If you are one of those recruiters that uses a keyword search resume bot in conjunction with a mass email to every result that gets returned, you are NOT a recruiter, you are not a sourcer, you are not a Talent Acquisition Specialist. You are a phisher, also colloquially known as a SPAMMER.

There was a firestorm this week on one of my online moderated discussion lists (technology focused). We have a free job posting page, where any recruiter or hiring manager can post their job description, contact info, and application information. What started the whole “discussion” was this message:

Job Description: Hi, I Hope you are doing well. This is with reference to your resume posted on job Portal. I came across your profile and want to let you know about an opportunity we have that I think you might be interested in. We have a following contract opening with our client. Please go through the job description that has been attached below, and if available and interested, please send me your Resume in word format ASAP. (Also, do not forget to send the details that have been asked in the end). Note:- Please ignore this email if you are already working with , Inc.,  Our client or our Recruiters.

Now, keep in mind that the recruiter in question provided his full contact information (name, email address, employer). This message was regarding a job with a client as a Business Development Manager. It went on to describe the position in some detail.  But it never discussed the client in question, and at the end (“…do not forget to send the details that have asked in the end…”) the “phishing expedition” began.

**Need to know the following details to expedite the process*****

• What is your current location? :
• Are you currently on a project, If Yes-Why you are looking for new project?
• Define your job position you are looking for more clearly:
• Are you willing to be flexible to work in technology or areas that you are not familiar with?
• Have you had any current interview experience lately: If yes, please let me know Client name, interview date, Feedback or expected Feedback?
• Are you Willing to Relocate?:
• Availability (earliest date you can start)? :
• Your Work Authorization?:
• Current Salary and Expected Salary?:
• What is the best number you can be reached at? :
• Give me your employer details:
• Two References Details (Must) with Name of the person, Company name, Phone

As if that isn’t bad enough, on the Sourcer Guild Yahoo Group, I consistently see the same person posting a similar message whenever a true Sourcing  job announcement comes across:

“I have used virtual folks equipped with Monster, CB, and DICE licenses who can do this and internet searching for $6.25/hr. They will provide you with up to 150 resumes/week for 1-15 openings, and offer a free trial… However, some companies may prefer to spend 5-8x as much to get almost as much work done by a person onsite- which is their right.”

With practices such as this, it’s no wonder that sourcing as a profession is not well understood, or why so many recruiters don’t know HOW to source effectively. As a very visible recruiter in the community (for over a year and a half I had a career advice column on the Seattle Times NWJobs section, and my job seeker-focused blog gets a few thousand hits a week), I get the same questions from job seekers over and over. “Is this legitimate? How do I deal with these sorts of mails?”  I understand that there are tens of thousands of unemployed professionals out there, and I am happy to provide a resource for them. But when it comes to my own profession, I’ve got to tell you these are just the sorts of practices that A) give recruiters a bad name B) contribute the the still high unemployment rate in HR and Recruiting across the US.

What gets me especially steamed? The “virtual folks” for $6.25/hour. Let’s think about this: the DOL tells me that “the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009.” So the obvious conclusion I’m reaching is that these “virtual folks” are an off-shored, resume farming operation. It reminds me of puppy mills. Far be it from me to stifle a global economy, but if recruiters support this sort of resume generation and justify phishing as a valid “sourcing” model, then all we are doing is shooting ourselves in the proverbial foot when it comes to career development and industry respect.

If you cannot  be bothered to read the resumes your bot sorts before sending out an email, go into the email marketing business and leave sourcing to those of us that want to be RECRUITERS.

I know many of our readers have been waiting with bated breath for this announcement. You’ve been clicking refresh on your browser. Or perhaps you’ve been waiting for the announcement to leak out via Twitter.

Well, the wait is over. The new editor is me, Lance Haun, former Community Director and Contributing Editor at ERE Media (SourceCon’s parent company).

For a community full of sourcers, that should be enough, right? Perhaps, but let’s at least get an official story out there.

About Me

For the last two years, I’ve been with ERE Media as their Community Director and in the last year and a half, I’ve also served as a contributing editor for our HR publication TLNT as well as programming the Recruiting Innovation Summit.

Before ERE, I cut my teeth first in recruiting, then in HR for about seven years. I’ve headed up some interesting requisitions in my day (I can’t tell you how many times I answered “Yes, Walla Walla is a real place, with real jobs”). Some of those reqs were helped along by great sourcing partners. Others, I wished I had great sourcing partners to rely on. In short, I have a deep appreciation for how much a good sourcer could help me close my reqs better and faster.

In the last few years, I’ve become a tad obsessed with sharing useful information that elevates and educates people who share my passion for talent acquisition and development. I hope to bring both my experience as an editor and conference programmer, my background in the staffing world, as well as growing my existing relationships with sourcers to my role as editor.

Enough about me, though.

Continuing commitment to the SourceCon community

Knowing Amybeth even before her time at ERE, I knew it would be tough to replace her in this role if it ever came down to it. And now that I’m here, there are some big shoes to fill. But she’s also done a lot to make sure that SourceCon continues on its current successful trajectory.

My commitment to you is simple:

• Continue to see the SourceCon community grow and share information
• Bring to light stories that impact your world
• Make sure we have a publication and conference you can be proud to be a part of
• Listen to feedback as well as the challenges you are facing
• Meet the folks I don’t know and continuing the relationships with the ones I do
• Have a little fun (is that okay?)

SourceCon is my job and there are many moving pieces but the focus is always on where I can best serve our community.

If you want to connect with me, I am always happy to do so. The best way to do that is by e-mail (lance@ere.net) or phone (call/text: 503-840-8832). If you want to go wild, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook too. And of course, if you are interested in writing for or speaking at SourceCon, I’ll take your call too.

After two years of looking internally to fill vacancies, companies in 2011 again began to hire new workers, relying on referrals and job boards for nearly 50 percent of their external hires.

Social media, though it accounted for only 3.5 percent of those external hires, evidences a much greater impact on hiring than the numbers would suggest, influencing candidates whose hiring ends up being attributed to other sources.

These are but a few of the findings in the just released 2012 CareerXroads Sources of Hire survey. Conducted now for a decade by the talent consultancy of Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, the annual survey queries the recruiting leaders of America’s largest companies about where they source the hires they make. Additional questions touch on emerging trends.

While Crispin and Mehler caution that the results reflect only the hiring practices of the participating companies, the survey has come to be an industry standard, occupying the top Google results for “source of hire,” and is one of the tools recruiters use in developing their own recruiting strategy.

This year’s survey found that in 2011 the 36 participating companies, which collectively have 1.2 million employees, filled 59 percent of their 213,375 openings externally. It’s a dramatic change from the last two years when half the openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions.

The 18.5 percent drop from 2010, says Crispin, “helps to confirm we are coming out of a recession. It confirms the data we’ve seen this last year.” Still far below 2007 when 72 percent of hires came from outside — “a very hot year,” he notes — it now “looks like we’re getting back to the historic balance.”

Where companies find their new workers hasn’t been changed by either the recession or the recent economic improvement. Referrals accounted for 28 percent of the external hires last year, a percentage largely unchanged over the years. As big a number as that is, it’s probably an undercount, says Crispin.

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Somewhat more volatile — the likely result of more sophisticated tracking — is the percentage of hires coming from job boards. Last year, workers who first applied via a job board were 20.1 percent of the external hires.

Like the referral count, job boards almost certainly should be credited with a larger role in hiring.

“In many, maybe most, hiring, there are multiple influencers,” says Crispin. “The companies are getting better at tracking, but there are more things going on than are trackable.”

A few weeks ago, CareerXroads published a survey on employee referral practices, which suggested that referrals have a much greater impact than the direct counts suggest.

In the source of hire survey, Crispin and Mehler asked recruiting leaders their opinion on the influence of some recruiting channels. As they anticipated, referrals, social media, company career sites, and job boards (among other channels) are believed by the responding leaders to play reciprocal and influencing roles in the recruiting process.

“These are all underlying influencers. They don’t necessarily funnel candidates, but they help lead them to next steps,” says Cripsin, offering this scenario:

A job seeker goes to a job board and sees a job at a company where they previous worked. Now the job board has alerted somebody who used to work there. They go to the company site, because that’s where the posting sends them. But they call a friend who still works there, and the friend makes a referral, because the company pays a bonus.

The source of hire gets listed as ‘referral.’

A job board, says Crispin, “is really a lead; an alert. What do you do with an alert? You go back to the career (center) board.” So, he adds, even though the survey attributes 9.8 percent of the hires to company career sites, “most of them got there some other way. That’s why we asked about the influencers.”

Recruiting leaders told Crispin and Mehler that they believe social media, like job boards, plays a role in many of the sources of hire. For instance, 75 percent of the respondents say job boards influence the hires attributed to company career sites. Social media also exerts an influence on the career sites, say 62.5 percents of the respondents. And, as in Crispin’s scenario, career sites, social media, and job boards influence referrals.

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Of the job boards the survey asked about, Indeed and CareerBuilder turned out to be the most effective. A third of the respondents said CareerBuilder yields between 25 and 50 percent of their job board hires; 9.1 percent said they get as many as 75 percent of their job board hires there.

Indeed, which aggregates jobs from tens of thousands of sites, was every bit as strong a source of job board hires; 32.2 percent of the recruiting leaders reported the site yielded 25-50 percent of their job board hires. Cumulatively, just under 84 percent of the respondents said they got from 1-50 percent of their job board hires from Indeed.

Dice, a niche site specializing in IT positions, was also a strong source of hires, with 58.6 percent of the companies filling up to 10 percent of their positions from Dice. Even Craigslist, a highly local listings site, was cited as a source of hire by nearly 50 percent of the respondents.

Many, perhaps even most, of the hires coming from job boards are the result of job seekers applying to ads. More than two-thirds of the respondents (68.6 percent) said more hires are made from postings than from resume searching. Only 5.7 percent said they make more hires by searching the resume database than by posting jobs.

That’s a significant difference from how recruiters use LinkedIn. There, searching profiles to source candidates has a greater impact than posting jobs, conducting marketing campaigns or company pages.

What’s the common denominator in successful organizations? Access to the right talent when and where it’s needed. But even with a large pool of unemployed workers available, finding the right people remains a challenge.

Across industries, qualified talent remains elusive. One approach that can separate the winners and losers in the talent war is a more relationship-driven approach to recruiting.

However, merely seeking to forge new relationships and cultivate better ones isn’t enough – candidates have to be managed and nurtured properly if they are going to be valuable to the organization’s recruiting efforts. Technology is playing an increasingly large role on this front, with organizations relying on candidate relationship management platforms to keep in touch with prospective candidates, share new opportunities, and offer other relevant information to build the company’s employment brand.

What should you think about when sourcing for success?

Relationships are not disposable.

Taking a once-and-done approach to filling open positions is an inefficient use of resources that does nothing to keep your organization top-of-mind when a candidate is ready to make a job change. Rather than a recruiting process that focuses on hiring one person for one position, take a broader perspective. New systems enable organizations to tag and track candidates to develop a pipeline of talent. While you may be sourcing for a risk analyst today, that same person may develop the skills required for a management position in the future.

Relationships are participatory.

The best relationships blossom when both parties are equally committed. For candidates and recruiters, this requires keeping up with any change in status. Candidates need to ensure that recruiters are kept abreast of new skills, certifications, accomplishments, and affiliations, and recruiters need to make sure that their network (and their network’s network) has insight into any available positions and job requirements. Without the right technology, it’s impossible for recruiters or candidates to keep up. Many recruiters rely on an applicant tracking system database to search for talent, but the information becomes quickly outdated as candidates are unable to refresh their profiles and add new detail. In contrast, a candidate-maintained community enables individuals to maintain a single, detailed profile, thus giving recruiters access to current information and helping them foster a real connection.

Relationships require relevance.

Candidates who didn’t make the cut shouldn’t be discarded. Often, organizations will need to fill certain jobs and skill-sets in the future that they are not aware of today. Think of the HTML5 programmer or social media strategist – roles that didn’t exist just five years ago are in high demand today. An up-to-date talent community lets organizations not only track candidates, but have conversations about new opportunities or cultural benefits that might be relevant to a passive candidate. Organizations that understand a candidate’s strengths, skills, and requirements can have more effective conversations, reinforce the organization as a great place to work, and tap into the talent they need.

Relationships go beyond any single job opening.

Having multiple systems to manage relationships is a recipe for chaos – and yet, many companies track applicants in one system while using another to manage the relationship going forward. A single system for tracking and engaging with candidates can support more productive dialogue and quicker access to the right talent. It’s important to keep in mind that whether candidates are hired or not, there’s value in continuing the relationship throughout the talent lifecycle. Tracking hires can support effective internal redeployment and referral programs. Staying in contact with all candidates ensures organizations have access to a widespread talent pool.

Whether you’re hiring today or looking to the future, relationships matter. If your organization is investing time and money in sourcing candidates, make it work to your advantage by sustaining the right relationships over time.

When I try to explain SourceCon (the conference) to the uninitiated, it sounds rather geeky and strange. A bunch of us recruiting types get together to discuss data, search technology, and deep candidate research. We impress each other by sharing LinkedIn hacks or discovering obscure mobile apps. We fired up our laptops at a bar to discuss candidate tracking software.

We check in a lot. And we tweet. A lot. We zap QR codes and trade search strings. And we talk about talent communities.

What’s a talent community? Like sourcing, the concept of talent communities defies definition. It is what you want it to be. I like to believe that a talent community, like sourcing, results in candidates and hires. Not everyone agrees with me.

I think that SourceCon, and the community that has developed around it, is a great example of a talent community. Perhaps the original intent was not to build a pipeline of sourcing professionals, but the end result is an active, real-time candidate pool. Doesn’t matter who owns it, or who uses it. If you’re looking to hire a sourcer, start with SourceCon.

The brilliant Chris Havrilla has already explored the territory of SourceCon and Talent Communities. But I will forge ahead, maybe extend the analogy. I’m stubborn like that.

Why I think SourceCon is a good model for anyone looking to build a Talent Community:

Passion

The foundation, I believe, of any talent community worth its salt is passion. Members must truly care about the topic, the product, the company, the event, or whatever principle that serves as the basis of the community. So developing a talent community around your employer brand might sound like a good idea, but it is ill-advised unless the passion for your brand already exists.

The passion for sourcing is palpable at every SourceCon. Blog posts are carefully researched and written. All sourcers want to learn, to get better, and since they don’t teach sourcing in school, we learn from each other. Sourcers get excited by new tools, new tactics, new data. Sourcers believe that sourcing is important. SourceCon exploits (in the best possible sense) the natural passion that sourcers have for their work.

Online and offline

The SourceCon Talent community grew out of a live event, a grass roots effort spearheaded by Leslie O’Connor in 2007. The event was acquired by ERE Media. Through contests, promotions, and word-of-mouth, the buzz grew. So now there is a website. A LinkedIn Group. A Twitter stream. A Facebook page. A daily email update. A website that hosts past presentations. In short, high functioning talent communities are socially enabled. “Members” can tune in at any time, via multiple platforms. Those who can’t attend the live event, watch the video stream. Twitter users tweet the highlights. LinkedIn Group members ask and answer sourcing questions. The most productive talent communities promote online and offline interaction, which leads to greater opportunity to convert community members to candidates and employees.

Continuous, three-way communication

Talent communities generate content (“conversation”) three ways. The “leader” or “community manager” provides information to the “group.” Group members respond or contribute original content to the community. And lastly, a true talent community provides a forum for intra-group communication. The community enables members to find and talk to other members. SourceCon has always encouraged three-way communication and the development of relationships and partnerships inside and outside the SourceCon ecosystem. Because SourceCon facilitates collaboration, it continues to enjoy high value among its members.

Data collection

A while back, I asserted that a talent community was nothing if recruiters didn’t collect data on its members. I was almost shooed out of the room. But I’m stubborn. I won’t back down. Your talent community is useless as a recruiting method if you don’t get the email addresses and phone numbers of the members. You’d better believe that SourceCon collects data at every possible interaction.

When you register for a conference, they collect data. When you sign up to get the daily newsletter, they collect data. When you join the LinkedIn Group, they collect data. SourceCon, I’d be willing to wager, has the most reliable list of sourcers on the planet.

This list has extreme value; it’s the reason SourceCon, the product of an event/media company, continues to attract an ever-growing audience to live events. Without data, SourceCon would be a great way for sourcers to share information, but not so great at selling tickets to events (its end goal). Creating a talent community in which you cannot communicate with members individually is what gives “social recruiting” a bad name. The end goal for any recruiting-based talent community should be to collect and analyze data and figure out how to reach out to individual members to recruit them. If your end game is simply “awareness” or “branding,” you get a great big FAIL from me.

Sexy Content

Lastly, the only way to keep a talent community going – and growing – is to provide a steady stream of relevant, sexy content. Sexy, of course, is relative. One girl’s Denzel is another sourcer’s Talentbin. You know what I mean. SourceCon keeps it sexy. New tools. New methods. What works. What’s cool. Old school stuff seen in a new light.

I flew 24 hours straight to make it to SourceCon. It was worth it, as I knew it would be, because I was able to connect with esteemed colleagues, recruit some of them for a project I’m working on, collaborate on new ideas, share some laughs and pizza, and learn a bunch of new stuff. As a member of the SourceCon community I look forward to contributing, sharing, attending, and participating.

If you are building a talent community for your organization, you would do well to create a community as vibrant and productive as SourceCon.

I am not #SourceCon. We all are.

As someone who has been in sourcing for nearly a decade now, I’ve watched the function ebb and flow through recessions and boom times. When I first started sourcing back in 2002, it was a boom time for sourcing. Everyone was excited about it and wanted a sourcer to add to their team. Around 2007, things started getting a little tight and by 2008 sourcing was one of those job functions to be cut first from company budgets because “it wasn’t a necessary function” to keep a company going. Now, sourcing is making another comeback — everyone wants to learn about sourcing; everyone wants the “secret sauce” for finding every single candidate in existence.

The problem with this is that there is no one “secret sauce” — yes, there are specific potions that will help in different industries, but when you boil it down to the basics, the “secret sauce” comes from community cohesion. And this can come in the form of your recruiting team which consists of recruiters, sourcers, and HR folks, or the sourcing community from which you can learn techniques, yes, but more importantly, from which you can learn the thought processes behind the magic of sourcing.

The whole collective effort of the community is greater than the sum of its individual parts. You — we — are all #SourceCon.

Sourcing and the Functioning of the Human Body

Every component of a sourcing community serves an important function. Think of it like your human body — while the brain is the control center, without a neck to hold up the head, the brain could not send signals to the rest of the body. Without a beating heart, the brain could not function. Without lungs, oxygen could not circulate in the blood. The human body operates in sync with all its moving parts to create the most amazing machine on the planet. I find the sourcing “body to be equally as amazing.

Within the body of sourcing, you have those who function as the “brain” — ones who bring to light thought processes that others might not have considered. You have “eyes” who look for new and wonderful things, and “mouths” who have the gift of sharing knowledge in an understandable manner.

You have those who are the true “heartbeat” of the body and those who bring life-giving oxygen to the community — the ones who uplift and keep the body moving forward by delivering essential nutrition to the rest of the body. Without these individuals, the body would starve.

You have the “hands” of the body who write and the “legs” and “feet” who move the body forward. You have the “bones” and the “muscles” who offer structural support and strength to keep the body upright.

You see where I am going with this — no matter what function you serve within the body, there is an importance to it for the survival of the body.

Sometimes, different parts serve multiple functions or change functions from time to time. And sometimes, parts are either temporarily unable to or stop functioning, and others kick in to keep the body going. It’s all a beautifully choreographed production that keeps the whole machine functioning and thriving.

This is how I see this community, and why I believe we are all #SourceCon.

Sum-Of-All-Parts

For those of you who were privileged to attend SourceCon in Atlanta last week, I believe you got a first-hand glimpse at the sourcing body. Atlanta is where everything started and the community there thrives on sharing and learning from one another. There are lots of other communities around the world that offer a similar atmosphere to the one in Atlanta, but there is something special about that one. And the conference was a reflection of this spirit of community and sum-of-all-parts.

No one presentation delivered all the answers. But put together, they delivered a package that, if applied, can help you reach new levels in your sourcing practices. Sourcing is not a one-size-fits-all function, and those who attend learning events expecting to be served up secrets on a silver platter are in for a rude awakening. To receive the total value from an event, one must observe all parts and see how they work in harmony with one another. Attend sessions that are outside of your comfort zone; sit with people you don’t know; open your mind to a new concept and see how it has worked for others. Actively seek learning experiences; they are everywhere.

The Blind Men and the Elephant

There is an old Asian Indian tale of six blind men who wanted to know what an elephant looked like. One day, an elephant was in their village so they all went and touched the elephant in different parts.

“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.

“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.

“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk.

“It is like a big hand fan,” said the fourth man who touched the ear.

“It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly.

“It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk.

They began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right. A wise man passing by stopped and asked them, “What is the matter?” They said, “We cannot agree to what the elephant is like.” Each one of them told what he thought the elephant was like. The wise man calmly explained to them, “All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all those features what you all said.” “Oh!” everyone said. There was no more fight. They felt happy that they were all right.

Open Your Eyes and Minds

While the story is told to teach tolerance for all viewpoints, I also see it as a lesson on understanding the whole by comprehending all of the parts. The blind men did not explore the whole elephant and instead only relied on what they themselves knew by touch. They also did not trust in the discoveries made by the others. By only touching on or learning about one part or topic, you receive limited information about the entire object or concept. When it comes to sourcing, if you only seek to learn about mobile, or telephone, or leadership, or metrics, or automation, you narrow your understanding of sourcing as a whole.

Holistic Learning and Functioning

What we strive to do with SourceCon — both the website and the events — is to provide you with a wide variety of “touch” points from which to understand sourcing as a whole function. And by involving all the “moving parts” of the sourcing body, we are more able to accomplish this. By sharing information from the perspective of the newest member of the sourcing community, we allow you to see sourcing through a fresh set of eyes. By publishing works from industry veterans, we provide you with opportunities to learn from years and decades of firsthand experience. By inviting leaders who were practitioners, and practitioners who are working toward becoming leaders, you have the chance to see change in action and listen to people who are cutting new paths in the sourcing function. And by providing perspective from a variety of resources, tools, and ways to use them, you get to put all of these things together in a manner that will best serve your organization’s unique needs.

The Secret Ingredient

Here’s the only secret I will share with you: you must put forth the effort to determine what your needs are. No one can tell you what you need — you must educate yourself and determine that on your own. That’s why I am not a fan of the concept of “secret sauce” — if anyone has watched Kung Fu Panda, you know what the “secret ingredient” is…

Mr. Ping: The secret ingredient is… nothing!
Po: Huh?
Mr. Ping: You heard me. Nothing! There is no secret ingredient.
Po: Wait, wait… it’s just plain old noodle soup? You don’t add some kind of special sauce or something?
Mr. Ping: Don’t have to. To make something special you just have to believe it’s special.

To make something special, you simply have to believe that it’s special. To put this in sourcing terms, to make something work, you have to believe it will work. And you have to find what will work uniquely for your organization.

Never Stop Pushing the Limits

Though this is my last article as the Editor of SourceCon, I will never, ever stop pushing all of you to think differently about sourcing. Approaching sourcing the same old way will yield you the same old results.Trying new things will bring new possibilities your way; some won’t work, but many new methods will. Don’t ever be afraid to try a new direction for fear of failure. Failing is what great people and great organizations do best — they simply learn from those failures, adjust, and continue to press forward.

You will be surprised at how much further you can go by just pushing your body beyond what you believe its limitations are. Pushing the limits hurts — but the long-term benefits of doing so are increased health, endurance, and overall appearance. And my belief is that by pushing the sourcing body beyond what it feels it is capable of at the moment will surprise the rest of the recruiting world — and far beyond. Get the “body” working in harmony and see what awesome new thing your sourcing team, and the sourcing community as a whole, will be capable of.

Happy Sourcing — and see you in the trenches!

I talk to a lot of sourcers –I ask them about their work and which tools they use. You might say as a marketer, blogger, and speaker within the industry, I’m a keen observer of sourcers and recruiters.

One of my favorite questions to ask is this: What sourcing tools do you use?

A popular answer is LinkedIn Recruiter. Now, I am not a sourcer myself — but as a sourcer, does that make you upset? Does it make you worried?

It probably should. LinkedIn Recruiter is an effective (albeit expensive) tool that, for all intents and purposes allows people to call themselves sourcers. No research background necessary, no Boolean strings, no X-Raying Google or Bing, no geolocation tricks. And certainly, no need for telephone sourcing.

Is this how sourcers are trained now?

Have sourcers become so dependent on the tools that the skills have fallen by the wayside? Some would argue that with new and sophisticated algorithms, a sourcer’s primary job has been replaced. Others stand fast in the knowledge that despite all the shiny new tools, having a skilled and competent sourcer can give a recruiting team the solid boost it needs to stay competitive.

Let’s go back to another question that I frequently ask when I speak on building talent communities. Who here has a talent community that they use for sourcing and recruiting?

Inevitably one or two people will raise their hands and say, “We have Jobs2Web; the talent community came with it.” Face palm. I don’t blame busy sourcers or overwhelmed HR practitioners. I don’t blame the vendors that are trying to create profitable and easy-to-use software. I blame the pervasive attitude that platforms do the work!

At the end of every “cool tools” session, during the course of every case study, within the text of every article someone is touting some tool or platform and if you listen closely at least 85% of those same people will say “But it’s not a silver bullet…” but I’m not sure that we’re getting that message. And it’s quietly affecting the practitioners and newcomers to our industry.

Many of the sourcers that I am meeting and speaking with on a regular basis know nothing of the building blocks or solid training that I heard about when I came into the industry a mere five years ago. They are being trained, but not to sleuth and “find the purple squirrel” – instead, they are being trained to push buttons and pull levers. It’s easier for sure. Corporations and organizations need people to push buttons and pull levers. But anyone who starts their career with that as their most marketable skill will eventually find their career automated. Which is a darn shame, because sourcers, true sourcers, may be the most well-equipped to handle the fire hose of social that continues to pummel the HR Industry.

You see, with all this over-dependence on the platforms, we forget that sourcing experts are the conduits into the organization. And there are many more attraction channels than there were ten, five, or even two years ago. With a new social recruiting (or just plain social) tool appearing on the horizon every week or two, what better than the research function of talent acquisition to find out how to use it to increase the talent pool, pipeline, database or, yeah I’ll say it, community?

A true sourcer is proud of the top-notch talent they unearth and bring to their recruiting team and are not likely to let a prime candidate languish in a sea of under-qualified, mismatched resumes. Their engagement skills as they watch the streams of data get ever larger and the candidates needed even more niche, will be the ones primed to connect the dots and engage with quality candidates in a proactive and real way.

The good news is that with a proliferation of free tools and platforms comes a great deal of solid and innovative training. And education in virtually any vertical can be had online from nearly anywhere, but sourcing and social lend themselves phenomenally well to online learning. Sourcing experts like Ryan Leary, Kelly Dingee, and Amitai Givertz and more will give you great information for practically nothing on the Internet. There are quick and easy tutorials for generalists who want to stick their pinky toe in the seemingly “for smarties only” world of sourcing. And there is something to be said for professional certifications and trainers.

Learning to use more than the latest and greatest platforms will not only make your skill set more valuable but will also allow sourcers to truly shape the social recruiting revolution. Tools and platforms are powerful engines, but sourcers should be the ones driving the car.

As a sourcer, your time is valuable — in fact, if you’re on commission, your time literally is money. As such, it goes without saying that maximizing your day-to-day efficiency is of the utmost importance. So why not start in the most obvious place for our digitally connected world? Your email, of course!

If you use Gmail in some manner when you’re sourcing, there are several tools that can aid you in your search efforts. Aside from enabling every Labs feature known to man, take note of these valuable external tools that link easily to Gmail.

1. Rapportive: Why waste your time searching for each and every candidate’s social media profiles when you can have them all pulled up in a flash through this app? You can easily see their Twitter account, their LinkedIn profile, and their WordPress blog, among others — all conveniently located on a sidebar in Gmail. Best of all, you can save private notes on them for future reference (like for the times that pushy potential candidate rears his head for the tenth time).

Maximize the utility of Rapportive by adding Raplets, which are additional plug-ins similar to MailChimp or a number of CRM options. As a side benefit, when you see Rapportive information pop up on a potential candidate, you know that the email address you’re attempting to use is valid.

2. Boomerang: This app serves two purposes. First, are you afraid you’ll forget about that dream candidate if you don’t hear from them within four days? Email them, click the “Boomerang” button, and, if they’ve seemingly disappeared into space (or heavens forbid, been snatched up by a competitor), you’ll get an alert from Boomerang in 4 days (or 1 hour!) reminding you that your email has not received a response yet.

Second, Boomerang allows for scheduling of emails; nobody wants to receive a dreaded rejection letter on Saturday night, even if that’s when you’re putting in some extra hours. And good news — there’s now a mobile app, so you can schedule important phone screens on the go.

3. MeetWith.Me: This handy website allows you to sign up with your Gmail account, and it also synchronizes with your Google calendar (or iCal, if that’s your calendar of choice). So what does it do? It allows you an easy way to book meetings or phone screens by publishing your availability and allowing your contacts to register for an appointment slot; they can choose up to five options. Be sure to claim your MeetWith.Me page, which can consist of an easy-to-remember URL, like meetwith.me/yourname. SourceCon’s Editor, Amybeth Hale, and I even used this clever tool to set up our first phone chat!

* * *

While these apps are beneficial in the professional world, they also serve double-duty for personal use. With Rapportive, you can easily peek into someone’s online life…maybe that guy you’re meeting for drinks on Friday night? According to Boomerang’s website, the myriad uses include scheduling birthday notes ahead of time, remembering to pay bills, and “Boomeranging” travel confirmation emails back on the day of your trip. MeetWith.Me can be used for scheduling lunch with your coworkers or your girls without the usual back-and-forth calendar shuffle. You can even create a group to gather everyone’s availability in one fell swoop.

All three of these apps can be used for free, although Boomerang has a cap on the number of messages you can schedule for free each month (pay-for services start at $10/month).

P.S. If you’re looking for a fun way to clear out your inbox, be sure to check out TheEmailGame from Baydin, the makers of Boomerang!

What other tools do you link to your email in order to maximize your efficiency as a recruiter?

Since the last article I wrote, I’ve gotten a lot of questions around how to find candidates on Twitter. And while there are a few great ways to do this, the one that I’ve had the most luck with lately is TalentBin…in fact, I’ve become so in *love* with TalentBin that I decided to dedicate an entire blog post about it. (OCD much? Yeah, yeah, I know.)

Open Web Sourcing…Before TalentBin (Yawn)

Because I’m assuming that everyone that reads this is probably a bit more resourceful than the average recruiter, I’ll spare you a lecture on what I think a “good recruiter” looks like. We all know that using job boards should not be a recruiter’s first place to source. More often than not, those candidates have already been contacted by everyone and their mother (hell, maybe even *your* mother) and they aren’t the best candidates available. It is well known that {almost always} the best candidates are the ones that you have to really dig for and they aren’t searching for a new role.

So, where in the world do you find those people then?

(For those of you who said, “Show up in their bushes!”…you’re a creeper. Sorry.)

Chances are, you’ll take it to Google and get crafty with a Boolean search. Chances also are, you won’t write a string that can possible encompass every single viable candidate. You just aren’t that smart…sorry. (I kid. I kid. Sorta.)

Perhaps you’ll go on LinkedIn — and, so will every other recruiter now-a-days — which means that all of the awesome candidates YOU are emailing about that “hot” new opportunity is showing up in their searches, too. And, all of the candidates that are equally as viable with stripped profiles aren’t being populated in your search results. Bummer.

Maybe you’ll hit Twitter, but you still don’t understand how to search for candidates, engage, and turn an interesting “tweeter” into a viable candidate. Plus, Twitter can be unbelievably time consuming. As much as I love Twitter, I’ll be the first to admit this.

Maybe, maybe, maybe you’ll really get crazy and visit specialty groups. While the likelihood of finding good talent increases significantly with this approach, it is also insanely time consuming, and unless you’re wicked smart, engineering ways to search these sites is difficult.

While all of these approaches can yield decent results if you stick with it, send enough emails, etc. they all also have one thing in common…they are incredibly time consuming and when you’re racing to find that one-in-a-million-candidate…we all have to agree that time is a premium.

This is where tools like TalentBin become so gosh darn valuable.

Open Web Sourcing…After TalentBin (Dance, Dance, Dance)

In a nutshell, TalentBin is a candidate discovery tool that utilizes open web recruiting to the fullest AND leverages your company’s network to maximize referral generation. In short, it is the ultimate sourcing tool…on crack.

I was first introduced to TalentBin about four months ago, shortly after I transitioned from agency recruiting to the sole internal technical recruiter at a booming e-commerce startup in the Bay Area. When I joined my company, I was tasked with growing our engineering and product teams and ideally moving away from agency usage. (Love you guys — but you’re expensive!!) While I am fairly confident in my ability to source great, hard-to-pull candidates I also recognize that everyone can use a little help — and if there is a freaking awesome tool out there to help…well, sign me up.

Awesomeness In Action

I was immediately impressed with TalentBin and all that their product offers. From an open web perspective, it blew my mind and is extremely easy to use. (In all honesty, it completely levels the playing field for recruiters of all experience levels because it builds your booleans for you…and these booleans are formulated by super smart Stanford engineers.)

Once you log on and create the title of whatever job you are recruiting on, it immediately searches every single person with that background available anywhere on the web. It scrapes social networking sites like Facebook, Quora, Google+, Google Groups, MeetUp, Twitter, GitHub, Stack Overflow and makes it searchable by location AND skillset. Once your search results populate, you can search by your company’s network (with filters) or everyone (without filters).

Undiscoverable Candidate, No More

To give an example of how revolutionary this is for recruiting, here is an example of a recent search I ran for Ruby on Rails engineers in San Francisco, California.

When I did this search in LinkedIn, I got back 3,850 engineers with this skillset in the Bay Area.

When I ran this same search on TalentBin, I got back 8,870 with this skillset in the Bay Area.

And…to make it even better (and more fun for all of you stalkers), it gave me any contact information they had linked to any profile on the web. Twitter handle? Got it. No more searching for hours finding that one person tweeting about something remotely relevant to your search. I found them through TalentBin in two minutes and had a tweet out to them instantly. Email address? Got that, too. No more clogging in-boxes with LinkedIn “In Mail” that won’t even be read.

Finished Product

So, because I know recruiters are numbers driven, I know you are wondering what this meant for me in terms of actual hiring. Those of you that know me know I’d never champion a product unless I’ve had some serious success with it so here are some rough stats to whet your appetites:

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.

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.

Grand Finale

If by now you can’t tell that I truly think TalentBin is the ultimate game-changer in the recruiting industry — well, there is something wrong with you. I highly recommend that everyone at least check it out.

It is a great company; hell, their sales team actually had so much luck with the product as recruiters, they joined TalentBin to sell the product. In my opinion, that is the ultimate endorsement. I guarantee that you’re recruiting game will strengthen, you’ll save yourself so much time and you’ll finally find those one-in-a-million type candidates.

Could you imagine a life without trust?  What about a career without trust? Or even a relationship without trust? Trust is a huge component of civilization. Trust is what defines relationships and it’s an imperative module in our industry. Adam Lawrence defined it in his keynote presentation: “Trust is the new ROI.”

As sourcers, we are always looking for new technology and tools to lead us to our next placement; those are the hard skills that drive creativity and innovation in our industry. There will always be buzz in the sourcing community on who is using the latest shiny new tool, or who discovered the new Boolean technique, or who found the new stalker site. But seldom do we talk about the soft skills that define who we really are. Trust is and should be the foundation of our industry.

Candidates trust sourcers with their most important personal information and decisions. Recruiters trust sourcers to find the best talent. Hiring managers trust recruiters to place the best candidates. It’s a never ending cycle.

As featured in Lawrence’s presentation:

“Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the fundamental principle that holds relationships.” – Stephen Covey

Trust, or the lack thereof, has always been a topic of debate in our industry. Many sourcers and recruiters have been burned by the “stealing of ideas” or “being thrown under the bus.” This also conveys over to our relationships with our candidates. Not every candidate has had an amazing experience with a sourcer or even with a recruiter during the hiring process. Indeed this can lead to a lack of trust and lack of trust will sometimes alter our decisions. When this happens we tend to make mistakes and develop biased opinions.  It also can lead to avoiding, rather than be doing. As Lawrence best stated, we all come from a different background and we have all had different experiences, and grew up with different values. Each individual is interpreting those experiences in different ways. Everyone has a set of biases that they bring into a conversation and we don’t walk into these conversations overexposing topics that will help us reach a common agreement.

Lawrence views talent and acquisition as a supply chain in that when you look at lean methodologies, it’s easy to process out things that are not efficient, such as a level of trust.

One of the most important professional relationships needs to be assembled on trust. Whether it’s the relationship with a candidate, recruiter, or hiring manager, we need to trust others experiences, opinions and ideas to complete our ROI. Most of us have held the role as a sourcer or as a recruiter, and we have all taken different paths to find our purple squirrel. As Lawrence best defined this, it’s a silly attitude to think your way is the best bay. Amybeth Hale also has said that you can give a researcher a search assignment, and depending on what path that researcher chooses to follow, they will get different results. Go back and do the search again and choose to follow a different source lead, and you will end up with a completely different result. Now that is trusting a sourcer!

It’s hard to work with someone without trust. It’s also hard to engage our talent without trust. As Lawrence contributed, the sourcing pendulum is swinging back to engagement. The need and importance for engagement will always be a heavy weight in our industry. There has been a lot of talk at SourceCon conference about mobile sourcing (case and point, my presentation). Undoubtedly mobility will be the wave of the future. It’s exciting to have new tools and tricks for us to engage our audience. Just remember that our candidates all come from different backgrounds and experiences. Lawrence recommends that we take the steps and cautions that we need to ask into the marketplace and avoid some of the mistakes in finding the people that aren’t easy to find and serving them with an attractive message.

Lawrence calls these mistakes, and his past mistakes, the “dumb tax” and he centers this on relationships. He says that electronic communication is not engaging to your audience or contributing influence. He also adds not to solely rely on remote sourcing – be there! As sourcers we are often perceived as industry takers. People trust people, not email – invest into your message, don’t rush in, do your homework, embrace and celebrate the differences, and adapt to change.

Trusters innovate. Trusters create brand trust and brand reputation. Trusters fill positions and building trust will deliver results. We need to act selflessly and consistently and exceed expectations.

“‎In life you’ll realize that there is a purpose for everyone you meet. Some will test you, some will use you, and some will teach you. But most importantly, some will bring out the best in you.”