Most of the requisitions arriving on a sourcer’s desk are in general repeat roles (find me a Software engineer or a salesperson or a DevOps engineer). Some roles may not be as cut and dry as they seem thereby requiring some research into understanding the role from a business perspective. Some vanilla roles also may need technical analysis to come up with alternate ways of search. Let’s look at a few such examples for illustration purposes.
Deep Dive
Example 1: Director – Biostatistics with preclinical experience for a healthcare firm.
From the looks of it, it seemed fairly straightforward.
The usual competitive analysis of firms likely having such candidates in the nearby areas was done. This included traditional drug makers like AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, etc. along with generic drug markers like Gilead, Takeda etc.
Simple search employed was site:www.linkedin.com/in (Biostatistician OR Biostatistics OR Bio-statistics) (Director OR “Associate director” OR “Senior Manager” OR Manager) Location
The talent pool was very good but most of them had clinical trials experience, which was not desirable.
Parallel research about preclinical studies, made me realize that, before a drug is to undergo clinical trials (FDA), pre-clinical studies are to be conducted that include initial efficacy, toxicity, pharmacokinetic,s, and safety information. Wide doses of the drug are tested using in vitro (test tube or cell culture) and in vivo (animal) experiments, and it is also possible to perform in silico profiling using computer models of the drug-target interactions.
This revealed a few keywords that could be tested and resulted in a target pool that would have got missed using traditional search.
site:www.linkedin.com/in (Biostatistician OR biostatistics OR “bio-statistics”) (“pre-clinical” OR Preclinical OR pharmacokinetic) (Director OR “Associate director” OR “Senior Manager” OR Manager) Location
OR
site:www.linkedin.com/in (Biostatistician OR biostatistics OR “bio-statistics”) (“in vitro” OR “in vivo” OR “in silico” OR “in-silico”) (Director OR “Associate director” OR “Senior Manager” OR Manager) Location
Example 2: Informatica developer with Salesforce integration
Sounds quite easy and you would get some profiles using the following string
site:linkedin.com/in (“ETL developer” OR “informatica developer” OR engineer OR specialist OR programmer OR consultant OR “data engineer”) (Salesforce OR SFDC) (Integration OR integrate) Location
I looked up the technical specification sheet of how Informatica integration is accomplished with Salesforce. That’s how the following alternate search came about:
site:linkedin.com/in (“ETL developer” OR “informatica developer” OR engineer OR specialist OR programmer OR consultant OR “data engineer”) (Salesforce OR SFDC) (“informatica Intelligence cloud services” OR IICS) Location
For quite a few sourcing assignments, simple searches may yield the desired results. For some sourcing assignments, one needs to go a little beyond the ordinary. It’s easy to get disheartened with initial results for such roles but a deeper investigation and research will lead to a better result. Hopefully, this will lead you to think a little differently when conducting your sourcing in the future.