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Articles tagged 'sourcing'

The Sourcing Function

Show Your Sourcer the Love (and by Love, I mean Money!)

by 2 days ago

6 Comments

show-me-the-money

Sourcers are highly specialized, experienced, and on-demand professionals — yet compensation doesn’t seem to follow along.

Here’s something I don’t get: take a look at the average sourcer job description, and what do you see? The average sourcer is expected to have:

  • 3 to 5 years of prior experience in recruiting and/or sourcing
  • Specialized knowledge of a specific Industry (software, healthcare, financial, etc), combined with the knowledge of how resources of those industries are located across different geographies.
  • Deep and continuously updated knowledge of searching techniques (online and offline)
  • Innate ability to develop strategic approaches to develop candidate pipelines
  • Working knowledge of Applicant Tracking systems and collaboration tools in use by other areas of HR and business at large
  • Wonderful written and verbal communication skills
  • An uncanny ability to apply all of this at lightning speed, as it is typical that sourcing is a timing game and the first to find and submit a candidate is the one that wins.
  • Costly certifications that give an official stamp of approval to all of the above.

And the demand the profession is commanding: it is not about two or three openings out there. A quick search across aggregators throws back 300+ openings for sourcers across the nation (at least as of mid-January 2012).

So, as the subtitle of this article clearly states:

Sourcers are highly specialized, experienced, and on-demand professionals…

If that is the case, can someone explain to me why would it be justified to expect to pay a professional of this caliber who is in such a high demand $20-30 dollars an hour? Or even worse, $6.25 an hour with offshore resources in countries with much different labor conditions than ours?

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Leadership

Managing a Virtual Workforce: Setting Social Goals Are the Key

by 3 days ago

1 comment

virtual employee

The virtual workplace is different.

The setting is different; cubicles don’t divide the virtual space. Neither do city lines, time zones, or continents, for that matter.

The employees are different; without that immediate group feel, employees have no other option than to be more independent and self-starting than their on-site counterparts.

And, above all else, management is different. When dealing with such an unconventional and independent staff, it becomes abundantly clear that “traditional” workplace motivation and efficiency strategies simply aren’t going to be effective.

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Social Media, The Sourcing Function

The Strategic Role of Sourcers in the Social-driven Economy

by 9 days ago

1 comment

puzzlepiece-world

The role of sourcers is changing as quickly as the role of marketers and in very similar fashions.

The times when marketers assumed that customers would buy a product because they needed it (or be brainwashed by advertising into believing they did) are rapidly vanishing. Today, as consumers, we expect to build a relationship with a company. We expect an experience – a positive experience, not the “bad” experience that makes us return products and try competitors – as well as vent our disappointment on social networks or other public venues such as Groubal.

In today’s competitive business environment, consumers demand personalized attention before and after any transaction. So do job seekers. They don’t want to be treated as interchangeable pawns, even for lower positions. People are not job-fillers… They are people first – and if they are unhappy, they’ll just look for another opportunity. Let’s keep in mind that the vast majority of people who look for or are open to a new job already have one!

It’s time to start looking at things a little differently. 

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Leadership

Becoming a Sourcing Advisor

by 2 weeks ago

1 comment

trusted-advisor

Where do you add value in the recruiting process? Do your customers see you as a recruiting consultant/advisor? Do your peers see you as an expert in sourcing? Do you mentor others? What do you do to set the strategy for sourcing? Is there something special in the screening that you do? Is there something different in the techniques you use to find candidates? Is there something different in the overall work that you can do?

I just asked a lot of questions I’ll bet you’ve asked yourself at some point in time…

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Leadership, Metrics, Social Media

The Best of SourceCon 2011, #2 — 10 Common Mistakes of Sourcing

by on Dec. 29, 2011

1 comment

JHascheRIS11

Editor’s note: this article derived from Jennifer Hasche’s RIS presentation was the 2nd most popular article on SourceCon in 2011. It originally ran in October.

During her presentation on sourcing strategies that produce results this Monday at the Recruiting Innovation Summit, which took place at Facebook in Palo Alto, CA, Jennifer Hasche, a Senior Sourcer at Intuit, shared her list of top 10 sourcing mistakes that are typically made within a recruitment organization. These mistakes are often the cause of missing the right candidates, taking too long on a search project, not understanding your business, and most frustratingly the misuse of available sourcing talent within an organization.

Read through the following list and make sure you aren’t making these mistakes yourself!

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The Sourcing Function

The Best of SourceCon 2011, #3 — The Unique Mind of a Sourcer

by on Dec. 28, 2011

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brain-cogs

Editor’s note: Sarang Brahme’s article was the 3rd most popular article on SourceCon in 2011. It originally ran in October.

A while back I saw an article on SC about Rob McIntosh’s Brain Is For Sale. Being an inventor of various sourcing contests like Rob’s dog and a true sourcer that he is, this article made me think about a brain of a sourcer. I have a firm opinion that sourcers are a unique breed of recruiting professionals. Not that they belong on a different planet, but that their mindset, focus, and passion put them in a league of their own.

Think about the different characteristics of a mind of a sourcer. Now these may be recruiters who love sourcing and have the right attitude toward sourcing. However, I honestly think that a true sourcer possesses a set of qualities unique from their recruiting counterparts.

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Corporate Sourcing, Technology & Resources

The Best of SourceCon 2011, #5 — Boolean in Disguise: LinkedIn Recruiter’s Cure for the Common Boolean Blues

by on Dec. 26, 2011

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Boolean Rx

Editor’s note: John Childs’ article was the 5th most popular article on SourceCon in 2011. It originally ran in June.

Boolean in Disguise is a prescription for easing the pain some experience when wrestling with Boolean strings. The Rx consists of a way of formulating and writing Boolean strings without realizing you’re doing it.

The prescription is not a complete cure however, but more like symptomatic relief of the common cold. You feel better, but you’ve still got a cold. We can call it a “semi-cure.”

Example of an easy string that works almost like a longer one — it can be as easy as typing the following one word string:

HR

…into the Key Words field of LinkedIn Recruiter, put a few checks in boxes, and it will give you even better results than you got by entering the longer Boolean search string in the Key Words field as shown below:

(HR) AND (“Information Technology”) AND (Director) AND (“New York”)

 

How cool would that be?

Keep reading…I’ll show you.

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The Sourcing Function

Breaking Down the Sourcing Function, Part 3: How Do You Interview a Sourcer?

by on Dec. 22, 2011

3 Comments

interview-cartoon

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been breaking down the sourcing function into some simple, digestible bites of information. Last week, we covered a few things to look for when you are ready to start interviewing sourcers — career and educational backgrounds, personality traits, and so forth. After reading last week’s article, a lot of you may be thinking, “Well this is all great stuff, but how do you find out in an interview if a candidate possesses these skills?” So this week, we want to provide a few suggestions for some good screening techniques.

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Social Media

Digging For Gold: Three Layers of Candidate Sourcing

by on Dec. 21, 2011

7 Comments

gold-nuggets-

I still remember those days when word “sourcing strategy” was define mainly with the names of job portals we would have an access. Well now, the situation is relatively similar — we have simply replaced job portals with Social Media and LinkedIn. More often than not, these so-called “strategies” appear pretty one-sided, lacking an in-depth understanding of the entire sourcing gamut. For now, it seems we are drifting toward “Social Media” as an entire strategy whereas in reality, it is simply one part of the entire strategy.

We get easily carried away with numbers like 800 million on Facebook and 150 million on LinkedIn. Do you know that 81% of LinkedIn and 76% of Twitter users never visit their account? Facebook, by contrast, has a higher engagement ratio — over 42% of users visit Facebook every day. I’m sure you will agree that the actual target population size is much bigger than just these numbers, which means with Social Media we are only looking at one particular section of candidates – not the whole group. Maureen Sharib has touched on this point very well in her Phone Sourcing discussion.

So – when it comes to Social Media channels, do we expect candidates to fall in our laps for easy pickings? Will this be a holy grail of candidate acquisition?

My answer is NO. If what we call a Social Media “strategy” simply means posting jobs in every corner of the Internet and expecting positions to fill, then we are missing the trick. What we need to look at is where our candidates are — are they all hanging on Social Media channels? Are they all equally active? Wouldn’t we look at candidates who are not using these channels? There are several layers of hidden treasure beyond social channels that remain to be excavated.

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Industry News, Social Media

Facebook Introduces Private Messages For Business Pages and Fans

by on Dec. 20, 2011

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facebook-fan-page

Though the news hasn’t appeared as an update on its official blog, Facebook has has begun introducing a new feature which allows business pages to receive private messages from their fans on the social network.

Right now, the new feature has only been rolled out to Asia-based admins. When it launched on Monday morning, Facebook page admins woke up to the following information box:

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