Tag Archives: sourcing candidates

Having Trouble Attracting the Right Candidates?

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Venus Flytrap While attending the Social Recruiting Summit in Minneapolis back in May, I made specific note of a common sentiment expressed by recruiting representatives of two social recruiting powerhouses – Best Buy and Facebook: They don’t have any trouble attracting people, but they do have a tough time attracting the right people.

Recruiters in attendance scoffed at the thought that these two great companies with fantastic brands would have problems attracting talent.

However, I wasn’t surprised – not in the least. And I’ll tell you why. Continue reading →

What if You Only Had One Source to Find Candidates?

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question markImagine that you were just assigned a position to recruit for and that you needed to present 2 fully screened, highly qualified and well matched candidates within 5 business days.

Your manager/client is requesting candidates with:

  • 3-5 years of related work experience (your choice – something not too vanilla/easy/common, but not “purple squirrel” either)
  • Experience in a specific industry, and experience working in a similar environment (size/scale/team/software, etc.)  to the manager’s/client’s
  • Bachelor’s degree in a related discipline

Furthermore, let’s say that you don’t have any qualified candidates in your pipeline, so you are essentially starting from scratch.

Under those conditions and assumptions, if you were limited to only 1 method/specific source for identifying candidates to contact, engage and recruit, which would you choose, and why?  Continue reading →

How I Learned What I Know About Candidate Sourcing

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How_did_Glen_Cathey_learn_how_to_source_candidatesWhen it comes to my theories and best practices for leveraging information systems for quickly finding highly qualified candidates, I am often asked, “So, how did you figure all of this stuff out?”

It’s a fantastic question, and I am happy to be asked it, but my answer doesn’t seem to satisfy anyone. 

The short answer is literally that “I just figured it out.”

The long answer provides some insight into how I figured some of this candidate search stuff out, but I think the real value and message of my personal story is that anyone can become quite proficient at electronic talent discovery – and it’s less dependent on any training you receive and more on how you approach your job. Continue reading →

Why Do So Many ATS Vendors Offer Poor Search Capability?

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JIT Talent IdentificationThis question has been burning in my mind for quite some time – why is it that so many ATS/recruiting CRM vendors offer poor or limited candidate search functionality? I’m not talking about ATS vendors you’ve never heard of – I’m talking about some of the biggest names in Applicant Tracking/Candidate Relationship Management applications.

I’m well aware that ATS’s serve many critical functions beyond searching for the candidates contained within them, but let’s pull no punches here – you can’t hire someone, or begin to automate candidate relationship management with someone you haven’t FOUND in the first place. And just because a candidate is buried somewhere in your database, it doesn’t mean you’ve actually found them (or can find them when you want or need to).

The bottom line is that data is of little to no value if you can’t retrieve the information you want, when you need it. What is the point of storing human capital data if you can’t precisely retrieve exactly what you want, when you want it? Continue reading →