When today’s job candidate seeks a new opportunity or simply surveys the employment landscape, they use search engines, social networks and personal connections to find the best places to work. Many candidates start the process on a search engine, and as we have seen, search engines are the gateway to social media since they index social mentions.

Organizations have responded by establishing a presence on some or all of the major social platforms. To get the full value from their social media efforts, companies need a strategic approach and an understanding of where to focus their efforts.

Are you prepared to succeed and stand out from the competition with your social strategy? Below is a list of the common mistakes companies make on social platforms. Ask yourself if you’re making any of these critical errors. If the answer is yes, it’s time to rethink your digital strategy.

Put up or shut up

In the film, A Field of Dreams, the idea was “if you build it, they will come.” However, in social media and digital recruitment, “if you build it, they won’t come” – unless you drive people there (but that’s a different conversation). The real question is: Will they come back? The social experience is about sustainable engagement – getting people to interact with your brand whether they’re communicating directly with your organization or carrying your messages and job opportunities forward to their personal networks. The value of social media isn’t just in getting found, but in what people discover when they visit your career site, Facebook page or Twitter stream. With so much competition from multiple platforms, personal posts and the general abundance of digital information, you’ll lose your audience if returning users see the same content they saw during a previous visit.

Pro-tip: Commit to keeping content fresh. Include new images, videos and updated copy and seek opportunities to interact with your audience.

Forget the “Spaghetti Method”

Throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks is a recipe for failure. If you’re basing your social strategy on it, you’re doing it wrong. Instead of rushing to put up a presence on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc., think carefully about your audience and the platforms they are using. While Pinterest may be the “new shiny thing,” it won’t prove effective when sourcing for talent if your audience isn’t using it for their job search (and they might be). Wasting time and energy on the wrong platforms won’t advance your cause. Always ask yourself these two questions: “Who are we trying to reach?” and “What do we want them to do?”

Pro-tip: It’s better to have a narrow focus and get it right.

Be in it to win it

Many organizations make the mistake of not defining their goals. Are you looking to create employment brand awareness? Gain market intelligence? Increase traffic to your website? Encourage individuals to like your page, comment on your posts or share jobs with their friends? Achieving ROI requires defining success metrics upfront so you can measure against them.

Pro-tip: Understand the end-goal so time and resources are aligned with business priorities.

Frozen by fear

Fear keeps many organizations from allowing employees to post on the company’s behalf, but this is shortsighted. Organizations that don’t open up and get employees engaged in the social space are missing a huge opportunity. Third-party endorsement – especially from individuals who know the company and its culture – is extremely powerful. Employee-generated referrals can produce candidates who are a better cultural fit and tend to have higher retention levels. So, it makes sense to conquer the fear and use your employee network to competitive advantage.

Pro-tip: Update your social media policy and activate your internal workforce to serve as brand ambassadors to find right-fit talent faster.

When U.S. college students and recent grads go looking for a job, they want quick answers, trustworthy insights, and evidence the employers know how to use the various social media channels to add value to their search.

So says PotentialPark, a Swedish recruitment market research firm. Its annual survey (U.S. results were not posted as of this writing) of 3,552 U.S. college students and recent grads found young job seekers are comfortable with social media and expect that you will be too. While 86 percent of them make use of company career sites, more than half (56 percent) expect to find a company on Facebook, and 69 percent expect you to be on LinkedIn.

What PotentialPark found when it audited the corporate career sites of almost 500 U.S. firms was that only 57 percent link to their Facebook page; 79 percent connect to LinkedIn or some other professional network. The career site itself, says PotentialPark, “rarely offers any interaction.”

That’s a mistake, considering 61 percent of the young job seekers say their reason for interacting with employers online is to get in touch with recruiters. (Other reasons that ranked almost as high were: finding interesting jobs (60 percent); building their professional network (55 percent); and, getting realistic insights and interesting background information (51 percent).

“No matter which channels they use,” says PotentialPark, “jobseekers want to find relevant information quickly and easily with no time wasted searching. Customized, target job offers (opportunities), email job alerts, and a way to track the status of their applications are high on their wish list.”

Says Julian Ziesing, head of research at PotentialPark, “Jobseekers in the U.S. have gone multi-channel. The question is, ‘Can employers keep up?’”

The answer is that some can. According to PotentialPark’s detailed analysis of 117 top employers, Accenture ranks at the top in online recruitment communication. It not only has the best career site, Accenture has the best mobile presence, and ranked 10th for its Facebook efforts. It’s on Twitter, has a career blog, and its LinkedIn presence includes employee testimonials, a video, and career path information for its global operations.

Accenture and several of the other companies that made PotentialPark’s top 30 list also appear on lists of companies rated for Europe, the U.K., France, and Germany. What they all have in common, says the market research firm, is that they learned from experience. “They have gone through a learning process that typically involves trial and error,” says PotentialPark.

They design their efforts from a job seeker’s point of view, leveraging the attributes of each channel for maximum value.

Much of what PotentialPark’s young job seekers said was important to them is echoed in a report on the candidate experience, issued last month by the Talent Board. The non-profit group of prominent recruiting industry leaders, manages the Candidate Experience Awards, which recognizes employers practicing “exceptional and exemplary recruiting, and hiring methods.”

Some of the companies on PotentialPark’s top 30 also earned recognition for their candidate experience. These include addidas, PepsiCo, Deloitte, and General Mills.

After reviewing some 11,700 candidate surveys, submitted by some two dozen employers, the Talent Board found the company career site was the only channel used by a majority of candidates. Direct contact, either via phone calls or email, was a primary communication channel for job seekers. LinkedIn was the most commonly used social media platform. Job seekers went their primarily for research, not for specific positions.

The whitepaper from the Talent Board goes into much more detail about the entire job seeker experience, including what happened when they submitted an application. (Some 40 percent reported hearing nothing.)

TalentBin officially launched from private beta to public yesterday. The service, which bills itself as a talent search engine, announced via press release that it “just turned the entire professional web into the largest talent sourcing database known to mankind with its public launch.”

If you’ll excuse the bravado, what TalentBin is trying to do is actually quite impressive and has leaped forward since I saw the beginnings of their private beta at the HR Technology Conference last October.

What they are trying to do is fairly simple: create a searchable database that merges information about a person from all over the web into a single profile so that sourcers can get all of the information about them in one, digestible place.

Pre-launch reviews were strong

When TalentBin quietly went into private beta, several prominent folks got an opportunity to use the product hands-on. And the reviews from those people were strong.

Megan Hopkins wrote here on SourceCon a few months ago that, “in the four months I’ve been using TalentBin, I’ve located, extended offers to, and hired nearly a half-dozen candidates (all top notch engineering and design professionals) and my pipeline is robust with killer talent that will, at some point, be looking for a new company to join.” She adds, “In terms of time, it took me a fraction of the time it used to take me, allowing me to be so much more efficient and contribute more to my employer. And, it saved us money — the ultimate ROI.”

Irina Shamaeva wrote on her Boolean String blog last November, “TalentBin is one example of a sourcing product that has a potential to become the Dream Software.” She concluded, “if you have a sourcing budget, I do recommend checking TalentBin out.”

Also in the press release is a customer list that includes companies like Groupon, Intuit and Yahoo.

Profiles built based on implicit data from 30+ sources

In talking with TalentBin co-founder Peter Kazanjy, he said that TalentBin has expanded its reach since its beta launch last year. “We’re now using over 30+ sources from the open web,” said Kazanjy yesterday by phone. “We’re going whole hog on creating an implicit database of potential candidates.”

Kazanjy explained that the implicit database they are building is better than competing search tools by LinkedIn or job boards because it takes in information people are creating elsewhere. He used the example of software engineers who may have a terrible LinkedIn profile and no (or a severely outdated) resume on a job board but have been active on Twitter or Quora or even specialty sites like GitHub or Stack Overflow. They use contextual clues from what the person tweets or works on based on less traditional sources of data and compile it all into a single profile.

Like LinkedIn, the bigger your network, the better your reach will be. That’s why TalentBin focuses very heavily on having your co-workers connect to your TalentBin so you can search resumes from their networks.

Added Chrome plugin and API access

One of the things that launched with their move from private beta to public was the addition of a Google Chrome plugin that allows you to have easy access to the consolidated profiles TalentBin offers when you’re cruising social networks. As an example, if you bring up my Twitter profile and click on the TalentBin plugin, you’ll get this:

That has a link to all of my social profiles as well as my contributions on websites like SourceCon and ERE. And even with a basic account, you can find a lot of information about me (and potential ways of getting in touch as well).

Kazanjy also said his company also added API access to the platform for the public release. “One of the things we heard from our [beta] customers is that they would love it if this could be integrated into their ATS,” he said. “This is a first step.”

The product itself still has some rough edges. Most of my tech contacts are admittedly based in the Northwest and while I wouldn’t call it a representative sample, TalentBin didn’t have some of these people in their system. As Kazanjy said, “If you’re looking for someone in Iowa, you’re probably not going to find a lot right now.” Indeed, it seems the further away you are from a technical background (or from Silicon Valley), the less chance there is that a profile will be in the system. He claims they are continuing to expand the number of profiles but they started with technical talent since that’s where the greatest need is at right now.

Pricing is on a sort of seats-based, freemium model. Kazanjy said they are debuting with a $4,800 per seat/per year price point for the full version of their product. He said that’s about half of what LinkedIn Recruiter costs.

How do you approach outbound messaging? Are you in the “spray and pray” camp? Are you spending upwards of an hour crafting that perfect email only to find that it gets no response? We’ve spoken with hundreds of recruiters in the last year and have distilled what we’ve heard about what’s working into five tips:

Tip #1: “Go custom.”

If you’re sending form emails to people, the odds of success are low. It might even reflect poorly on your company’s brand. Many in-demand people get dozens or even hundreds of these messages every month. There’s nothing wrong with templates but there is a better way.

Going custom involves crafting an email that makes it looks at though you spent more than 30 seconds checking out the person who you’re contacting. You should plan to use some sort of tool that aggregates data across multiple sites (e.g. Entelo, Gist, Rapportive, Xobni) to give yourself the best chance at standing out in the noise.

Tip #2: Multiple channels for maximum effectiveness.

For the vast majority of candidates, you can discover multiple routes to get to them. Perhaps you have an email address or a LinkedIn profile. Or maybe a phone number or even someone in your company knows the person. Here’s the important part: don’t just reach out to a candidate through one channel.

Different channels will have different levels of effectiveness for a given candidate. Some people will be very responsive on email because, after all, it’s email. But others won’t be because if they get an email from you, it might not be clear who you are immediately and it’s easier to just hit delete than to do that research. So a LinkedIn InMail might be more effective for that individual.

But no more than two channels! Otherwise you could just come off as stalker-ish.

Tip #3: Shorter is better.

Nowadays, a lot of email gets read on mobile devices. The longer the message, the more someone has to scroll. The more they have to scroll, the higher the likelihood they will just hit delete. Think about that when crafting your emails. How can you convey the most important information in the fewest number of words.

As much as possible, focus on the candidate. Many companies send over long missives about how awesome they are. Funding, accolades, metrics, etc. If you instead shift the focus back on the candidate (see Tip #1) you’ll find response rates improving.

Tip #4: Experiment with timing.

There are going to be better and worse times to send out messages to people depending on what industry you are sourcing in. When it comes to reaching busy executives, the best times tend to be before 9 AM (their local time of course) and after 5 PM on weekdays. Mondays and Fridays tend to be bad but weekends actually can be pretty good.

If you’re trying to reach out to engineers, think about when they are most likely to be responsive. A lot of engineers are night owls so reaching out to them late at night may actually work better in some circumstances. And if you don’t want to stay up late to send an email don’t worry, Outlook can be set to send emails at a certain time and if you’re using GMail, tools like Boomerang and Streak allow you to schedule emails to go out whenever you’d like.

Tip #5: Manage your outreach and interactions.

Most companies, and almost all startups, don’t do this well. They’ll send an email to a candidate and have no record of who they’ve reached out to and when. Then, a few months later they’re looking to fill a position and they come across a very promising candidate and the immediate thought is “Did I email this person already?”

What do you want to track? Track every time you send an email or make a phone call. If you get a response from the candidate, track that too. Pay particularly close attention to anything that might indicate future availability. For example, often a candidate will say something like “I’m good for now but might start looking for something at the end of the year.” That’s a perfect opportunity to set up a follow-up task to check in again in the future.

We hope these tips are helpful as you are reaching out to candidates. While the process of reaching out is never easy, it can be made easier with some simple adjustments to your workflow.

A report in Reuters has indicated that LinkedIn is among a handful of potential companies expressing interest in purchasing all or some of Monster Worldwide. According to sources close to the situation, LinkedIn and Silver Lake Partners are two of “a broad range of strategic and financial buyers” who are weighing Monster as a potential acquisition target.

According to the report, the company plans to send out more detailed financial information by the end of next week to potential buyers.

Monster Worldwide shares are up over 15% in late day trading in reaction to the report.

Back in March, Monster CEO and Board Chairman Sal Iannuzzi said, “At a certain price, anything’s for sale.” As to the buyer, Iannuzzi told Bloomberg it is less important and he said at the time, “The real issue is we know we have value, and we know we can go around and look for opportunities to get that.”

That was before a rare bright spot for the company in recent months.

Two weeks ago, Monster released it’s first quarter results that doubled analyst’s earnings expectations. That too sent shares soaring but only for a short time.

An acquisition by LinkedIn has been rumored (fairly unsubstantially I might add) as Monster’s stock price continued to deflate. The social network for professionals competes directly with some of Monster’s products (notably the job posting and resume search business) but some Monster’s other technologies like the semantic search product SeeMore and Facebook networking platform BeKnown might be an attractive piece in addition to an influx new customers.

So when are the best times to post content to social networks (especially content you want clicked on)? It seems like a big question that should have a fairly straightforward answer.

Maybe you’ve done the click tracking on your own. You’ve found the sweet spot for when you post that gets the maximum level of engagement and impressions. But many people haven’t (or they have the data but have a hard time analyzing it and understanding it over the aggregate).

Well link sharing service bitly has some answers over a fairly huge data set that they recently shared.

The afternoon is the right time

Average Clicks Per Link On Twitter. Darker blue = more clicks. Monday is day 0 and all times are in EST (image source: bitly)

Bitly had a great blog post this week that showed some of the best times to post on social networks. For both Twitter and Facebook, afternoon EST is the best time to post. Over the aggregate of all bitly links, pushing your posts to after Noon to 1pm EST will generally result in the best number of clicks. Logically, that seems to make sense. Almost all of the timezones in the US are up at that point and then traffic slowly tails off after 5pm EST until 8-10pm EST.

Average Clicks Per Link On Facebook. Darker blue = more clicks. Monday is day 0 and all times are in EST (image source: bitly)

Facebook is slightly different with the stronger times times perhaps being pushed back a little further in the afternoon. You’ll notice that most of the click activity tends to take place in a much smaller and less uniform manner than the clicks on Twitter. And maybe more surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be as strong of a night crowd on Facebook. In fact, it pretty much drops off completely after 8pm EST.

The post also covered Tumblr and you can check that information out there. I’d be curious to see if LinkedIn followed the same model as Twitter or Facebook

A couple of thoughts about both charts

One of the more interesting things is the fact that so many people are using social media during the work day (and by this measure, interacting with that content by clicking on links). The fact that there is generally less traffic on Fridays than the rest of the weekdays and that traffic just flat out dies on the weekends is indicative of how embedded it is in to many people’s work day.

Does jobs related content get consumed the same way as general content? Not necessarily. In fact, I’m guessing at least a portion of it is getting pushed to the fringes. But certainly a lot of people are viewing this content on work machines and others, those with perhaps more restrictive social media policies, are looking at that content via their mobile devices during the day.

Those who advocate making their content mobile capable and having a way for more passive candidates to interact with your talent acquisition team are probably nodding along with me on this one. While a lot of the hardcore employment activity is still pushed into the margins of the workday or into the evening and weekends (things like actively searching for and applying for jobs), the times when people are engaging with content via social networks is during the prime of the workday.

The lesson here is not only knowing about when you should be posting but also what sort of content is going to be appealing to those who are probably viewing it from work or on a mobile device.

I said it often over at our sister publication TLNT: social media is an extension of the way we build relationships. Sure, it might change a few of the dynamics or the ease of which those relationships can be had. But many of the same principles that make people successful at building relationships and getting things done in real life are the same ones that are successful online.

Social media is a game changer in many ways but it is still hard to game human nature and ability. And when it is blamed for something that was going on before its time, there’s usually a counter-story there.

That’s why I was a bit amused when I saw an article saying that social media has enabled the poaching of employees.

Poaching employees made easier?

In a story by The Sydney Morning Herald, it paints sourcers and recruiters like you as the bad guys taking advantage of technology like social media to recruit candidates. How dare you:

Your best employees are most at risk of being poached by competitors under the new rules of the modernising economy.

That’s because changes in the workplace, growth of technology and the rise of social media now allow employers to cultivate relationships with prospective employees – even while they’re on your payroll.

The preference to recruit employed candidates, rather than those out of work, highlights the risk of a raid on your company’s talent pool.

I don’t have to mention that this has been happening for a long time. And by this, I mean poaching employees in general, not just poaching employees via social media.

Did we forget about the headhunters?

Those who can remember a time before the internet know that sourcing and recruiting of employed individuals happened long before the invent of social media. Whether it be a direct phone call off an industry list or perhaps pushing your network to give up names of people to talk to about an opening, in particularly critical positions, direct sourcing (or poaching) looked pretty similar to what it does today. At least in practice.

I remember hearing stories of headhunters doing anything they could to get a conversation with the top people in a competitor’s business. One person said he often called pretending to be an associate he was closing a business deal with only to reveal the true nature of the call when he finally got through.

This sort of direct contact happened all of the time, under the boss’s nose.

The audacity of connection

One other thing the piece suggested was the fact employees are building relationships with potential employers via social media.

Unfortunately, it also fails to mention that networking has been happening for ages. Industry groups, local business meetings and Rotary have been part of that landscape for years. Those meetings fostered relationships that built business deals and also landed more than their fair share of jobs.

Now, very few people see these networking groups as a risk (in fact, many employers encourage their employees to take part in these associations), so you have to wonder what is really so different about social media?

Ah, yes. The passive candidate trap.

When passive really isn’t passive

Maybe the biggest change that social media brings is that it is easier to mark yourself as a passive candidate than in the years before the internet. You can quietly network for a new position and accept offers to talk about new opportunities without raising anyone’s suspicions.

But employed doesn’t mean passive. Employed means employed and that comes with its own set of hurdles, but to compare anyone who is employed (but who may, more or less, be looking around for other opportunities) to truly passive candidates doesn’t really belong.

There’s nothing wrong with sourcing a slate of a wide variety of candidates in different job statuses (from active and unemployed, to passive and happily employed) but to say that anyone employed is passive is not accurate.

Ease, but for everyone

Of course, the problem now is the fact that it is relatively easy to find people online. A quality person with a visible social media profile is probably getting contacted. Frequently. Even very happy employees in the super passive category.

So while that might be some of the risk of social media, it is also an advantage. A good sourcing team can strike back using the same resources. And those who are skilled beyond the basics can further differentiate yourselves by finding people who aren’t found easily using a search on LinkedIn.

Sometimes sourcing is done by phone or by e-mail. I even had someone tell me they mailed the person a letter because that’s all they had. And sometimes it is by social media. It’s been happening for a long time and it won’t stop, even if this whole social media fad finally passes over.

Google continues to make changes to the way it searches the web. Every month, they release a search quality highlights post that explains the changes in more general terms. That’s better than the alternative. Previously, sourcers would just stumble upon a new feature that was rolled out and never announced. That being said, it isn’t always exactly clear how much of a change was made or how to utilize the new search function.

We’ll try to pick the updates that are most applicable to sourcers and, when possible, let you know how to best utilize the new changes.

First up, Google’s index is a lot bigger now.

Google’s index increases by 15%

Probably the biggest news is that Google increased the size of their index last month:

Increase base index size by 15%. [project codename "Indexing"] The base search index is our main index for serving search results and every query that comes into Google is matched against this index. This change increases the number of documents served by that index by 15%. *Note: We’re constantly tuning the size of our different indexes and changes may not always appear in these blog posts.

While Google may not mention every time they update the size of their index, they obviously figured it was a big enough deal to publish in their highlights this time.

WorldWideWebSize.com (a site which tries to independently extrapolate the size of the indexed web) shows that while the index did increase in size, it wasn’t much beyond the high index points over the last year. It should also be noted that both Bing and Yahoo have shown a significant increase in index size in recent weeks but still fall well short of reported index highs over the last year as well.

Assuming we take Google at its word and they have increased their index that significantly, that’s good news for sourcers. Unfortunately, we also know that those results from outlier sources are sometimes awfully hard to find. And if they weren’t in the base index to begin with, I have to wonder exactly how often it could impact search results?

Domain diversity in results

When you aren’t searching a specific site, you might have an issue with the same site popping up in your search results over and over again. Without suppressing the specific site, you’ll be wading through them to find what you’re looking for. Google hopes to alleviate that:

More domain diversity. [launch codename "Horde", project codename "Domain Crowding"] Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains.

This seems to be good news for sourcers but we’ll see how it plays out. Certainly though, it is easier to focus in on a particular site once you’ve found it than to try to ignore a dozen or sites that might pop up over and over again that you’d like to suppress a bit more.

A couple of other updates of interest

Since Google updated 52 items this time around, not all of them are applicable to sourcers but a few could tint your search results slightly, too:

• Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. [launch codename "Bi02sw41"] One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you’re searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.
• Improvement in a freshness signal. [launch codename "citron", project codename "Freshness"] This change is a minor improvement to one of the freshness signals which helps to better identify fresh documents.
• Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.

As always, if search is part of your primary sourcing strategy, I recommend you take a look at the full rundown of the list of changes Google makes every month and follow the Inside Search blog.

LinkedIn served up a double surprise today, reporting it grew revenue in the first quarter by 101 percent, and buying content sharing site SlideShare.

Minutes after the markets closed in New York, LinkedIn made the two announcements, sending its already pricey shares up almost 10 percent in after-hours trading. The stock, which closed the day at $109.41, hit $119.80 after the reports were out.

LinkedIn said the SlideShare purchase is worth about $118.75 million, to be paid in a combination of stock and cash. Like LinkedIn, SlideShare is widely used by businesses and professionals, who use it to host their PowerPoint, documents, and other presentations. Users upload their materials, which can then be shared, and viewed in much the same way videos are on YouTube.

“Presentations, said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, “are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity.” The SlideShare acquisition aligns “perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission.”

For the first quarter, the company reported earning 15 cents a share (after allowances for certain exclusions) on revenue of $188.5 million. Analysts were expecting 9 cents a share and revenue of $178.58 million. It was the seventh straight quarter in which revenue doubled.

Employment is the company’s cash cow, accounting for 54.4 percent of the first quarter revenue. The $102.6 million attributed to recruitment and job postings is 121 percent higher than in the same quarter last year. In the first quarter, LinkedIn added 1,200 new customers.

During a conference call with investors and financial analysts, Weiner and CFO Steve Sordello said employment is the company’s fastest growing sector and that mobile usage continues to grow more quickly than other services. Weiner said during the question-and-answer period that mobile users are also increasing their engagement with the site.

The SlideShare purchase seems intended primarily to grow user engagement. With 29 million unique monthly visitors and some 7.4 million presentations, SlideShare’s reach is broad. The presentations are embedded in more than 1.4 million Internet sites, and have been shared across LinkedIn and other social networks.

Primarily a free site with a premium service level, SlideShare is not expected to add much to LinkedIn’s overall revenue. Sordello told analysts its revenue contribution is “really immaterial.”

Looking ahead, Sordello raised LinkedIn’s revenue expectations, saying it anticipated revenue of $880-$900 million for the year. For the current quarter, revenue is projected in the $210-$215 million range. That takes into account, he said, the “worsening condition of the European market.”

Global operations are becoming an increasingly important part of LinkedIn’s success. While the U.S. provided $121 million of the company’s income, Europe accounted for $43 million, which was more than double the $20 million in Q1 of last year.

Weiner said 61 percent of LinkedIn’s new members — it now has 161 million total — come from international markets.

Even if you don’t pay close attention to NFL football, you might have heard that Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck was drafted by the Indianapolis Colts with the first pick of the 2012 draft last week.

What you probably didn’t realize is the 252 picks later, the Colts selected another quarterback (this time from Northern Illinois University) named Chandler Harnish. As the last pick in the seven round draft, Harnish is dubbed “Mr. Irrelevant.” Since those selected in the later rounds get little press coverage, being the last pick of the bunch surely feels fairly irrelevant.

The more important lesson is actually how very relevant sourcing and choosing the right person for that position can be.

Mr. Irrelevant is still probably really, really good

Just for context’s sake, there are nearly 1,700 football players on rosters in the NFL at any given time. And out of the 250 or so that are drafted from the college ranks every year, there are thousands who never get a glimpse at the professional playing field.

So even though Chandler Harnish may have not had the skills to be a top pick, that doesn’t mean there weren’t still teams interested in him as he explained in an interview with NFL.com:

I was getting calls from like the Kansas City Chiefs, the Tennessee Titans, St. Louis Rams, Oakland Raiders, just a bunch of teams were (calling) — and I’m talking to my agent every three minutes,” Harnish explains.“It looked like we were about ready to set up a free agency deal. I was ready to go to San Diego. …

“They wanted the decision 10 minutes after they could put the deal on the table, and this was still at pick 240,” Harnish says. “So there were still 13 picks to go. And they put the deal on the table that they wanted me to be a free agent and I had to say ‘yes’ to it. … We tell San Diego we want that deal. Well, my agent tells the Colts, ‘Hey, he’s going to San Diego if you guys don’t draft him with your last pick.’ So, because of that, the Colts were like, ‘We want him. We want to take him before he goes to free agency, and then he goes to San Diego.’”

And why shouldn’t they be calling? Harnish set 30 different records at Northern Illinois. He was very good.

You probably need Mr. Irrelevant talent too

The real secret is that with such large roster sizes (53 per team), teams need these players who maybe aren’t as highly rated or game changing, but can still play a solid game or be a backup for a star. And with only so much in salary space per team, getting a good value in the lower rounds is essential to having a balanced roster and having a team that can compete.

For someone who is as thoroughly obsessed with talent acquisition as I am, those lower rounds are way more fascinating than the top rounds. The first round or two have been analyzed over and over by TV personalities and internet sites. When you get into the later rounds, you see players that, as job candidates, we might be more accustomed to seeing in a day-to-day hiring process. They might have been a top performer at their last job but it isn’t the no brainer that a first round pick should be.

NFL teams that have done consistently well also do well at picking up good talent in later rounds of the draft and even among undrafted players after the draft is over.

Sourcing excellence, top to bottom

It speaks to the consistency and importance of the sourcing and recruiting function beyond just top hires. It might be tempting to spend an inordinate amount of time on a VP of marketing rather than the marketing associate that you seem to always have an opening or two for all of the time.

While it would be crazy to suggest you spend the same amount of time on sourcing a VP candidate as you would an associate, great organizations, like great football teams, do a fantastic job of making great hires at all levels of their organization. While you may get the props and kudos for finding the big fish, knowing that you created a solid slate for the Mr. (or Ms.) Not-So-Irrelevant positions in your organization is a long term difference maker.