Tag Archives: Talent Acquisition

Sourcing vs. Recruiting – What’s the Difference?

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While you may not  know that Balazs Paroczay recently posted a rebuttal of my proposed definition of sourcing, I strongly suggest you read his argument, as I appreciate his perspective as well as the fact that he disagrees with me on the definition of sourcing and I’d like to hear your opinion.

I believe disagreement is important and valuable, because it fuels critical thinking and forward progress.

Before I get to Balazs’s post, I’d like to get your take on a recent disagreement I had with Recruiting Animal. Continue reading →

What is Sourcing? I Propose a New Universal Definition.

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Definition of Sourcing on TwitterWhat better time than at the beginning of a new year to take a critical look back at where we’ve come from, to reflect on our current state and to look forward to a next step in the evolution of sourcing?

It believe it would certainly be helpful and beneficial to have a universally agreed upon definition of exactly what sourcing is. If you’ve attended any sourcing and/or recruiting conferences, it doesn’t take long to notice people using “sourcing” to describe different types of activities. When anyone talks about the sourcing function at their company, it immediately begs the question of exactly what the sourcers are tasked with. Do they find people and pass them on to recruiters to contact, or do they also engage the people they find? The same goes for hiring sourcers – one of the first questions is always whether or not they will be responsible for engaging potential candidates. 

Am I the only person who thinks this is a bit absurd, if not just unhelpful and annoying?

The fact that there is no universally agreed upon definition of what sourcing is when it comes to talent acquisition has always bothered me. Don’t you think it’s well past time to move the ball forward and make the attempt to develop a single definition of “sourcing?”

Historically, sourcing was typically used to refer to talent identification only – name generation, org charting, finding resumes and social profiles, etc. However, I have noticed over the past few years that more people and companies are starting to use sourcing to describe both the identification and the engagement of talent, which aligns with what I’ve always believed sourcing to be.

Let’s take a look at other people’s opinions on what sourcing is and leverage what sourcing is considered to involve when it comes to procurement to see if we can achieve some parity before I share with you my proposed definition of sourcing. Continue reading →

The Current and Future State of Talent Sourcing

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I had the distinct honor and privilege of serving as the conference chair of the biggest-ever SourceCon, held at the Georgia Aquarium in February. Part of my responsibility in that role involved kicking off the event, and I took the opportunity to touch upon my observations and opinions on the current state of sourcing, as well as what I believe will be the future of sourcing.

Even as I was standing on stage I knew I would be writing a post on this topic, because it was apparent that there is much misunderstanding and debate surrounding sourcing, and certainly no shortage of opinion, qualified or otherwise.

If you’re ready, I’ll walk you though my definition of sourcing, my observations on the current state of sourcing, and what I (and others!) see as the future state of sourcing.

WARNING: If you don’t like/have time to read long posts, I suggest you turn back now. While I could have split this content up into 9 weeks worth of 500 word posts, I’d prefer to give you the goods rather than string you along.

What is Sourcing?

First and foremost, I believe it is critical to have a common understanding of what sourcing is.

I define sourcing to include any and all activities whose primary purpose is talent discovery and identification.

My definition is purposefully broad, because I find too many people seem to associate sourcing solely with searching the Internet with Boolean search strings.

While some companies may limit their sourcers to exactly that – searching only the Internet and generating names for someone else to engage – sourcing is and should be much more than that.

Sourcing encompasses the use of any source of human capital data – an ATS, Monster, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps, etc., and it can also include the phone, email, and messaging work of engaging potential candidates and networking with them to yield referrals and the opportunity to identify more potential candidates.

Yes, networking with people – whether they be new hires, existing staff and management, or complete strangers – to find and identify potential candidates is also sourcing, regardless of method (electronically, over the phone, or in person).

Of course, sourcing also includes traditional phone sourcing as effectively addressed and dramatically demonstrated at the SourceCon event by Conni LaDouceur.

And finally, although passive and offering little-to-no control over the qualifications and experience of the talent discovered, job posting is even a form of sourcing – the primary purpose of posting a job is to discover talent.

The Critical Importance of Sourcing

When it comes to the entire talent management lifecycle, nothing is more important than sourcing.

That’s because, quite simply, the entire talent management lifecycle is completely dependent upon discovering and identifying potential talent in the first place.

You cannot engage, build a relationship with, recruit, hire, retain and develop someone you haven’t found.

Period.

Try cutting and polishing a poor quality diamond, or better yet – try cutting a diamond you don’t actually have. You could have the best diamond cutters in the world on your staff, but without a steady supply of high quality rough diamonds, you simply won’t be in business.

When it comes to hiring and retaining, all future outcomes are dependent upon that magical moment when a sourcer/recruiter first finds and makes contact with a potential candidate.

The Current State of Sourcing

I believe that sourcing is largely misunderstood, undervalued, and under-invested in today.

I offer as evidence:

  • An alarming number of people seem to believe that sourcing is all about Boolean logic
  • There are people who believe that sourcing is a function that can be easily replaced by software
  • There are well respected companies who don’t give their sourcers or recruiters any premium or purpose-built tools or resources
  • The recently conducted sourcing compensation survey illustrated that 23% of the respondents make less than $40,000 annually Continue reading →

The Talent Community Conundrum

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First it was social recruiting, then it was mobile recruiting.

Now talent communities are apparently the latest cure for all of your talent troubles.

One the surface, the talent community concept seems like a brilliant “no brainer.”

However, like Socrates, I believe there is value in questioning everything. So when I start seeing  a strong buzz about just about anything, I immediately hit it with a dose of healthy skepticism and start asking some tough questions.

I’m well aware that there are talent acquisition leaders out there right now that are saying, “What we really need is a talent community,” primarily because of the buzz the concept has been building over the past year or so. I worry that these same people are placing blind faith into the talent community concept out of the hope that it will help them in some significant manner with their talent acquisition challenges.

When I attended a webinar on building sustainable talent communities the other day, I felt it raised more questions than it provided answers. Because I know I can’t be the only person wondering about the validity of the talent community concept, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you my thoughts and questions. Continue reading →

Why Sourcing is Superior to Posting Jobs for Talent

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Posting a job online is perhaps the first action most companies take to attract talent when they have an opening.

However, posting jobs in an attempt to attract qualified talent has many intrinsic flaws, and here are the top 4 in my opinion:

  1. Posting jobs a passive strategy
  2. Posting jobs offers no control over candidate qualifications
  3. Job advertisements only attract candidates who are actively looking
  4. Posting jobs isn’t social!

In comparison, sourcing from Internet, LinkedIn, online resume databases, ATS/CRM systems and similar resources to discover and identify qualified candidates is an active strategy which offers significant control over candidate qualifications, can be used to specifically target passive and even non-job seekers, and is 100 times more social!

Read on for a more in-depth analysis of posting jobs vs. sourcing candidates, as well as to have your eyes opened to a new way of looking at the value/ROI of posting jobs. 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 →

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.

Lean Sourcing and Recruiting: JIT Candidate Acquisition

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Lean Sourcing and Recruiting: JIT Candidate Acquisition

According to globally accepted supply chain management principles (such as those of Lean and the Toyota Production System), building and maintaining product inventories is wasteful. In an ideal state, companies would acquire the right material, at the right time, at the right place, and in the exact amount.  This is called Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory management.

However, many HR, recruiting and staffing organizations push their teams in the exact opposite direction – focusing specifically on building candidate inventories through “proactive” recruiting, the theory being that when a specific need arises, they might already have candidates already identified in their inventory. This begs the question – why don’t more organizations adopt Just-In-Time (JIT) talent identification and acquisition into their Human Capital supply chain management philosohphies and systems?

I think there are 2 major reasons for this: #1 Many sourcers and recruiters rely heavily upon cold calling, referral recruiting, and posting jobs to find talent, and #2 Most HR, recruiting and staffing organizations don’t (or are simply not able to) effectively leverage technology.

Cold Calling, Referral Recruiting, Posting Jobs

While cold calling into companies, referral recruiting, and posting jobs can be effective techniques for identifying talent, they are slow, time-intensive processes that have an intrinsically low probability of delivering precisely the right talent quickly for any specific manager or client request. Additionally, posting jobs yields a very low percentage of qualified applicants – sometimes less than 5%-10%. Using only these methods, if a recruiter waited for a client or manager request before they began recruiting, it could literally take weeks or months to find the right people, which certainly would not be delivering value to the client (a core Lean principle), nor would it provide a timely flow (another core Lean principle) of candidate submissions in response to the client’s or manager’s request. To compensate for this, recruiters really have no choice other than to proactively recruit candidates even when they don’t have an active opening/need, in the hopes of having candidates whenever they do receive a job order/request. However, hope is not a strategy. Continue reading →