Sophie Beaudoin, Sourcing Specialist at The Mindfield Group in Vancouver, BC, Is our SourceCon Spotlight for the month of March.
Sophie is a graduate of BCIT (a technology school) with a Marketing Diploma. While there, the CEO of Mindfield was a speaker to a group she belonged to called SIFE. He spoke to her at length about his company and HR/recruiting in general and she became more and more interested in it. She didn’t realize in the beginning that she would be able to use her education in marketing in this role, but as she has to market the positions to the candidates, it’s an added bonus.
Mindfield is an RPO, meaning that they become their clients’ outsourced recruitment department and advertise the open role under their brand. Industries they focus in are Consumer Goods and Services, Finance and Banking, Government and Public Sector, Aviation, Healthcare, Retail and Software and Technology. Having been in her role with The Mindfield Group now for about 7 months, Sophie’s role is to provide all the sourcing for their clients’ salaried positions. She supports 2 recruiters and works with one other sourcer who provides the sourcing for all of the hourly positions they work on. She has supported up to 5 recruiters in the past. Sophie sources for positions from Customer Service Reps to PHP Programmers and Senior Accountants.
In order to be successful in her position, Sophie enjoys using social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook together. She believes that if you can find someone on both of these sites you likely have accurate information to go on. Other favorites include User Groups (Google, Yahoo) for more technical/software roles. She finds qualified candidates through these avenues, especially if access to the user group mailing list is available.
Like others are starting to see as well, Sophie realizes how much marketing is involved in sourcing and having to market open roles to candidates to attract their interest. The advertising for the role has to be specific to the target candidates you want to attract to the role. Sophie always wanted to be involved in corporate side of marketing a business, but she is finding that marketing from the candidate side is even more interesting because the message always changes. She says, “You always have to think on your toes to change the message to different industries and target groups.”
In the short amount of time that Sophie has been with Mindfield, she has contributed greatly to the streamlining of the sourcing process. Before she joined the company, there was no solid way of tracking sourcing for each role, what has been completed, what needs to be reposted, where passive candidates can be found, if these places have been looked into, etc. Sophie started out tracking her sourcing efforts in an excel spreadsheet, moved to what she calls sourcing guides that track each place she posts, when, how often, how much it costs, etc. She also created alerts for herself so she knows when anything needs to be reposted. Basically, she created organization around the process for sourcing for a new role and how all the information is collected and tracked.
With any position come some challenges. Sophie finds receiving applications or inquiries from interested candidates that haven’t clearly read the job description to be frustrating. She overcomes this frustration by taking the time to think about how she can give them constructive advice for future job applications and correspondence, and then responding to them. She also finds it frustrating working on a difficult role and not being able to the find the right candidates or the right places to find quality people with whom to network. The way she has been able to overcome this on a daily basis is to reach out to the recruiters and managers with whom she works at MindField Group for their insight, as well as resources like ERE, utilizing its many Groups and Forums for ideas and places she never would have thought to look.
A best practice that Sophie sticks to is ensuring every candidate that either comes into the system or into her mailbox for any reason (applying for a job, sending a general resume, inquiries, etc) ALWAYS receives a personalized reply. She realizes that if she were on the other end she would not appreciate feeling like a number or wondering if she was emailing a real person or not. It’s fairly simple: treat people the way you would want to be treated.
Outside of work, Sophie enjoys snowboarding, reading, and writing/poetry.
Sophie encourages everyone to check out The MindField Group’s ReThink Recruiting Blog, written by Mindfield’s CEO, Cameron Laker, which provides some really interesting articles and insight on the recruiting industry.
Connect with Sophie Beaudoin: