Last fall, one of the attendees at the conference in Santa Clara told me that a document we posted to provide some tangible evidence of the benefit of attending SourceCon had worked for her: she printed up the document and gave it to her manager, who read it and said, “Looks like something you should go to!”

I was recently asked by someone interested in sending a small team of recruiters to SourceCon in Atlanta to share some further information about the conference and answer some questions. While responding, I really started getting excited about the event and all it represents, and my response ended up being quite long-winded.

The answers I provided, however, are truly a reflection of why I feel this event is singularly the most important event for sourcers and those who desire to learn more about sourcing to attend this year. Below are the questions as well as my responses — I hope these will help you make a decision to come to SourceCon or give you the tools you need to ask your manager to send you!

Can you give me background about the conference?

The conference is unique in that it was developed based on a community desire for a learning experience dedicated just to those in sourcing functions or those who desire to learn more about sourcing. So essentially it was developed BY sourcers, FOR sourcers, and has since come to envelope all areas that sourcing touches including social media, branding, marketing, management, technology, and other related topics.

How long has the conference been around?

The conference got its beginnings in 2007; it ran again in 2008 and was subsequently purchased by ERE Media in 2009. Since the spring of 2010, there have been 4 additional SourceCon events, with the one coming up in Atlanta to be #5 since the change in ownership.

What is the attendance like?

We have an eclectic mix of attendees ranging from brand-new entry-level sourcers to seasoned veterans who’ve been around sourcing since the 80s and before the Internet was available to the general public. Attendees consist of those who work strictly in sourcing roles, individual contributing recruiters who do their own sourcing, recruiters who want to learn how to source, managers who oversee sourcing professionals, consultants, thought leaders, and resource vendors who all enjoy coming to the conference.

What makes this conference stand out from any other conference?

Quite frankly, it’s the first and only conference that’s JUST for sourcing topics by people who actually source — not just vendors or consultants. Not to sound like the genie from Aladdin, but it is often imitated but never duplicated. As the Editor of SourceCon for the last 4 1/2 years (3 of those on a voluntary basis) and a successful sourcer myself since 2002, I can attest that the content from these events is carefully selected and evaluated to provide powerful take-aways and action items for attendees. Selected speakers are experts in their given areas and many topics are ones you’d never think to learn about but are pertinent to the achievement of excellence in sourcing (we had a social engineer at our NYC conference and the CIO of a semantic search engine company at our last event). Consequently, the learning experience is unique — we like to make things interesting by having a diverse mix of well-known experts and people you may not recognize but who have a ton of great knowledge that they want to share. And my favorite part of this event is the networking — the people who attend this conference are very community-oriented and absolutely LOVE to freely share what they know with one another, as evident in the grass-roots growth of the After Dark portion of the conference.

* * *

As an aside, I may be biased due to my role as the person in charge of this conference, but I was a presenter at the very first SourceCon in 2007 and I loved it so much that I became involved by editing the newsletter, which used to come out monthly in PDF format. This is an event that was very near and dear to my heart long before I was paid to feel that way.

As an added resource for you, we’ve revised and updated the conference fact sheet to help you present a compelling case to your manager for you to attend SourceCon in Atlanta next month. To download the fact sheet, follow this link.

Hope to see you next month in Atlanta!

I was lucky enough to finish a SourceCon preliminary challenge that some said was one of the toughest in recent years. With that qualifying challenge, I was able to take time, make mistakes, try new things, and go at my pace without a lot of pressure. The preliminary challenge overview and the steps involved are available for you to read about, if you would like to know more.

On the Thursday night of SourceCon, located in a conference room at Yahoo’s URL building, I sat at a table as the third and final qualifier for the SourceCon GrandMaster Challenge. I was sipping on a beer to keep the nerves at bay waiting for the unknown challenge. Opening every sourcing tool and website that I had available, I practiced for a few minutes with each. I also wanted to be sure all passwords and ID’s were correct, plus to see if there were any changes or updates. I sat down at the table and had ALL tools ready to go so I could flip to whatever was necessary if needed finding people. I had heard that we would be getting zip drives for the challenge which hinted that we would be sitting at the computers and not going on a physical running scavenger hunt type challenge. Why I had thoughts of the scene from “Social Network” with shots of liquor and the crowd around us in a hack-fest, I will never know, but it was sort of quiet in the room. The music from the SourceCon After Dark reception was in the next room and we were all ready to have a source-off.

Amybeth Hale came around and handed out zip drives. We all inserted them into our computers at the same time. Amybeth said, “Start the challenge. You each have 45 minutes.”

Suddenly everything started to go into a sort of surreal slow-motion… There were two items on the zip drive – a file with instructions and an Excel spreadsheet. 

click to enlarge

The first file

A PDF that said, “Find affiliates of WITI (an international network of women in technology) who currently work in non-technical roles”. The instructions continued with a bulleted list stating that we may use any tools at our disposal and would need to supply first name, last name, title, email address, the source, resume link, or webpage URL where we found this information and the method used to verify it was a valid and legitimate email address. We were also instructed that we may not use LinkedIn as a final source because we need to provide an email address (email addresses are not typically available on LinkedIn; and also, “that’s too easy!” the instructions said).

The second file

An Excel spreadsheet which basically had spaces for name, title, email address, source of information, and a column for how we validated and verified that it was correct email address.

Go Time!

After reading the instructions and panicking for about a minute (which seemed like about five minutes) the sourcing strategies started popping into my mind. Which one do I do?

• Do I x-ray the WITI website to try to find hidden files and try to flip and search to pull personal profiles? Will these have email addresses?
• Is there an event attendee list for a conference or member list?
• Do I just go to Monster and start downloading resumes that may have WITI on there is as keyword and then back into whether or not they are technical?
• SBWI – Or do I have enough time to use my favorite method of SBWI? SBWI stands for “Sourcing By Wandering Around” – a common method of sourcing that typically takes a lot more time than we were given for this Challenge. Would I be able to find large lists of emails?

I can find lists of names all day long, but the email piece really threw me off. I am a HEAVY user of LinkedIn Recruiter and have access to InMails. I typically do not have a need to really find email addresses, so this was definitely going to be a stretch assignment. Baseball analogy — Do I hit a bunch of singles to get the runs or do I step up like Sammy Sosa and swing for the fences while potentially striking out a lot?

So many ideas and additional strategies went through my mind. When you only have a total of 45 minutes to do something, you really have to be organized. With all the strategies going through my mind, the time limit, and stress of performing, I was anything but organized! I knew at a minimum I needed to get some points on the board quick. I needed email addresses.

The first thing I did was hit the search engines to check out the email patterns – @witi.org or @witi.com or @us.witi.org. This didn’t help my confidence since there were basically no email addresses available and no specific pattern. When I did find an email address, it was like the pattern was made up on the fly over a few years. I also checked out witi.org and witi.com to see if there were different materials on each. At the top of one of the pages was a spot to “JOIN” WITI for $250 and get access to their member directory. I was ready to pull out my Corporate AMEX and do this, but I had no knowledge if it would yield email addresses. I figured it would not, so I steered clear of doing this. Yes, I did try to hack in for a few minutes as Admin but I struck out. I also saw in various spots on the web pages that there was the ability to sign up to get WITI’s newsletter. I immediately did this and did not get a newsletter until the next week. Therefore no fruit from that tree, but I still get the email newsletter (that I need to turn off).

I went to LinkedIn and joined a couple of Groups to see if I could find some unique organizations that might get me some email addresses, but I mostly struck out there.

Brainstorm! Bam! I am involved with a not-for-profit called the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management. How would I get the email addresses of people that were associated with the organization but not actual members? It hit me. The employees of the not-for-profit organization! Okay…this could be a Sammy Sosa technique and pay off heavy. I went to Jigsaw and searched for “Company” of WITI and I got a good list of names, titles, email addresses. This technique netted some names and entered their information on the spreadsheet. I was putting points on the board!

Hitting a Few Singles

I starting thinking it was about time to “hit a few singles” and look for the individual names. I searched for a speaker at a conference and got one with an email address. I found a guy that was a speaker or member of a regional chapter with an email address. This was more difficult than expected because email addresses were not in or around the speaker’s bio. In hindsight, that would have been a hell of a tactic to leverage if I had more time — find all of the men who were associated with WITI, because they were targets.

This technique was taking too long — I just knew there had to be a mega-list somewhere. I shifted to some AIRS techniques of visiting local WITI chapter webpages and peeling back the URL’s. This is where you delete some of the URL text, to try to find information hidden on the page.

I took the URL of a person that I found as a speaker from a WITI event and peeled back the URL. This led me to the location that they were out of and if they were a member of a local chapter. What I found was that some of the local chapters had email addresses listed for leaders on their webpages. I added some of the men and attempted to determine if the women were non-technical. I also noticed that the webpage template was a little different from the national chapter on a few of the local chapter sites. I immediately went to work on these using the X-Ray and peeling back techniques. While looking for a file with Member Lists, I stumbled across a Listserv that somebody had not deleted.

Jackpot (Though I Didn’t Know It)

Okay, now we’re talking! This is an email distribution list that goes to all of their members. Someone had hidden it from view, but it was a hidden page still live on the webpage. Some nice webmaster had not deleted the ability to sign up and send an email to their listserv subscribers. I clicked on this link, subscribed and sent a test email. I added the information that was returned to me and was getting ready to dive deeper and attempt to extract more names when Amybeth walked in and said “Time’s Up!”

All I could think at that moment was that I tried. I spent so much time shifting strategies and trying for the big lists, that I did not put as many names on the list as I had expected. I joked with Amybeth that I wanted a “Mulligan” and the ability to try again. I was up against two top sourcers who did this every day and probably were a lot better than me at finding email addresses. I knew I had needed to have more than what I produced to win this thing. I was crushed! You could see it on everyone else’s faces in the room that this was a tough assignment. We made small talk in the room and knew that from this point until tomorrow at noon, we all had to wait. I had to now wait over twelve hours to ultimately learn the outcome. Given my performance, I was already expecting that I would not win, so I shared a few of the things I did with the group in the room, but no one else really wanted to talk either. It was so tough knowing we had to wait.

Waiting…

I met a couple people at Bennigan’s to have a drink and put out the fires and drown the sorrows of a poor performance. Anyone that saw me knew I was not in a good spot and could read it on my face that I felt I had not done well. In conversations with people, I explained that this event had not played to my strengths, which are generating talent via LinkedIn and other methods, not generating email addresses. Also, I have not done any Information Tecnology type searches for about ten years. I was so bummed out that I think I described my performance to Tito Magobet from Expedia as about a 4 on a scale of 1-10 with 10 as the highest. I was glad I had the opportunity to be a part of the Challenge and I was getting ready to congratulate one of the other two participants on their victory.

Dejected and crushed at dropping the ball in a huge opportunity, I went back to the room and got online. I had to learn where I missed or figure out what I could have done better. I spent the next three hours reliving the terror, but researching what I did wrong because I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I did more research, looked up more people, tried to find more email addresses – basically, trying to second-guess everything that I did. I was trying to find more and I was little bit happy and that I didn’t find that thing that I have been looking for…that Holy Grail of names – the big list. It’s almost like WITI had a consultant come in and sweep their whole website for any holes, emails, or website back doors. While writing this article, it makes sense that they may have had someone from their organization do a sweep / security audit given they are a technical organization.

#Winning

The next morning was tough. We had to wait to find out what the results were. At the end of the conference around 12:30, it came time for the announcement to be made. I was wholeheartedly ready to stand up and clap for one of the other finalists since I knew one of them was going to win. I was already set and ready for the announcement and they said the winner is “Jim Schnyder.” I can’t begin to tell you how freaked out I was and anyone that was in the room saw it on my face.

I do not remember a lot of what happened next since I was so stunned, but Carmen Hudson mentioned that the judges (Amybeth and Carmen verified everyone’s work) were not only impressed with what I did in sheer numbers but also the techniques (some old-school stuff) that I used to find some of candidates.

In the end, I guess you sometimes have to realize that you may be doing a pretty good job even when you don’t think you are. A monstrous shout out goes to Amybeth – she created all of the 2011 SourceCon preliminary Challenges as well as the very difficult SourceCon GrandMaster Challenge. Thanks to you and all of the SourceCon staff.

If you had told me five years ago that I would be in a role where I get to geek out by using mathematically based principals to do my job, stalk people online, and then convene with others who love to do the same, I wouldn’t have believed you.

But here I am, loving every day of what I get to do.

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend SourceCon (thanks to the downloadable document on How to Get Your Boss to Let You Come to SourceCon) where I was able to meet some of the legends in our industry.

I took about twelve pages of notes in Word throughout SourceCon, hoping to learn tons of knowledge to bring back and implement. One of the wisest things that was said was during Michael Notaro’s presentation on Automation. He said that the most important thing you could do after leaving SourceCon is to pick 3-5 things you learned from SourceCon and immediately implement them into your organization.

I think the tendency when we come back from conferences is to be pumped up about what we learned and want to implement it all, but in reality, it is impossible. We can’t implement everything we learn, so it is important to hone in on a few key takeaways, disseminate the information, and put it into practice as soon as possible.

In following this sage advice, a few main themes that resonated with me were: How to Implement Sourcing into Your Organization and Gathering/Organizing/Analyzing Information.

How to Implement Sourcing Into Your Organization

Jillian Snavley’s presentation highlighted some great points about how to bolster your sourcing function within your company. The best point that she made is that sourcing needs to be a partnership, not just a support role. Regardless of whether you are sourcing in a corporate setting or in an agency, you need to partner with your recruiters to strategize the best way to get your candidates. Sourcing is changing from the reactive approach of searching for candidates when needs arise to a more proactive model of pipelining and specializing so that when roles come open, there will be people ready to go. Sourcers will eventually be people to whom leaders within organizations will come first when deciding to hire, not last.

In order to build a more proactive approach, it is important to truly define recruiting needs and use metrics to discover that information. Sourcing has a few main components to it: pipeline building, prospect sourcing/talent community development (see Marvin Smith as a great example), labor market research, and sourcing consultation. The challenge we face is transforming from what we have been doing which has been working to what will work even better in the future in order to make us even more successful.

Specifically at Rylem, I was the first sourcer to be hired this May, so I’ve been tasked with building our department out. In my previous role I was very reactive in my sourcing approach, so changing my sourcing habits has been a challenge, but taking on that challenge is proving to be tremendously fruitful. I have had to train my mind to repeat the attitude of a long-term sourcing approach and direct my efforts to those activities which include pipelining candidates, conducting more competitive research, and analyzing more information instead of simply focusing on immediate needs.

Gathering/Organizing/Analyzing Information

How often do you feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information that you are bombarded with every day? Well, unfortunately, it’s not going to let up anytime soon. The task at hand is to compile all of the incoming information in addition to the existing data we have (CRM, ATS, excel sheets, emails, blogs, Twitter streams, LinkedIn status updates, need I go on?), analyze it, and effectively manage it. The question still remains – what is the best way to consistently manage information?

I wish I had the answer! But what I do know is that it is different for everyone; it all depends on what resources are available to you and what works best for you. Some people love managing Excel spreadsheets while others have CRMs that they can use. Tito Magobet talked about multiple solutions in this space: creating detailed (but simple to create) spreadsheets, using Access (it’s already on most of our machines anyways), and supply and demand matrices. Through managing and analyzing your data in a strategic way, you will be able to stay ahead of the competition through predicting what types of jobs will be hard to fill, seeing where employees are coming from/going to, and then strategizing how to best keep your pipeline warm and determine what pipelines you should have.

After you analyze the information you have available, the next step is to SHARE THE INFO! This was another super important piece of advice I took from SourceCon. Especially in the agency world, recruiters have the tendency to keep their candidates to themselves as they want to manage the relationship and make the most commission on their candidate. The problem with this is that by doing this, we miss out on great candidates because of the unwillingness to share information. It’s so important that everyone be on the same page in your organization, be collaborative, and partner with your sourcing and recruiting counterparts so that time is effectively managed and potential hires aren’t buried in your coworkers’ spreadsheets of great candidates on their desktop.

Since SourceCon, I have been focused on how to best improve my company and the department I’m trying to build. I’ve been working to develop a way to better manage our talent communities, deciding what will be the best way for us to do this. This has been a challenge as we are currently evaluating the tools we are using (ATS, analytics tools, etc.) and I don’t want to create extra work.  A few specific things I took from the conference that I thought would help Rylem are analyzing the types of candidates we have in our database, the types of jobs we have filled, and how to better utilize our time to ensure we get more great candidates and more wins.

SourceCon was amazing. I’m so happy my company let me go — I had the chance to meet some talented and smart people and glean some great information to share with my office here. And on a side note, what I’ve really appreciated about the sourcing community, especially in Seattle, is people’s willingness to share information and really pay it forward to help each other learn more about sourcing. I can’t wait to attend the next SourceCon – although I don’t know when the next time my job will pay for me to go. Guess I better implement this stuff so I can fund my next trip!

Editor’s Note: Teresa has graciously provided a PPT with her notes and takeaways from SourceCon 2011 — you can download it here. Thanks, Teresa!

We (Tanja and Arati) recently attended the SourceCon conference in Santa Clara, CA. Having written previously about the collaborative styles we have when working together, to  fill Nike’s job openings, we definitely wanted to experience this event as a team as well. When we approached our manager about attending the conference who was supportive and said go for it!

Here are our experiences from attending SourceCon as a team. 

SourceCon from a Recruiter’s Perspective

I received my confirmation email months ago, my flight was on time, and my hotel was within walking distance from the conference center. I was so close, but would I get in? After all I am a recruiter. I am not a sourcer. Was there a secret handshake? Would they ask for my favorite Boolean string? Would they let the sourcer I traveled with in and not me? Luckily I saw my nametag on the check-in table and I knew everything was okay. I was an official attendee of SourceCon 2011!

My goal in attending was to bring back new techniques I could use to up my sourcing game. I knew I wouldn’t be as skilled as my rockstar sourcer Arati, but at least I would have a few more tricks in my tool belt. As a full cycle recruiter, my time is split between account management and sourcing duties. More often than not, the sourcing falls to the way side and I am left doing basic LinkedIn searches or sifting through our applicant tracking system (ATS) and candidate relationship management (CRM) system. What I learned at SourceCon will definitely give me a diverse set of sourcing tools I can easily put into proactive practice. Simple things from changing my search engine to diversifying results or building a custom search engine (okay… that last one’s not so simple!).

In addition to the presentations from experts in the field, the labs provided a smaller venue to network and learn from peers. I specifically found Mark Tortorici’s presentation extremely informative. I couldn’t stop taking notes during his presentation! He did a great job of providing an overview of many sourcing techniques that are readily available and at not cost. All of these tools are easy to use as well and don’t require hours of intensive training.

Overall during our two days at SourceConI was impressed with how close the sourcing community was and their willingness to share best practices. Google Chrome, Google Custom Search, Outwit, Bing, Plaxo, hashtags, mailtester.com, twitter search, Google + profiles, and Follower Wonk just to name a few!

Lastly, it was great to see my sourcer in her element networking away to learn best practices she can bring back to our greater team. Taking this trip made me realize how thankful I am for the sourcer I have the pleasure of working with each day!

Thanks for letting this Recruiter into the club!

SourceCon from a Talent Scout’s Perspective

I am still reeling from the SourceCon conference! I am grateful I had the opportunity to meet with and learn best practices from the world class sourcing and recruiting professionals — wow! This was my first live SourceCon and it was a great experience from a participant’s perspective. I had the opportunity to connect with so many innovative sourcers and leaders in this industry who are as passionate about this area as I am. I had only two days at the conference and there were so many experts I could meet with and imbibe knowledge and ideas from. I had so many questions to ask and so many topics to talk about. My list was endless and time was limited. We shared ideas on how to build Google custom search engines, how to extract maximum data from the web, how to find the hidden talent before our competition could find it, how to become experts in Boolean searches, and how there is more to life than one type of web browser.

I especially enjoyed the session “Building a Search Engine” by Mark Tortorici and “Reviving up your Sourcing Function” by Jillian Snavley. Jillian’s presentation clearly articulated the value-add a sourcing function can bring to a company and what it takes to make the sourcing model successful. A true must-watch!

We are indeed living in a very fascinating age where the emergence of social media has led to immense data and has made the game of sourcing a thrill. I was amazed and impressed by the geekiness of the sourcing community where participants with no software language background had built applications to mine the best talent It was also interesting to learn from various recruiting leaders on how they have creatively built business cases for a sourcing model and reduced recruiting cost by millions and millions of dollars. Finally, it hit me hard that I better hurry up and become an expert in mobile recruiting applications if I want to stay current with emerging recruiting trends.

Tanja and I enjoyed being part of the “Sourcing Family” and discussing recruiting issues that face all of us today – identifying and then attracting the right talent. And of course a big highlight was that we enjoyed spending time with each other – some lasting memories that we’ll cherish for a long time!

Arati currently works at Nike as a Talent Scout for Product Creation and Merchandising and is primarily focused on apparel and sports equipment. She combines her International Public Relations experience and full life cycle recruiting experience to acquire the best talent for Nike. She enjoys talking to prospects who have not thought about leaving their jobs and landing them a home here at Nike. Arati has also worked for multiple pipelines at Nike including IT, Strategic Planning, and HR.  She began her recruiting career at a Software Consulting company as a HR Generalist/Recruiter and then worked at Wells Fargo as an HR Associate/Recruiter and Recruiting Manager at American Income hiring commission based insurance agents. Prior to that she worked in an International Public Relations agency and managed clients such as Benetton, Pierre Cardin, and others. Arati has a Masters degree in Communication Studies and was an Adjunct Faculty Member at the Communication Studies department at PSU and taught Speech Communication. When she isn’t building relationships with talent, she enjoys running, reading and spending time with her kids.

Jillian Snavley has built a phenomenal sourcing function at PNC Financial Services. And she has the data to prove it, as she very effectively demonstrated during her keynote presentation at SourceCon on Friday morning. This is something that sourcing leaders, practitioners, and corporate executives alike need in order to justify the very existence of a sourcing function within a company. Conference attendees were treated to a stream of useful knowledge to bring back to their individual companies to help build a case for both developing a new sourcing function as well as investing into existing ones, based on the successes shared by Snavley during her presentation.

Snavley appropriately divided her presentation, titled “Revving Up Your Sourcing Function,” into four “laps”: Building, Developing, Strategy, and Refining. Each “lap” of building PNC’s sourcing function (which was non-existent at the beginning of the process) presented challenges which were overcome by providing business cases, data and metrics, and examples of success from other areas that have led to a highly successful and very unique group of sourcers, who have earned the designation of “in-house agency” partners for various business units.

Building

Snavley, who is the VP, Senior Recruiting Manager for the Centralized Resource Center, began building her business case for a centralized sourcing team by looking at the current challenges that needed to be overcome. These included:

• A massive expense in agency spend
• Recruiters who were buried in reqs, had virtually no time to source for openings, and whose sourcing skills needed sharpening
• Identification of what alignments would make the most sense based on similar job families and/or geography

By identifying the appropriate challenges, she was able to achieve buy-in with the decision makers by making compelling arguments that a centralized resource center would help reduce agency spend, allow recruiters to focus on recruiting, and align business units effectively and efficiently. By hiring the right kinds of individuals into these new sourcing roles (Snavley prefers to hire those with business experience; for example, one of her best sourcers used to be a branch manager at a competitor), she began the process of developing what would be referred to as the “in-house agency” to focus on positions requiring ongoing pipelines of candidates.

Developing

With the right people in place, the next step was to provide appropriate training. Snavley focused on technology as well as process – ATS, LinkedIn, job boards, and Boolean as well as developing SLAs, cold calling skills, and compelling messaging. She also introduced a unique role: the Talent Scout. Those in this role would be responsible for being the “eyes and ears” in targeted growth markets – partnering with business units, attending industry-related events, and developing relationships with new acquaintances to continually feed the talent pipeline in those market areas.

With things in place, metrics were established to track success and find areas for improvement. PNC eventually used a CRM to track conversations and conversions of passive leads to active candidates. The focus was always on quality over quantity, and in 2010 the percentage of hires that were the right fit was an amazing 97%. All this from a database that was built up with passively sourced talent.

Initially, sourcers were not invited to intake sessions but this changed when business units realized the importance of involving sourcing in these information meetings. Sourcers derived benefit from learning what competitors to target, how to sell the company and the position, and also how to establish expectations of results from sourcing efforts as well as follow-up conversations. These intake meetings also proved to be important for further development of trusting relationships between sourcer, recruiter, and hiring manager.

Strategy

Snavley’s goal was to make the central resource team a consultative partner to the individual business units. In doing this, she focused not just on dollars that would be saved from reduced agency use but also on the additional value that would be derived through competitive intelligence gathering and internal relationship development. Some of the ways in which she saw value that would be created through a central resource team included:

• Pipeline building
• Prospect sourcing
• Labor market research for future needs
• Consultation and training/development of sourcing best practices

Additionally, with the reduction of overall agency spend, Snavley was able to re-engage valued agency partners for high level searches and further develop external relationships with these individuals. She noted that there is definitely still a need for agency search engagement at PNC but that it simply needed a more defined and streamlined process for it to work properly.

With these revised strategies, recruiters were able to focus more on recruiting, time-to-fill was reduced, sourced candidates were better fits for the open positions, and PNC saved more time and money while improving the overall quality of the recruitment process.

Refining

The best way to generate efficiency from a total business unit is to allow specialization and then combine all specialties to create a whole working unit. PNC’s centralized resource center’s secret to success lays in its combined parts – screeners, sourcers, and recruiters, both internal and external. This group’s new point of entry is screening. By bringing screening into the centralized resource center, Snavley has been able to develop a career path for those individuals to learn sourcing and strategies to identify top talent for PNC.

Business units have begun to see firsthand the value that sourcing offers in competitive intelligence gathering, and this in turn has allowed PNC to improve its candidate – as well as employee – experience. The company has greater ability to adjust its products and services to meet industry and market changes and demands. And finally, sourcers have improved their overall knowledge of the marketplace and can therefore present more compelling messages to better-targeted prospects.

This entire process from start to finish has taken Snavley approximately three years. And to date, she has had zero turnover within the sourcing department. By anyone’s standards, this is an impressive accomplishment for a team that did not even exist when the process began.

For those of you who were unable to make it to our 2011 fall SourceCon conference, we have ya’ covered today. We are livestreaming the conference throughout the 2-day event so that those at home can get a small taste of what’s going on here live. Click  on the “SourceCon 2011 Is Streaming Live Right Now… ” link above to view the livestream..

Of course, a lot of the experience of the conference is the networking that goes on in between sessions and after-hours (*cough cough AFTER DARK**) but we definitely want to share what we can with the community! We hope you’ll be able to tune in during the next couple of days to learn from some of the industry movers and shakers!

Should SourceCon become the site of a British murder mystery, never fear. We have our own Hercule Poirot or Inspector Morse to solve the case. Irina Shamaeva, Partner and Chief Sourcer of Brain Gain Recruiting, is as persistent as a detective. We’ll get more evidence of Irina’s expertise during the paid resource panel discussion at the SourceCon conference on October 14.

You were once an engineer. In 2003, you started BrainGain Recruiting. What made you change direction?

I wouldn’t say this was a long-planned change but it fits my personality really well. Software engineering was fun but not social enough for my taste. I had loved referring friends to jobs, had positive experience being placed by recruiters, and did well searching for employees as a hiring manager. I tried recruiting as an experiment back in 2003. It has allowed me to use my intuition, along with technical skills, resourcefulness, and creativity, and the change happened.

From an engineering perspective, what could most sourcers do differently to be more productive?

Sourcers could warm up to thinking out of the box vs. using pre-packaged “Boolean strings.” A sourcer needn’t be technical but some concepts of what’s going on underneath a search could help in getting better results and

enjoying the process. Sourcers could also look into productivity tools for collecting and parsing information; this side of sourcing is often neglected. Automated matching or searching rarely works, but automated sorting and parsing does.

You also run several communities for sourcers, Boolean Strings LinkedIn Group, Boolean Strings Network and the Twitter for Sourcing and Recruiting Group. You also write a blog. How do you find the time to be so generous? Do you think it is important to contribute to the sourcing community?

In 2009, when I started the first Boolean Strings group, I realized how huge the need for this type of knowledge was; it still is. This coincides with my desire to express myself, be creative, and be helpful. Since I source hands-on daily, it doesn’t take any extra time to invent new tricks; they just pop up while working. I’ve met some great people in the industry and appreciated the exchange of ideas. By now the Boolean Strings community has over 15,000 people from 65 countries.

Let’s talk Twitter for Sourcing (one of my favorite topics). Do you find proactively searching Twitter to be productive for most searches?

Sorry, I almost never use Twitter for searching. I do use it for cross-referencing candidates and also for branding my services and chatting with fellow sourcers. Cross-referencing and exploring “distributed profiles” is one of my favorite topics.

Please share a favorite Twitter sourcing tip.

The “Find Friends” function is a favorite tip. One can upload a list of email addresses (using a dummy gmail account) and discover those people on Twitter. The same trick works wonderfully on other major networks. I will

stop here, not to say too much .

Tell us a bit more about Irina. When you’re not sourcing, leading communities and running a business, what do you like to do for fun?

I love spending time with my wonderful children, the outdoors, free-form dancing, yoga, and watching British murder mysteries.

You won the SourceCon challenge in 2010 by being tenacious, digging deep, and being creative. Do most sourcing projects require such tenacity and creativity? What inspires you? What would you recommend to the average recruiter to improve creativity?

Thank you! That was fun. The SC challenges seem to be the perfect place for combining the right and the left brain; kudos to their creators by the way! Challenges inspire me. I am also very happy for my partner Julia Tverskaya who won the first challenge in 2011.

My recommendation regarding sourcing tools and creativity would be to be unafraid of experimenting, be open to change, and try not to control things that can’t be controlled anyway.

Anything else you’d like to learn from Irina? Ask in the comments below.

Stay tuned as we bring you more interviews from the presenters for the upcoming SourceCon conference in Silicon Valley, October 12-14. Don’t forget to register – we’ll see you there!

I began my pursuit of solving the second SourceCon Challenge when I saw this Facebook posting on the SourceCon page on September 7:

As I had started late (the contest began on September 1), I missed out on some of the preliminary clues, including a mouse-over title for the countdown clock on the SourceCon page that said “CiteULike.org,” which was where I would have found clues leading to the Diigo group ( “similar source” and “sourcecon2011_challenge2”). Thankfully, though, no one had discovered these clues, and I sent an email to the SourceCon editor to ask if it was too late to join in. I guess I was under the impression that if you had not participated in the first SourceCon Challenge on building Google Custom Searches that you were not able to get in the hunt. I was delighted to learn that it was not too late. I clicked on the link from the Facebook posting which led to a Diigo.com site where you were invited to join a group. Little did I know that this would begin a 12-day journey (evenings and weekends) of hunting and gathering information to solve this quest!

Clue #1

Clue #1: look for a person who is tied to Toyota and the clue that led you here (JACS/XML). Think similar categorical terms, keywords, and phrases.

When you find that person, you must then find someone who was at the same school, but 5 years later and only for 1 year. Once you find them, you must send ONLY that person’s email address IN THE SUBJECT LINE to sourcecon2011@gmail.com.

Okay, so I started late. I did not know the first clue and information and had no idea where to start on this one. I quickly tried “toyota jacs xml” as search terms and netted 45,000 Google results. I definitely needed to narrow down this search. I needed more information, so I figured the best way would be to back in and look at the previous clues and hints that had been shared to date by SourceCon.

From the SourceCon announcement of the Challenge, Red Herrings and Hidden Gems:

Your starting clue is this: Glen Cathey has shared a lot of thoughtful search processes over the last couple of years. To begin Challenge #2, look into some of his recent lessons to find a clue for how to get going.

Helpful hint: don’t bother Glen for hints or assistance – he can’t help you with this Challenge. In fact, there isn’t a sourcer out there who will be able to help you. You must rely on your own research skills – and you’ll be using both Internet and telephone for this Challenge.

I am thinking to myself, ”Great…Red Herrings…fake clues? This will be tougher than expected. Which ones might be fake?”

There was a note from SourceCon that some additional clues would be delivered in the September 8 SourceCon Weekly Newsletter. Time to wait…

The newsletter was released and the two clues were:

• The company of the first person you need to find can be found using blekko. Seek out sourcecon there.
• One of the educational institutions of the second person you need to find is in North Carolina.

OK, time to get moving on blekko. I searched for SourceCon and found this:

I was able to find a Toyota and ALJ – Abdul Latif Jameel. ALJ seemed like a clue, but I was not sure.

Then another clue arrived from SourceCon, which was “Saudi Arabia.” I popped into Google and ran the following search.

BINGO! M. Zulgarnain Mahmood at Abdul Latif Jameel. He has to be person number one. He attended Michigan State University from 90-92. Now the tough part, finding someone that was at the same school, but 5 years later and only for 1 year.

How do I do that? I did get a clue from the SourceCon Challenge that one of the educational institutions of the second person is in North Carolina. I need more information.

I really spun out on this part. I was trying to find a person who had little to no relation to a person that was at Michigan State University five to seven years later and was only at the school for one year. Plus this person also was at another school in North Carolina. I did some web searches and LinkedIn searches trying to relate Toyota, Michigan State, and any of the schools in North Carolina.

CLUE from SourceCon in the Diigo group:

For part 2, the person you are looking for did not necessarily earn his education at the school in the State of Michigan. Perhaps he was an educator.

Duh! Now it was time to zero in on the faculty.

From there I began to cross-reference lists around Michigan. I focused on the Faculty at Michigan State and people that went to or worked at a school in North Carolina. After looking at who started at Michigan State between 1997 and 1999 and worked for one year, I amassed a list and started going through profiles. This took some time and effort. After filtering through a lot of people, I ended up finding a guy named Aneil Mishra that fit the search. I scanned his online resume and he had everything. Per the SourceCon directions, I sent in his email address. He was the correct answer!

Clue #2

This took me to the new clue:

Clue #2: To get to the next level, follow COLE Grant and find the author.

Immediately I read the clue and thought, Follow…Twitter! I quickly X-rayed Twitter.com for @colegrant, I located a profile and his information was a bunch of numbers. This looked like GPS coordinates, so I dropped them into GoogleMaps.

This led me to find the address near an airport in Canada. I then located the person that lived there – Michael Rouch – Chief Flight Instructor… The directions from SourceCon did not state what to do with this information when you found the author. I emailed the SourceCon editor and to my surprise, this was a wrong turn that I made.

I found a red herring. Back to the drawing board…

A new clue was sent from SourceCon to the Diigo group that stated,

This next step has everyone bogged down. Be sure to read every detail of this clue, and keep in mind that you were instructed you would need to use the things you find along the way. Perhaps there are things that can be found by looking into the profiles of those who’ve led you this far.

In looking at the clue very closely, I noticed that COLE was capitalized. I hadn’t thought about all the options. Also, I needed to look at the profiles that led me here. First stop: Aneil Mishra’s resume — BAM!! COLE was there. Aneil worked at Duke University and assisted with the “Center of Leadership and Ethics” (COLE) grant program.

I then Googled Duke, Cole, and “Center of Leadership and Ethics” and found more about the genesis of the COLE Grant.

COLE was started by Coach K (Duke’s legendary Basketball Coach – Mike Krzyzewski) and a Duke Professor Sim Sitkin. I totally wanted Coach K to be a part of this challenge! Unfortunately, after looking up information on his two New York Times best selling books, “Leading with the Heart” and “Beyond Basketball – Coach K’s Keywords to Success,” I hit a dead end. Nothing seemed right for Coach K as the author, so I looked up Sim Sitkin on Amazon and found a book that he wrote.

I noticed there was a Customer Review!! I checked it out.

YES!!!!! This was totally SourceCon Challenge material. A cool puzzle at the CIA-Headquarters that is written up on the SourceCon page?

It was now time to X-Ray the SourceCon website! 15 seconds later, I found a blog posting about the Kryptos – The Ultimate Challenge. I remember reading about this in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.

I was at the right webpage. I scrolled to the bottom and saw there was an anonymous comment:

I now started thinking that I had to solve the Kryptos, but it has not been solved in the last 20 years since it was built with the best in the world trying to decipher it. This had to be a red herring…

So I knew I was at the right spot and there was nothing here… I was so close, I just knew it! I thought for a few minutes and decided to check the HTML source code for the page to see if there were any hidden gems (text or messages). This hunch paid off!

Hidden Gem:

“email sourcecon2011@gmail.com with subject "NYPVTT" (minus quotes) and the first and last name of the author of the book that led you here in the body for your next clue.”

I sent Sim Sitkins and NYPVTT to the SourceCon email address. Am I finally done? Did I win???? Along came another clue.

Clue #3

Clue #3: JimSanborn. you musT find him.

Jim Sanborn? The creator of the Kryptos ciphers at the CIA-HQ? I had already been down wrong paths, so I definitely wanted to save time on this one. I noticed a capital “T” in musT. Could that mean Twitter?

I went to Twitter and searched for JimSanborn:

The SourceCon logo was a dead giveaway. He also had recently tweeted a link. I clicked on the link… Will it be over????

The link was to the Diigo site, and the never ending online journey continued…

Clue #4

Clue #4: you have all the information you need — you just need to find the location of the after dark. Look 4 BaSic clues.

I noticed “location,” the number 4, and the letters “L,” “B,” and “S” capitalized. My gut said find the location of the After Dark on Foursquare. First, I had to learn where the SourceCon After Dark was being held. In checking the SourceCon page, After Dark will be held at Yahoo!’s Building C / URL’s Café. Quickly taking this information to Foursquare, I tried to find the location, but it was not near me, so I was unable to view the information. I quickly turned to the X-Ray tactic and by typing in “Yahoo! Building C / URL’s Café site:foursquare.com” I found the location.

There it was!! The SourceCon logo, the date of After Dark and the thing I had been looking for from the beginning — the phone number! It was laid out in the beginning information about the Challenge that you would also need to use the phone. Finally! I will call and be done…

Not so fast — one more thing…

The voicemail said that I needed to send the name of the individual associated with Wake Forest University that I located earlier in the subject line of an email to the Challenge email address. I sent Aneil Mishra’s name to the SourceCon email and that was it!!!

I sent the final e-mail at 11:37 PM on September 19. It had been twelve days of crazy times for me – and nearly three weeks from the beginning of the contest! I was searching and doing all of the SourceCon Challenge tasks in the evenings after my wife and kids went to sleep. Needless to say, it made for some long nights.

Two things that I think helped me in this Challenge were asking questions and getting feedback of my progress. I continued to check in with SourceCon to ask if I was on the right track. New clues (many based on my inquiries) were posted publicly in the Diigo groups to help me as well as all the other participants. In past Challenges, there has been little to no interactivity throughout the Challenge. But as with our daily job function, checking in and asking if I was on the right track helped immensely with completing this project. The same can be said about work – when working on a sourcing project, checking in along the way ensures that you are pursuing the right paths to ultimately find exactly what you need.

A big thank you and round of virtual applause needs to go to SourceCon for designing and executing a hell of a tough challenge. It was very well organized and the technology flowed well.

I look forward to competing with Katharine and Julia to see which of us will win the Grand Master Sourcing Challenge next week during the SourceCon After Dark – and I hope to see you there as well!

*Editor’s note: Even though Jim technically won this Challenge on September 19, we decided to extend the contest to the first day of October to give the rest of the participants an opportunity to complete the Challenge. Jim was already scheduled to be a panelist for the conference, and while neither he nor any of the other presenters contributed to the development of this Challenge, we knew he would already be attending and wanted to give others a chance to come. The fact that he ended up winning the Challenge proved to us that we made a good choice in having him as a presenter!

Honorable mention goes to Lisa Offutt who completed the Challenge through Clue #2 and was hot on the trail to find Clue #3. This was a very difficult challenge and we commend each and every one of you who participated!