Monthly Archives: July 2012

How to Become a World Class Sourcer or Recruiter

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So, you want to know how to become a world class sourcer or recruiter?

You’re in luck, because in this article, I explain precisely how to become one.

The good news is that all it takes is practice, and it doesn’t take 10,000 hours of practice either.

No one is born with a sourcing or recruiting gene, so no one is predispositioned for sourcing/recruiting greatness – it’s pretty much a level playing field without any significant barriers to entry.

The bad news (for some) is that it takes “deliberate practice,” which by design isn’t fun, is hard work, mentally challenging, and improves performance by design.

Read on, if you dare, to unlock the secret 8-factor deliberate practice formula for becoming a world class sourcer or recruiter. Continue reading →

One Job Board to Rule Them All? Hint: It’s not Facebook.

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Like many people in HR/recruiting, I recently read about Facebook making the jump into offering searchable jobs.

What took them so long anyway?

Apparently, Facebook is planning to launch its own job board later this summer, and the board will aggregate the job postings of third-party providers, making them available for search by Facebook users.

This comes after Facebook announced late last year that they would be entering into a partnership with the U.S. Labor Department to provide job-hunting resources to explore and develop systems where jobs can be posted and delivered “virally” through Facebook at no charge.

Some people think that Facebook offering job board functionality will positively affect the U.S. economy and job marketplace.

No offense to Facebook, but I’m happy to say we don’t need them to launch a job board to help put America to work.

I believe there is something that the United States government (or any country’s government, for that matter) can do to facilitate putting more people to work, without the help of any other site or company, let alone Facebook. Continue reading →

Searching Facebook for Sourcing and Recruiting

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As Facebook approaches 1 billion users globally, it would be folly to ignore the vast amount of human capital data that Facebook has to offer.

However, as I have written and spoken about many times, the value of data is directly proportional to the ability to retrieve it.

And therein lies the rub of Facebook.

It’s just not very searchable, and the structure of Facebook source code doesn’t make it easy to reliably target the really good stuff that sourcers and recruiters would be especially interested in.

Aside from being highly unsearchable, Facebook doesn’t score highly on the depth of professional content either.

I am aware that many of you probably believe that very few people enter in any professional information into their Facebook profiles, but you might be surprised to learn that more people than you would assume actually do enter titles and the companies they work for.

Also, while the percentage of Facebook users entering in professional details might be relatively small (for the sake of argument, let’s say 10%), given the nearly 1 billion profiles, that would be almost 100,000,000 profiles with some amount of professional data.

I don’t know about you, but I can work with 100,000,000 profiles.

So, while Facebook isn’t very search-friendly, and not everyone enters professional information on their profiles, there are a few ways to search for and target people based on what they do and where they work.

Let’s get on with a walk through of some of the ways you can leverage the professional content that is present within Facebook. Continue reading →