When I assess what has brought about the most change and will continue to bring about the most change in names sourcing and Internet recruiting, I’d say it’s the staggering growth in the creation of new tools that expand the reach of communication and brand management.  In essence, the sourcing toolkit has expanded greatly and the subsequent reach provided helps to increase brand awareness to passive and active candidates.

Yet the increase in the number of tools doesn’t necessarily equate to an increase in efficiency in getting your message to the right people and helping to cut down on your sourcing time.  It’s one thing to have a tool and it’s another to learn how to use the tool properly.  Hence, the ability to effectively increase the reach of your messages, and to control and expand your firms’ brand, will equal the knowledge of how to use these tools.

For this reason, I’d say that for recruiting firms to survive and thrive in 2011 & beyond, it will be an absolute necessity that the names sourcer / researcher branch out beyond the traditional role, embrace the new tools of communication, and learn how to effectively use them to create and maintain a firm’s web brand presence.  This has become clear to me, not only in my current role, but reflecting on past positions, and relates especially to non-corporate, third party recruiting firms. 

What is Included in a Web Brand Presence?

When I say web brand presence I literally mean all aspects of communication via the web, from SEO implemented on a website and/or blog (webmaster), to active daily communication and networking via the changing social media web such as that done via Facebook pages and tweeting. In essence, this includes any tool that allows the firm to expand its message and hence, its brand, enabling it to reach a targeted audience.  Though this is not an exhaustive list, I’d include:

• RSS feeds
• The correct use of LinkedIn and other professional networking sites
• Email marketing
• SMO – Social Media Optimization
• SMM – Social Media Marketing
• PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising
• The use of sharing and bookmarking widgets on key web properties
• Keyword and reputation monitoring/automation
• Forum participation
• Participation in vertical niche networking virtual communities
• Blogging

Why the Names Sourcer?

In each of the firms I’ve been at, there simply hasn’t been anyone with the time, inclination, or personality to initiate and (most importantly) continue these efforts.  The names sourcer / researcher typically is an individual that has the personality that leads to the necessary motivation and patience to develop and grow this key part of the firm. New tools come and go and it takes serious patience to take the time to learn about each and to then determine which tools are worth investing time in.  As such, these additional responsibilities cannot become secondary, but instead will become part of the names sourcer’s professional duties.  Sourcing for the right people and delivering the right messages to them becomes the brand management function. It’s not enough to simply set up some profiles here and there and then leave them at that.  They are not organic and they will not grow by themselves.  Individuals must fully dedicate themselves to becoming an expert in communication via these means and commit to continual education, training, and development.

The Search Engine Algorithms of the Future Demand this New Type of Recruiting Professional

The search engine algorithms of the future demand this new type of professional so that the recruiting firm will survive and grow.  It’s quite likely that the developing social web will become fully integrated into the algorithms of the major search engines and will therefore become part of the official ranking system for web properties.  The major engines have already implemented their own form of social search and do show results from Facebook and Twitter within the organic and paid listings.  With time, these will grow in importance in relation to what is returned when a user performs a query.  As such, getting your social web presence active, and then working to grow it, will likely pay off in increased rankings, not only when posting jobs, but also when getting the attention of the passive job seeker.  The more users who “like” or retweet (or whatever comes next) your postings, pages, or blogs, the more attention you’ll get from the engines.  And, of course, this will also increase the viral marketing effect in that your postings will reach more people over time via sharing in your growing network.

Recruiting Firms Need to Take their Web Communication and Brand Control Strategy Seriously

A firm lucky enough to have a researcher or names sourcer on staff should look seriously at having this individual create and grow the firms’ web presence by having them find, understand, and effectively use the growing list of web-based communication tools.  Should the firm not see an internal long-term role for the sourcer and be unable to commit to maintaining and growing the firm’s web presence if that individual were to leave, then at the very least they should encourage the individual to use some of the tools in their sourcing and research activities while there.  Though this will not lead to sustained long-term benefit regarding brand awareness, it will help to expand the reach of their messages for current sourcing initiatives and may provide some benefit for rankings in the search engines.

Regardless, though, of what a firm decides , 2011 will bring more communication tools that can lead to serious long-term benefits for recruiting firms to expand their message and brand in the mind of their target groups.  Why wait when facing the inevitable?

The video will be recorded and available later this week with notes from the interview. This is a short (5-7 minute) interview so don’t be late! We hope you will join us live at noon Eastern on October 27!

Schawbel consults with job-seekers regularly on personal branding issues. He also works closely with college students to help them develop professional personal brands that will serve them well as they enter the workforce. These are the potential candidates that we, as sourcers, look for every day. We will have the opportunity to pick the brain of someone who is advising our target audience on how to make themselves more visible and findable to people like us.

Schawbel’s overall goal in this brief interview will be to discuss how job seekers can build their own “personal brand” to help them stand out during the job search process. But of course, we want to put our own sourcing spin on this. The format of this chat will be Schawbel on the phone with Amybeth Hale, the Editor for SourceCon, while he is being videoed live. Amybeth will be asking him some questions, so here’s your chance to submit a question! If you have something you’d like to have Schawbel address regarding job-seekers and personal branding, please leave a comment on this post. We will select a handful of questions to present to Schawbel and while Amybeth is speaking with him, she will give a shout-out to the individual who asked each question.

Please join us here on www.sourcecon.com at 12:00pm Eastern on Wednesday, October 27 for this unique opportunity.

Here is a quick overview of Schawbel’s tips on standing out today as a job-seeker:

The Importance of Personal Branding: How to Stand Out in Today’s Job Market
By Dan Schawbel

Stay relevant or stay unemployed. You need to be relevant to be desirable in the marketplace, and you should prepare yourself for the careers of the 21st century. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that 60 percent of all new jobs in the 21st century will require skills that only 20 percent of current employees possess. You need a sense for what skills are important in your chosen industry, and which ones might be significant in the future.

Find your niche — you have to specialize. Being a generalist will help you adapt to new jobs because the market changes all the time, but specializing will make you more desirable to hiring managers. In fact, 71 percent of hiring managers are looking to fill “specialized positions” while 61 percent of job seekers considered themselves to have “broad skill sets”. Companies are looking to hire experts in their fields to solve real business problems. Become an expert in an in-demand field and you will have leverage over the recruitment process, make more money, and secure a stable position. Once you’ve chosen your field of specialization, you can become an expert by getting a second or advanced degree. Schools like DeVry University and its Keller Graduate School of Management offer specialized bachelor’s and master’s degree programs focused on high-growth career fields. You should do some research online to find flexible and affordable opportunities to dial in your personal brand niche.

The competition is relentless. The economy has created a tough job market for most individuals, especially inexperienced college graduates. There are currently 2 million unemployed college graduates, and companies are hiring 22 percent fewer graduates. Our country is becoming more educated with about 40 percent of Americans having college degrees. Having a college degree is extremely important for building a foundation for future success–a general bachelor’s degree is a great entry point, but having advanced or second degrees is a way to make yourself stand out and advance your personal brand.

Interpersonal skills are becoming more valuable. A brand requires a personality if it’s going to be distinctive. Your personal brand needs to be personable and attract positive attention. Organizations are starting to place a higher value on interpersonal skills (communication, teamwork, organization) and cultural fit, instead of technical skills and experience. A new survey by Right Management shows that 31 percent of companies feel that organizational culture and motivation fit is important, while only 12 percent are for technical skills, and 11 percent are for relevant experience.

Perception (how we present ourselves) is king. It’s the little things that count, whether you’re in an interview, or interacting with people online. A CareerBuilder survey states that 67 percent of hiring managers say that failure to make eye contact would make them less likely to hire a job candidate and 38 percent said lack of smile. People will judge you on small things that make a big difference.

• Downloading a QR reader app to your mobile phone
  • Some free apps for the iPhone
    • QR Reader for iPhone
    • QR Scanner
    • UpCode
    • Semacode (the one I use)
  • Some free apps for Android
  • Some free apps for Blackberry
• Taking a photo of a QR code with your mobile, or printing it out, and using your webcam to read the code with a desktop code reader (like bcWebCam or QReader)

Obviously, the mobile option for reading QR codes is the easiest, hence its appeal to mobile marketing. Lots of companies are starting to use these QR codes to promote their brands, share specials, and basically just heighten awareness of their products and services. But can this be leveraged for recruiting, and more importantly for us, to bolster sourcing efforts?

Here are a couple of examples:

• Siemens: In 2009, Siemens ran an ad in a German publication called The Journalist with a QR code that took interested readers to its company website and list of open positions. In the ad, it specifically noted what the QR was for, so readers knew where they would end up by scanning the code. (source: www.recruitingfly.com)
• TMP: TMP has created a QR code that it can place in collateral and advertising material that will take viewers directly to their job site (which is mobile friendly) to view openings. I’m not sure if they’re using it at the moment, but they had it in a blog post.
• Michael Marlatt discussed in a post last year how Using QR codes in recruiting material “can easily drive prospective candidates to a website that provides details on upcoming opportunities, special recruiting events, contact information, and so on.” (also check out Marlatt’s presentation from a recent ERE webinar)
• RECRUIT2retail, an Australia-based retail recruiting agency, uses QR codes in its print advertising to help candidates apply to positions online without having to remember or write down contact information. (source: www.recruitmentdirectory.com)
• Companies like Google and Microsoft hold competitions regularly to let technically savvy individuals flex their programming, engineering, and development muscles. These contests obviously serve multiple purposes, one of which is to vet excellent technical talent to hire. QR codes could (should?) be used as parts of these competitions to test participants.

Even job-seekers can get in on the action. Ryan Rantacore writes on Personal Branding 101 how a job-seeker can add a QR code to their paper resume that, when scanned, can take the recruiter to an online resume, a social network profile, a portfolio, or provide additional information about themselves.

So – what’s the deal with sourcing? How can QR codes help make our life easier? Well, our job as sourcers is to uncover talent and potential candidates for our jobs. Some sourcers take it a step further and vet candidates for their recruiters. Particularly for those of you who source for technical roles, using QR codes in your recruiting advertisement will bring you individuals who are obviously interested in your opportunity and/or your company. They’re a great filter for determining interest in one of those two things. Also, they’re a good way to show interest in emerging technology or to test ability to follow directions. (i.e. ‘go to this website’, ‘send an email to abc@xyz.com with the subject line “QR code application”‘, etc.) So, there are some applications to sourcing by using QR codes as a sort of new-age job posting. If nothing else, it arouses curiosity and can help to facilitate a warm conversation. (not to mention that they’re just awesome, and often include hidden treasures!)

Now – the million dollar question: is this a “social recruiting” technique? Or just a(nother) shiny new toy for us to play with? Share your thoughts below.

Big shocker! But there is a message that we, as sourcing professionals, need to find between the lines here…

Social recruiting is changing the scope of our job.

Let’s face it sourcers, we used to be able to get away with hiding in the corners of our offices, nose glued to our monitor(s), feverishly typing away on our keyboards drumming up complex Boolean search strings to scour the Internet for our diamond in the rough. In the words of Fergie, “That’s so two-thousand-and-late” these days. Gone are the days of total introversion and zero interaction with potential candidates.

You guys know me. You know how I feel about the phone. I’ve been shouting at the top of my lungs for eight years that I refuse to talk to people. So you’ve got to know how hard it is for me to come to this conclusion.

Take a look at this image, taken from the Jobvite survey (sorry, I know it’s tiny). It shows that one of the most popular uses of social media in recruiting is for employment branding:

Publishing jobs came in second overall – which in my book warrants another post all its own because the whole idea behind ‘social’ recruiting is being ‘social’ and not just sticking jobs into the conversation, but I digress…

A colleague I met with recently told me that his sourcing team was just moved from reporting directly to a recruiting manager and was now reporting to a manager in charge of workforce planning and employment brand. If who we report to is any indication of how our jobs are going to eventually evolve (and I believe it is!), then we need to pay close attention as this starts to happen in more organizations.

Most recruiting organizations, whether they are corporate or third party, understand the importance of using LinkedIn to find candidates.78% of the companies surveyed said they use it, in fact, and of those, 89% have indicated that they have made hires as a result of using LinkedIn. More and more are starting to incorporate other channels into their hiring tool-kits though: 55% use Facebook, 45% use Twitter, 19% use blogs,14% use YouTube, 5% use MySpace, and only 15% indicated that they use no social technologies in hiring.

Look once again at the graph above: the most popular use of the tools listed above is to promote a brand. Brand promotion is a task that has typically been the responsibility of Marketing/Communications/PR teams. It’s now creeping its way into recruiting, and guess who’s going to be charged with managing these campaigns?

This means interaction, outreach, engaging communities and individuals, and all of the other tasks that go into giving people warm-fuzzies about our respective companies. To loop back to the beginning of this article, this means no more  sitting in dark corners pounding away on our keyboards. We’re going to be expected to do employment branding activities in addition to active sourcing.

Please understand, this does not mean that understanding Boolean is a dying skill. I think our knowledge of Boolean will also evolve, bringing forth a need to understand semantic search as more and more online resources will be populated with user-generated content, and thus be more conversational in nature. That, too, will evolve over the coming months and years.

Researchers and sourcers, it is important to polish your existing skills at this point, but make sure you’re also paying attention to the new ways in which people are communicating. Understanding the way we socialize will help you to be successful in your career as a sourcer as time moves on. Keep up with the technologies and keep yourself relevant. I encourage you to take a look at the survey yourself – you can download it here.

Please share your thoughts below on how you believe social recruiting and social technologies are changing the way we do our jobs. Do you find it easier or harder to find candidates? Do you feel that a great number of potential candidates are being overlooked due to our new reliance on online resources? Do you feel that our jobs will evolve in a completely different direction? Leave a comment and share!

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?