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Jun 15, 2020

THE NEED

Imagine you have 2,000+ recruiters on various seniority levels that are totally spread across four continents, reporting to hundreds of managers and leaders…and you want them all to be able to source equally well. What do you do then?

Yeah… your initial thoughts might be around training (which is totally fine) but how do you exactly know who needs to be trained and on what? In other words: how can you map and understand whether Recruiter #1 is strong with LinkedIn but may not be a master of Facebook sourcing while Recruiter #1,975 is a born genius in all things sourcing?

That’s a great challenge, eh? 😆

There are some advanced e-learning platforms that you can buy and implement but there are a few aspects that you may need to consider:

1️⃣ The only scenario when e-learning works is when your employees’ direct leaders control the learning process. Otherwise (seen that with multiple companies) self-learning can easily lose scope and over time, lose motivation. We wanted to find a more engaging and user-driven solution – does that exist today?

2️⃣ Most of the e-learning sourcing platforms don’t provide assessment on current sourcing capability or if so they run some very basic tests after the completed curriculum. One-time tests, however, were not what we were looking for. Is there a way to always know, in real time, what our company’s global sourcing capability is?

3️⃣ It costs you triple fortune if you want to buy a proper sourcing e-learning tool for a company with an employee headcount this size – will that bring the desired ROI?

THE SOLUTION

The missing piece of the puzzle that we were looking for was the right way to assess current sourcing capabilities. We thought if we had this data in place, we could easily come up with the right training offering: assessment first, training second and performance measurement third. So what is the right way to assess a global company’s entire sourcing capability in real-time?

I was lucky to know the brilliant Jan Tegze, because around the time when we were working on the assessment piece, Jan came up with the Sourcing Test concept. Based on his previous success with the sourcing.games platform, Jan built a corporate solution for sourcing assessment. The model we used was very simple:

➡️ You build a sourcing quiz that contains (in our case) five questions

➡️ Questions are not regular multiple choice, academical-type questions but more like real challenges that make you actually source. Here is one example:

Women Who Code is a global organization for female engineers. Its Portland, Oregon community had a recent Coffee & Code meetup in Jan 2020 at Coava Coffee Roasters.

Based on the attendee list on meetup.com Jeannie joined this gathering.

What is her last name?

➡️ As Recruiters work on these questions we measure their performance. Typical measures include: do they use hints? Are they super quick or do they need longer time to solve the question? How many times do they provide an incorrect answer and so on. Everything a recruiter does within the Sourcing Hackathon is being measured, and measurement adds up to a global sourcing leaderboard

➡️ The Global Sourcing Leaderboard is a continuously changing benchmark of our company providing real time analytics of the actual sourcing capabilities

The sourcing capability analytics of the Hackathon is a piece of extremely unique intelligence.  It allows us to report by individual, team, country or even by leadership. Now we see who may need further training and exactly on what. We can make immediate actions to achieve the best sourcing performance within our company.

THE RESULTS

We launched the Sourcing Hackathon at the end of 2018 and since then we’ve been able to gather performance data for tens of thousands of sourcers.

We are regularly running quizzes and competitions within our teams and continuously engaging with them to be active on the Hackathon. The Hackathon is a tool for recognition and celebration – it makes recruiters even little fall in love with sourcing. ❤️ The gamification aspect and the leaderboard of the Hackathon boosts competition and makes recruiters wanting to do better and more. Not only because they play and win but also because with every new question they work on they also learn a new way of sourcing as well.

We monitor the Hackathon performance and have built this “new language” into our leadership strategy discussions.

All in all: it’s been a fantastic and successful journey to bring sourcing into the executive board room.

If you want to learn more about this case study please get in touch with me!