Over the next few weeks we will be introducing you to the speakers for the upcoming conference, SourceCon Fall 2013. Becky Mohr will be presenting Offshore Sourcing: How We Went Offshore to Find and Engage Passive Talent as a part of the Leadership Track.
Tell us about your background, how you became a sourcing professional, and what you do currently.
As a full-cycle corporate recruiter, I was asked to be the main liaison with our onshore sourcing team. Their craft pulled me in and they took me for one of their own. I learned to love sourcing and the value that targeted candidate generation and engagement could bring to our unique organization. Over the next few years I worked to grow our onshore sourcing team by 160% and reshape the philosophy of our global sourcing team. Currently, along with my counterpart in India, I co-lead an on and offshore sourcing force of 25+ (the “+” means we’re growing).
Tell us about the presentation you have planned for SourceCon. What takeaways should attendees expect?
I will be sharing our experience of working with an offshore component to our sourcing team. We’ve been offshoring hiring responsibilities since 2005, so we have more experience in this than most. However, what I think is most interesting about our story is that we are not a pipeline-driven recruiting model, nor are most of our sourcing assignments simple key-word matches. The fact that we have developed an offshore team that is smart, creative, strategic, and successful bodes well for anyone looking to take advantage of offshored cost savings. I’m looking forward to sharing what has made our team successful and where we have met challenges along the way.
Why would it be unwise for someone to miss your session?
Is there a sourcer or sourcing team out there who isn’t being asked to do more with less? Offshoring is a logical answer to that challenge, but it’s an intimidating prospect. I’m hoping this session makes offshoring more familiar and less intimidating and also gives folks real insight into whether it might work for them.
Have you been to SourceCon in the past? What are you most excited about?
Yes, I’ve been. I’m most excited about bringing half my team with me to soak up the knowledge that our colleagues are willing to share.
How do you feel about the future of sourcing?
I think that if your definition of “sourcing” includes a responsibility to engage and court candidates, then sourcing is going to be a key component of successful recruiting organizations moving forward. While candidates are becoming easier and easier to find, they are become more and more calloused to recruiting messages. The truly valuable sourcers of tomorrow will be emotionally intelligent, intuitive, highly persuasive, and persistent… in addition to being great at Boolean logic.
What new tools are you experimenting with that you find interesting?
We’re very interested right now in exploring collaboration forums as a means of finding candidates. The trick with these is that the users really don’t want to be recruited, so we are working out the right way to engage them and build trusting relationships.
Tell us something interesting about yourself that has nothing to do with what you do professionally.
I really love traveling, and I’m particularly skilled at planning foreign trips on a shoestring budget. Luckily, my husband is as unfussy as I am about accommodations, food, ground transportation, etc… but we can’t find many other people to travel with us in that style!