My Sourcing Story : Sören Frickenschmidt, Boehringer

Name: Sören Frickenschmidt
Country: Germany
Company: Boehringer

Q1 – What problems are you currently solving in your role?
I am heading the recruiting services team at Boehringer Ingelheim in Germany, a family-owned pharmaceutical company with 47.000 employees worldwide. My team is filling positions with internal and external candidates and manages temp labor. My day-to-day work mostly revolves around making sure that we have all we need to do so, are aligned with everyone playing a role in the process an adapt to external and internal changes.

Q2 – How do you define sourcing as it currently exist at Boehringer and how you see it evolving? 
When we talk about “sourcing” we mean identifying and contacting possible candidates instead of waiting for them to react on our offers. We have started to do this systematically some time ago and it is getting more important and more effective each year.  For the lion’s share of our positions, we get very good applications if we post the jobs on our website or online job boards. On the other end of the scale, there will always be positions where we need the help of selected external partners. But there is a growing area in between, where the best option is to actively approach interesting candidates ourselves.

Q3 – What are the biggest challenges you currently face as a recruiter/sourcer
I see two big challenges: One is adapting quickly to permanent volatility and ambiguity in the recruiting demand. The other is bridging the gap between our desire for a positive candidate and manager experience and a highly regulated and complex environment.

Q4. Who in recruitment do your admire or learn from? 
There are some brilliant professors, tech start-ups and consultants out there. But my best source of inspiration are other practitioners from large organizations. New ideas, strategies and technologies are fascinating, inspiring and always come with a lot of sex appeal. But I learn most from people who actually did something in a real world environment – and either solved a problem or learned from the failure.

Q5 – One bit of sourcing advice I can give to my peers
Innovation is just the sidekick. Impact is the superhero.