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Sourcing News and Knowledge – Beyond the Obvious


Articles tagged 'candidate'

Technology & Resources, The Sourcing Function

Job Boards = Bad Candidates? Don’t believe the hype.

by on Nov. 22, 2010

3 Comments

bad Apple

I continue to see well respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the value of the job boards is waning and that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low. I weighed in on a discussion a couple years ago in response to the question of, “What would happen if the job boards became obsolete?” I noticed that many people in the discussion took the stance that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low. Is it just me, or don’t these types of statements reek of stereotyping?

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Editor's Corner, Leadership

Look Beyond The Obvious

by on Sep. 27, 2010

1 comment

Autobots_Logo1

As researchers and sourcers, we are tasked with generating leads for our recruiting colleagues or our clients. But, as the slogan goes for my favorite childhood toy, there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to what we can do.

We need to look beyond the obvious – in more ways than one.

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Challenges, Technology & Resources, The Sourcing Function

Find Your Target Audience Where They Gather

by on Aug. 27, 2010

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Picture-1

Last week, I looked out the window in my home office and noticed a spider had spun a web just outside my window. I found this interesting since it obviously took a lot of work for her to set up her web in that spot – there is a significant distance between the wall that juts out on the left side of the window and the landing area to my front door that is way to the right of my window. I started wondering, “Why on earth would this spider go to all that trouble of spinning a web there?” As I pondered this, I began to put together the pieces of the puzzle:

  • Spiders eat insects (duh) – including moths
  • Moths are drawn to light (another duh)
  • I work in the evening quite often, after it gets dark (lightbulb moment!)

I live in a pretty woodsy area, and when it gets dark here, it gets DARK. When I work at night, there aren’t any other lights on other than the one in my office, which shines brightly through my window. The spider set up her web in front of my window because when I work late at night, it is a beacon for all types of insects, which she can then easily catch.

She set up her web where her target audience would gather.

Over the last few days, I’ve noticed the web has moved a little bit – probably due to repairs needing to be made after catching a meal – but it has remained right there in front of my window. She obviously has been doing well having set up shop in that location. My window spider is an out-of-the-box thinker.

So is James Bromley of MailOnline, a UK web news source. Earlier this week, John Zappe wrote a great article on ERE.net about a source code ‘job posting’ that appeared in the robot.txt file of www.dailymail.co.uk – seen here:

Talk about targeted marketing! Any of you sourcers recognize this concept? Using source code to hide a secret message? If you need a hint…. think about Rob’s Dog. And Jim’s Dog. Contests put on by two sourcing masterminds to see who can think outside the box to solve a problem and prove their professional skills. And in the case of MailOnline, to hopefully find an excellent SEO Manager. Brilliant!

Set up your sourcing campaigns where your target audience is sure to see them. You’ll have better luck ‘catching’ what you’re after!

By the way – we’re currently running a contest here on sourcecon.com – the prize will be a complimentary pass to SourceCon Fall 2010 in D.C. As of the time of this post, you’ve only got three hours left to get in on the action and qualify for the first round. The catch: finding the contest is actually part of the contest. I suggest you scan the website carefully…good luck!

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Metrics, Social Media

Tools & Techniques for Writing Strategic SEO Job Postings

by on Aug. 10, 2010

2 Comments

Weidmer-Adam

I get it; typically someone in sourcing gets called in when ad response just isn’t getting the job done. As most sourcers do when they get a new req, we evaluate the situation; find out what’s been done, what has worked, and what has failed. However, so many times when you look at the advertisements, it’s pretty clear to see that a “lack of proactive sourcing” is not the only problem. I’ve literally seen sales ads get run on multiple paid job boards without the word “sales” in it. You might as well make your ads invisible.

And while there is usually a lot of talk on best practices for advanced search string theory, it is refreshing when that same analytical approach is applied to producing competitively written job advertisements. Because ideally, for every one candidate that applies on their own, that saves a company both time and money in proactive outreach.

When it comes to advertising jobs more effectively, there are two primary steps that I go through:

  1. Keyword Selection (How do you select the “best” keyword terms to use in your ad?)
  2. Keyword Density (How do you measure your keyword use in each ad?)

Below are some tips and tools of the trade for writing strategic SEO job descriptions.

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Editor's Corner, Technology & Resources

Initial Outreach For Sourcers

by on Jul. 21, 2010

7 Comments

robot-hi

I’ve been asked several times over the course of my research career to share examples of my initial email outreach to prospective candidates after having found them through various sourcing avenues. When I share what I do, people are usually surprised at the simplicity of it. But my feelings on making a connection with someone who most likely doesn’t know you from a hole in the wall are that less is more.

For those of you who do initial outreach via email to potential candidates before throwing them over the fence to your recruiting colleagues, it is tempting to want to go into great detail about how incredible your company/client is and what a fantastic opportunity you have to offer them. I urge you to put yourself in the position of the person you are emailing: if you received an email from a someone you’d never met before, from a company you hadn’t previously either known of or been interested in, and the email was three paragraphs long with most of it being a stock company and/or job description, what’s the likelihood that you’d make it to the final paragraph where the job opportunity was shared? That’s what I thought…  

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Contract Sourcing

Sourcing For Contractors

by on Jun. 23, 2010

2 Comments

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Regular Contributor post from Kristen Fife

I’ve been a recruiter in the Seattle tech market for close to seven years now. I’ve worked for one of the top temporary staffing agencies, as a contractor on numerous teams at Microsoft as both a Sourcer and Full Desk/lifecycle recruiter for their corporate openings, as the lone recruiter at a mid-size company, and currently I’m working for a consulting company that places both staff augmentation and full consulting teams onsite with our enterprise clients.

From a sourcing perspective, I use the same skills to find talent. It is the time and talent management pieces that are vastly different. I do not particularly like straight temporary sourcing/recruiting. The ‘turn and burn’ mentality doesn’t allow me the chance to build a lasting rapport and relationship with my candidates (thus also building trust), or my hiring managers. When I worked at Volt, it was all about a ‘general fit’ and profit margin vs. the candidate experience. That ‘general fit’ was 75% or more. Meaning, if the candidate had 75% of the skills the job description called for, then write up your submittal verbiage and send them over. I was lucky in that I knew what the main skills were at Microsoft for core tech positions (C#, SQL, manual testing for SDET/QA engineers). Back in the mid-90′s, it was a candidates’ market. The inability to offer relocation or to cover expenses for travel to interviews was a major detriment to hiring truly talented people, thus the same professionals were jumped on by rival agencies. However, I will say that the ‘turn and burn’ environment taught me some really valuable skills as far as learning to quickly identify, contact, screen, and move candidates through the pipeline.

My biggest frustration with corporate recruiting is how slow things can be. 45+ days to hire? Seriously? Having that much time allowed me to look like a rock star because I was able to keep pipes filled to overflowing. The advantages to corporate recruiting include the fact that most professionals want the stability and benefits of a full-time job. It’s an easy sell, and especially with a brand like Microsoft as well as the resources, it was easy to convince candidates to at least talk to us. The caveat to full-time positions is that your client is much pickier about quality from both a functional skillset and a cultural fit. It takes many more candidates to fill a full-time requisition than it does a contract role.

Right now, it’s definitely an employer’s market. Jobs are the commodity we have to sell and we get more than enough qualified candidates on every requisition. And, given the fact that I live in an area of the country that seems to be doing better than average on the recovery front, people that are able to are moving to Seattle on their own dime. For example, I heard about the layoffs at Sprint in Kansas and started sourcing project managers for the wireless openings of which we have so many. And, I have two candidates who have applied for jobs from out of state that are moving in and I’m setting up for interviews. So for me, the pipe is very full. However, that does not stop me from continuing to build those longer term relationships. To me, effective sourcing is built on the platform of growing your network during feast AND famine.

I’d say that right now, more candidates are open to contract opportunities, since a lot of companies are using contingent staffing to help weather the economy. At least in Seattle, this is a cyclical occurence. It happened in the 1998-2001 era (which I affectionately refer to as the dot bomb) and I have no doubt it will continue to do so. And part of that cycle is that contractors who have worked out well will have the opportunity to become full-time employees as companies stabilize financially. If I, as a recruiter, help my candidates find and keep a job, I get the best of all worlds, including referrals from them, because they know I care about their careers and aspirations beyond just the six-month gig at XYZ company.

Have you found that more companies are looking to hire contractors than full-time employees? Are you finding contractors easier or harder to place than full-time? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The Sourcing Function

Why Sourcing?

by on Feb. 8, 2010

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brain-cogs

Regular Contributor post from Kristen Fife

I recently had a phone conversation with someone I’ve crossed paths with in the local Seattle recruiting community but  have never met personally.

This is a question a good sourcer gets asked fairly frequently. My skill set, which like any good recruiter includes agency/corporate full lifecycle recruiting, has a strong Sourcing component. And by sourcing, I’m not talking about a junior recruiter doing a keyword search based on a profile or generic job description.

A good Sourcer enjoys research, marketing, and building long-term relationships with people. As I said in my conversation earlier this week, Sourcing as a separate specialty in Recruiting is a fairly recent “job title” as a senior recruiting role. Before the advent of major Applicant Tracking Systems, almost *all* recruiters had to be strong in both sourcing and account management. My Mom was a nurse recruiter back in the 80′s and her eyes glaze over when I talk about Boolean search strings and the various ATS’s I’ve mastered over the years. It’s only when I talk about posting a job or attending a live networking event that she actually has a frame of reference. For her it was about picking up the phone, reaching out to her professional colleagues for referrals and recommendations, and meeting with both campus and industry candidates.

In the 90′s, technology took much of the human element *out* of recruiting, while streamlining the recruiting process and allowing recruiters to handle much higher requisition loads in the process. I believe that search technology (thank you Google) has brought about the advent of “Sourcing”. Now that we can run targeted searches on large numbers of candidates, “sourcing” has become even more valued as a skill.

puzzle-lgBut 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?

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