one of the organizers of the Australasian Researchers Network. Sourcing and dedicated Internet research techniques, especially within recruitment, are growing areas in Australia and Andrea hopes that this group will not only be a meeting place for people to learn and collaborate, but will also work to promote research as a viable career option.

Andrea’s heavy involvement in furthering the function of research in recruitment organizations in Australia is a big reason why she was asked to be a regular contributor to The Source. We are looking forward to learning similarities and differences in the way sourcing is done ‘down under’!

We at The Source are proud to introduce you to one of our new regular contributors, Marvin Smith. Marvin currently works for Microsoft in Redmond, WA as a Talent Community Evangelist.

Marvin’s career in recruiting has spanned nearly four decades and represents both executive and third party recruiting with the last ten years in corporate recruiting. He founded or was a principal in four different firms. The external recruiting experience prepared him well for corporate recruiting roles in that he learned the value of research, sourcing, relationships and adjusting to changes mandated by technological advancements.

Prior to Microsoft, his corporate recruiting roles were with early stage technology oriented businesses that required finding and recruiting talent that were game changers. The startups allowed him to field test some third party recruiting strategies and tactics with respect to their efficacy in a corporate environment.

The experience of building a recruiting function from scratch has served Marvin well in the pioneering talent community development pilot at Microsoft. This initiative is to evangelize/market the respective “brands” of E&D (Zune, Xbox, Auto Sync, Windows Mobile, Surface, Microsoft Game Studios, etc.) to the appropriate target talent audience. Their approach to talent community relies heavily on Web 2.0 technologies and social communities to create a unique experience for the prospect/candidate that is interested in exploring a career with Microsoft, either currently or in the future. And the experiences necessary to accomplish these goals were based on foundational experiences in external recruiting, tested in the laboratories of startups, and integrated into the complex Microsoft staffing environment.

Things that Marvin finds intriguing or fascinating in the world of sourcing today:

• The intersection of technology and human touch as well as using technology to enhance the human experience in recruiting. He is committed to research and competitive intelligence as a method of selecting a target audience and then using technology to develop a relationship with that target audience.
• He feels convicted that at this time in the 21st Century, there is a talent community imperative that needs to be addressed if we are to connect with the talent migration to social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, et al).
• Segmentation of target audiences and mapping them to the type of talent that businesses require.
• The automation of sourcing (as much as possible)

“I believe that an end to end recruiting process can be developed that will do away with ‘apply and goodbye’. It begins with research/competitive intelligence, handing off to prequalification team, and then moves to recruiters to manage the remainder of the process. At each point of the process when a “no” is given, that group of audience can be engage on a longer term basis using social networking.”

Marvin has already contributed several articles to The Source so he was a natural fit as a regular contributor. Please keep an eye out later this month as we will run the last article in his latest series, Being On The Cutting Edge. You can also view his bio on our Contributors page.

Happy 2010 everyone! The start of a new year leads many to make resolutions, to draw a line in the sand, and to restart or renew. 2009 was a year of big changes for SourceCon. With new ownership, The Source decided to take a break and re-evaluate how we’re planning to move forward with content. Starting this month, we are going to be doing things a little differently. We taken the last few months to draw our line in the sand and start fresh.

We have invited a few people to become regular contributors to The Source. Over the next month, we’ll be introducing you to these folks who will become familiar faces on the newsletter. Make sure to check out our Contributors page to get to know them, and we’ll be posting little featurettes on these people in the coming weeks. These individuals were hand-selected because of their unique knowledge of sourcing and research, as well as their varying professional backgrounds and the respect they’ve earned through our community. We really feel we’ve created an eclectic group of authors who will bring great information and thought process to The Source for our readers.

Thank you for your support, and we hope to see you in a couple of months in San Diego at SourceCon 2010!

Many of you may have been wondering about The Source as of late – we haven’t posted much this summer, and there is a very good reason for this! Moments ago, ERE released a statement that they have acquired SourceCon, which you know is the umbrella under which The Source Newsletter is released. Here is that release from the ERE site:

“I’m proud to announce that ERE Media has acquired SourceCon, the only live, in-person event for sourcing professionals in the world.

SourceCon is unique. It brings together the best minds in the sourcing profession to focus on minute intricacies of the art like no other event in existence.

I was at the first SourceCon, and remember being impressed by the vibe. There was an excitement in the air of a community coming together face-to-face for the first time. Several people came up to me unsolicited and told me how amazing it felt to finally be in a place where there were other sourcers “just like me.”

Since the current recession began, there has been talk of the death of sourcing. I disagree, and now ERE is putting its money where its mouth is.

So what does this mean?

For sourcers, this means that SourceCon is back, plain and simple! I and the ERE team respect the grassroots nature of the Sourcing community, and as we grow the event, we will do it in a way that respects the distinct (and quirky) ethos of the community.

For Leslie, SourceCon’s Founder, this is the result of years of her hard work building SourceCon into an amazing event. I and the ERE team will do our best to run the event as she has done, and hope to have her continued involvement for a long, long time.

As for us, SourceCon represents what ERE is all about — extending deeper into the talent acquisition community with another event that helps us to educate the profession.

We’ll be announcing the dates for the next SourceCon shortly, but if you can’t wait for your SourceCon goodness, check out The Source newsletter.“

We couldn’t be more excited about this! Being a part of the ERE team is huge – and though we’ll no longer be working under the direct tutelage of Leslie O’Connor, I know she’ll still be involved and quite interested to see where things lead.

That being said, The Source will still be published as its own blog/newsletter. You will still find us here at www.thesourcenewsletter.com and as always, we are eager to get contributions from the community for great content.

We are looking forward to being part of ERE’s family and joining the ranks of folks who put out excellent content through ERE, The Fordyce Letter, and the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

Stay tuned to ERE and here as well for more info on SourceCon 2010!

Summer = time for taking vacations, spending time with your kids who are out of school, and taking it a little easier. Stop and smell the flowers, enjoy the beautiful weather (in most cases), have a barbecue, and love life!

Summer = more difficulty getting writers for newsletters, blogs, and other publications

As we, the editors of The Source Newsletter, have discovered as of late, all of you are happily enjoying your summer months with your friends and family. We’ve decided to push back our July articles to allow both you, and us, time to live life. We’ll be bringing you more great content in the month of August, so stay tuned.

Just a couple of updates: our official Twitter newsletter account is now @TheSourceNews. The account belonging to @SourceConDude is now officially the SourceCon Challenge Twitter account. Make sure that you re-follow @SourceConDude so you can participate in the challenge, coming in September.

Thanks for reading us, and we look forward to bringing you great content next month. For now, go enjoy the summer, get a tan, and see you in August!

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The May 2009 newsletter is available for download in PDF format. Please also take advantage of other monthly newsletter downloads from our Box.net widget.

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The April 2009 newsletter is available for download in PDF format. Please also take advantage of other monthly newsletter downloads from our Box.net widget.