Category Archives: Sourcing and Recruiting

Passive Recruiting Doesn’t Exist!

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Myth BustersWhen most people talk about “passive recruiting,” they’re referring to the practice of targeting and recruiting so-called “passive candidates” – people who are not actively looking to make a move from their current employer.

If you accept that notion – what would be the opposite?

Active recruiting?

Think about it for a moment. Neither phrase even makes sense grammatically. The “passive” in “passive recruiting” isn’t being used to describe the type of recruiting being performed – it’s being used to describe the type of candidates being recruited. 

In this article, I challenge the notion of “passive recruiting,” implore you to retire the phrase, and introduce the concepts of active and passive sourcing.   Continue reading →

Sourcing: Separate Role or Integrated Function?

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Candidate Sourcing - integrated function of a full life cycle recruiter, or separate role?Whatever your thoughts may be regarding the sourcing role, companies and their HR/staffing organizations have at least 2 ways of handling the talent discovery/identification function: 1) Simply allow full life cycle recruiters to handle the sourcing role as an integrated function, or 2) Separate out the sourcing function and assign the work to people who are solely responsible for talent identification.

So which is the superior model?

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer here, as I do not believe that either way of handling the sourcing function is intrinsically “better” than the other. However, as someone who has always personally performed his own sourcing and as someone who trains dedicated sourcers whose sole purpose is to identify potential candidates, I can share my insights with you.

Continue reading →

Recruiting Pulse – Your Single Source for All Things Recruiting

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Recruiting_Pulse_ScreenshotOverwhelmed by the sheer volume of sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting and HR blogs?

I know I am – a new recruiting blog seems to pop up almost daily!

So how can anyone possibly stay on top of all of them? Subscribing via email? Using an RSS reader?  

My initial approach to not missing a post from my favorite recruiting bloggers was to use Google’s Reader. However, I found that over time, I simply stopped reviewing all of the posts and articles that were piling up.  Admittedly, my Google Reader is now essentially a dumping ground.

I switched to email subscriptions, but I found that to be equally unmanageable.

Then, not too long ago, I stumbled across a couple of interesting sites – Alltop and POPURLS – and I started to think…why not create a similar site that is focused 100% on aggregating sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting, and HR blogs?

So I did create one – and thus Recruiting Pulse was born.

Recruiting Pulse features the most recent 3 posts from over 50 sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting, HR, and UK recruiting blogs. On the main page, you will find a mix of 40+ blogs from all categories.

At the bottom of the page, you will find links to pages where blogs are arranged by category:

So What’s the Big Deal?

I didn’t say it was a big deal. :-)

I simply created the site as a blog post dashboard of sorts to enable people (including myself, I must admit) to easily stay on top of the content generated by over 50 of the top sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting and UK recruiting blogs.

Mouse over a link and you can see the beginning of each post.

Recruiting Pulse Mouse Over Post Overview

If you like what you see, you can click the link to be taken directly to the entire post.

It’s that easy.

A Work In Progress

I did not intend to make Recruiting Pulse a site that tracks every last sourcing, recruiting and HR blog in existence – that would defeat the purpose of what I am trying to accomplish.

To keep it manageable, I chose a combination of blogs from HR Examiner’s Top 25 lists and some blogs I read on a regular basis written by people I respect.

However, I am open to suggestions – so please feel free to let me know if there is a high quality sourcing, recruiting, or HR blog you think should be added to the site and I will take it into consideration.

I must say there are a few well known sourcing/recruiting blogs that I wanted to add to Recruiting Pulse, but I could not find an RSS feed for their blog (which is odd), and I found some Ning-based sites that only offered a “recent activity” feed as opposed to feeds for posts or discussions.

If you are a blog author and don’t see your blog on any of the pages of Recruiting Pulse – please let me know if you would like to be added. I can’t promise to add every blog/site as I am looking to keep Recruiting Pulse to a relatively reasonable size. However, I am open to adding blogs with quality content and at least weekly posts.

I do plan to modify the site in the future to feature even more specialized categories (e.g., global recruiting) – so let me know if you have any ideas there.

I hope at least a few people find the site helpful!

LinkedIn Current Title Search: Internal vs. X-Ray Part II

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LinkedIn Wizard by 4_EveR_YounGIn the original LinkedIn Current Title Search: Internal vs. X-Ray post, I found that there was a large disparity in results between identical internal and external (Google X-Ray) current title searches on LinkedIn. 

At the end of the post I asked if anyone had any ideas as to where the missing 288 profiles were, why they weren’t returned using the basic Google X-Ray current title search technique, and how can you find them?

I received a few interesting and insightful responses – I will review them in this post as well as provide my own insight as to the difference in results experienced when running an internal LinkedIn search and a Google X-Ray search of LinkedIn using the same search criteria.

I’ll also show you some interesting LinkedIn search phenomena. Continue reading →

Data and Drive are Paramount in Sourcing and Recruiting

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Samurai statue2 by mollydot via creative commons searchThe other day I came across an insightful post on Fistful of Talent by Josh Letourneau in which he addresses the arms race that rages on in the talent acquisition universe – the never-ending attempt of people and companies to achieve some sort of technological advantage over the competition.

Josh would rather have a recruiter “with the “will to fight,” in other words – someone with a never-say-die-because-I-will-make-it-happen Recruiter/Sourcer. If I have that, then I can introduce technology and truly accelerate their success. But if it’s a lazy Recruiter who would rather let their Careers Site do the work, then all the technology in the world would prove wasteful in their hands.”

I could not agree more!

A driven, no-excuses sourcer/recruiter will always out-perform a lazy sourcer/recruiter – no matter how bleeding-edge their technology. Continue reading →

The Future of Recruiting: The More Things Change…

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The Future of Recruiting - image by Silverisdead via creative commonsNow that we are on our way into exploring the new year, I’ve seen some articles on what’s coming next for the recruiting industry this year, and even as far out as 10 years from now.

When I read one such article written by Kevin Wheeler, I was struck by his comment that although sourcing remains a topic he is interested in, he feels that “the need to conduct in-depth Internet searches and apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases.”

I was prepared to write an article just in response to that thought, but as I sat down to review his post again on Sunday in preparation for my post, I noticed that Kelly Dingee had commented in defense of electronic talent identification.

In response, Kevin wrote “I think that intensive Internet searching, for most internal recruiters, is a sign of their failure to develop a community of potential candidates. If the position is a unique or one-of-a-kind search, they should probably use a third party recruiter. For volume and routine hiring there should be no need to use anything beyond a network of potential candidates whether proprietary or not. Building that community is what a recruiter’s job is all about – not running searches or becoming a computer nerd.”

Wow. Where do I begin? Continue reading →

LinkedIn Sourcing Tip: Searching by Company? Beware!

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LinkedIn_Company_Search_Image_3aRecently, I wrote about the intrinsic issues associated with searching LinkedIn for potential candidates with specific industry experience, and how using the “Industry” field can actually prevent you from finding the people you’re looking for. 

A number of readers responded by suggesting a logical solution to the issue – searching by specific company name(s) instead of using LinkedIn’s “Industry” field.

It is a logical solution, but a potentially flawed one nonetheless.

I’m going to show you some reasons why, and if you read this post within the next 5 minutes, I’ll even throw in a LinkedIn  company search anomaly as an added bonus. Continue reading →

How to Search Spoke, ZoomInfo, and Jigsaw for Free

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Search smallSpoke, Zoominfo, and Jigsaw are websites that contain information on 10’s of millions of people and millions of companies. Each site has their own special method of capturing information on people and businesses. What they all have in common, however, is that while you can register and in some cases even run a few searches for free, you have to pay to really dig into their information.

So – would you like to know how to search these sites for free? 

Yes? Well you’re in luck – that’s exactly what I’m going to show you in this post. Continue reading →

Candidate – Recruiter Relationships: Overrated?

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What is the ultimate value you provide to candidates as a recruiter?

I want you to really think about that question before proceeding. In this post, there will be more questions raised than answers provided. Please take a moment to ensure that you have your thinking cap on and that your mind is open. 

Who Defines Value?

From the candidate’s perspective, what do you think the real value provided by a recruiter is? There are countless recruiting articles and blog posts (such as this one referencing Guanxi) that will tell you that the relationship is more important than the transaction itself. But for the majority of candidates, is it? Really?

I’m a little bit of a Lean freak. One of the core principles of Lean philosophy is Value – every activity in a business should be scrutinized for how it adds value to the final product or service provided to the customer. A lot of activities previously thought to be essential in a business turn out to be non-value adding when evaluated from the perspective of the customer. Continue reading →

Recruiting: Art or Science?

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I recently wrote an article for Ryan Leary’s CruiterTalk blog titled, “Anyone Can Learn the ‘Art’ of Sourcing.”Although the main point I wanted to make was that sourcing isn’t all that mysterious or difficult, and that it can be taught and learned with a strong interest to do so and access to proper training and guidance, the post drew some comments and sparked a mini-debate on Twitter over whether or not sourcing and recruiting are more heavily based upon “science” or “art.” I’ve also found that a good number of people seem to think that the “art” of recruiting can’t be taught.

As expected, opinions will vary widely. However, I believe it is critical when examining this controversy that “science” and “art” be defined. I’ve found that many people struggle to explain exactly what they mean when they say “recruiting is 60% art.” Without a common understanding of the terms involved, there is a danger of misinterpretation down to the semantic level, which can seriously hinder any productive discussion.

So let’s start with “art.” Continue reading →

Real Recruiting: Talent Identification AND Acquisition

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As you might be able to tell from the name of my blog, I’m passionate about leveraging information systems for finding candidates. Unless you’re running 1 word or title-only queries, you can’t search the Internet, LinkedIn, Twitter, your ATS/CRM, or a job board resume database without using at least the most basic Boolean logic.

When I post links to my search-focused articles in various LinkedIn groups, I often get comments and responses expressing the sentiment that using various sites and technologies to search for candidates isn’t “real recruiting.” I’m always a little saddened and frustrated to see responses like this, because it reflects the fact that there are plenty of people in the recruiting and staffing industry that just don’t “get it.” Continue reading →

Don’t Be A Sourcing Snob

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Are You a Sourcing Snob?

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Is a candidate identified on LinkedIn intrinsically “better” than a candidate sourced from Monster?
  • Is candidate sourced by cold calling inherently “better” than a candidate sourced from a job posting on Careerbuilder?
  • Does it really matter where a great candidate comes from?

I continue to see well respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low, and there seems to be no shortage of those in the recruiting and staffing industry who are happy to jump on that bandwagon. However, whenever I read or hear broad, sweeping statements claiming that an entire population of 50,000,000+ candidates is low quality just because they happen to be in an online resume database of a major job board – my response is a mix of shock and disappointment. 

Stereotyping is Poor Judgement

Broad statements such as “the job boards have low quality candidates” reeks of stereotyping.  A stereotype is an oversimplified conception or opinion based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the “other group” (in this case, job board candidates) have in common. Stereotypes are often formed by an Illusory correlation , a false perception of an association between two variables where in fact none exists.

You just can’t go around claiming all job board candidates are bad. That’s like saying everyone in New York is rude, or that everyone in California is a hippie. To stereotype all job board candidates as low quality is downright insulting to the many fantastic people who make the decision to post their resume to well known online resume databases. If they only knew that posting their resume to a job board was equivalent to moving to “the wrong side of the tracks.”

Sourcing Snobbery

Many sourcers and recruiters use the Internet to source and identify candidates all the time, yet there is never a mention of the intrinsic “quality” of candidates who happen to post their resume on their own websites. As if creating a website and posting your resume to it somehow makes you a better person than someone who either doesn’t know how do do that or simply doesn’t care to, instead opting to post their resume to a well known job board site.

And what about Social Media? The last time I checked – there is no “candidate quality filter” built in to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or any social network. ANYONE can decide to create a web page or a Social Media profile, from “A” players to “F” players. Continue reading →

Searching Social Media Requires Outside-the-Box Thinking

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Non-Standard Descriptors and the Role They Play in Social Media

Article by Valerie Scarsellato, Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation
Co-written by Glen Cathey

Sourcing has always been a significant component in the recruiting lifecycle. However, in recent years, sourcing has taken a giant step into the forefront and has become recognized as the solid foundation at which successful recruiting rests upon in order to identify and secure top-level talent, no matter what industry you may be supporting.

One of the newest tools available for sourcers and recruiters to leverage to find candidates is Social Media (SM). These days, it seems as if nearly everyone from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to inventors in various fields, to the grandmother of your best friend has a Myspace or Facebook page or a LinkedIn or Twitter profile.

Twitter happens to be my personal preference in the SM realm. It also happens to be the fastest growing Social Media application at 1200% in the past year!

Although some people are still discovering and testing the waters of the Twitterverse, a diverse and large population (over 14M visitors in March – surpassing LinkedIn!) spanning nearly all industry segments has already fully jumped on to the real-time messaging bandwagon in order to share information or blurt out a piece of nonsense rolling around in their head.

Understand Social Media Users

With the significant levels of attention and traffic being driven by Social Media, it’s critical for sourcers and recruiters to understand how to best utilize SM for talent identification. Technology is ever-evolving and those of us in sourcing/recruiting/talent acquisition roles (even we have many titles!) are constantly having to play catch-up with those that create each new SM application.

After attending one of Glen’s focused and information-packed FREE webinars, I had an epiphany. It’s true – we need to build the right search strings in order to filter through and find the right people we are targeting. In order to do that effectively, I realized that we as sourcers need to understand the psychology of the people we’re searching for and be aware of how they think of and refer to themselves in order to return highly relevant results when searching Social Media. Continue reading →

Human Capital Data Analysts – Sourcing Samurai

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What’s The Sexiest Job in Recruiting?

I recently read this excellent post on the Google blog written by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management at Google, and I was especially excited to read this:

“Hal Varian likes to say that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. After all, who would have guessed that computer engineers would be the cool job of the 90s? When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.”

Hal Varian gets it.

Google gets it.

So Why Don’t People in Recruiting and HR?

What am I talking about? That the ability to understand and extract value from data (human capital data in recruiting) is the scarce factor and it leads to intelligence and success in business.

***Note***

This post was originally published in March 2009 – when pretty much no one read my blog. now that I have a few more readers, I’ve decided to modify and update the original post, which you can read here.

Is Candidate Sourcing Dead?

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Why Do Some People Think Sourcing is Dead?

Some people believe sourcing is a dying function because it is relatively easy to identify and find information on a large number of people using the Internet and social media.

What’s Really Happening

First it was Internet search engines. Then it was the job board resume databases. Now it’s social media and social networking. What’s really happening here is that more information about more people is becoming available electronically every day – it started slowly at first, and has accelerated over time.

More and More Easily Accessible Data = More Problems

There is no arguing that the Internet, job boards, and now social media applications have given the masses easy access to more human capital data. However, having more access to more data actually exacerbates the sourcing and recruiting function. Essentially, the haystack has gotten larger and continues to grow. Last time I checked, when that happens, it doesn’t make anyone’s job who’s looking for a needle any easier. Continue reading →