We caught up with Jim Stroud, speaker at #SOSUAU and asked him a few questions about sourcing and his upcoming talk at #SOSUAU in Amsterdam on 12-13 Sep. Below is the video. Enjoy.
Guest post by Jan Bernhart, International Corporate Recruiter at Spil Games
These are exciting times for sourcers, the internet detectives of the recruitment industry.
Cool new sourcing tools are launched (connectifier) regularly while many die (falcon) with a fast pace. The image and profile of a Sourcer is shifting from being a nerdy recruitment assistant to a big-shot recruiter who gets head-hunted for high-profile sourcing jobs in different continents. And then there’s the upcoming Sourcing Summit Europe.
Finally a sourcing event for us Europeans – #SOSUAU.
For me, this event will be the ultimate test for the maturity of sourcing as a craft. Of course I’ll be there to learn and share cool new tips and tricks. But I’m especially interested in learning to which extent the presenters and attendees can showcase best-practices that are proven, sourcing strategies which are scalable and ROI driven solutions.
Currently, I find it’s not always easy to justify all the energy and hours I’ve spend mastering the craft of sourcing (most of it learnt at my own free time because I love doing it. Yeah I’m the nerdy guy). Sure, my sourcing skills are paying off now, but it is still hard to measure ROI and also convince others on the value of sourcing. Can I really advise people that regard hacking with Google a hobby to take sourcing seriously? Or will sourcing remain a niche craft for nerdy assistants in the recruitment team?
On the one hand, I don’t think I’m the only sourcer who tries to track his ROI and create proven best-practices. But on the other hand we’ll need a lot more data, more than guys like me can gather, to really prove the value-add and ROI of sourcing. Time will tell; but I hope to find some answers at #SOSUAU.
See you guys at SOSUEU in Amsterdam!
P.S. if you need advice for getting around in Amsterdam , I am a local, feel free to contact me. My contact details are easily googleable J
Guest post by Britt van Capelleveen
Recruitment (Corporate) has changed over the last few years. Or, at least it should have, in my opinion. Yes, we are still looking for the perfect candidate, and sometimes it still seems like we have to look out for that purple squirrel.
Yes, we occasionally have a different opinion than the hiring manager and we still have to deal with candidates who lose their interest because of ….(you can fill this in with your own frustrating moments, I’ m sure you’ll have them too). But one thing has changed dramatically. Most of our future potential talent has discovered the different social networks. So, we as recruiters have to discover them too.
As Advisor e-Recruitment @Tempo-Team (part of the Randstad Holding), I –together with our corporate recruitment department– have come to the realization that it is important to get to (already) know our future colleagues. We do a lot of hires each year, in particular for commercial roles. Despite the economic circumstances top-talent aren’t waiting side-by-side to find a new job. We became aware of the fact that our target group needs to know us too. And better yet, they have to like us.
This led to the corporate recruitment department of Tempo-Team setting up a small sourcing team. For every open vacancy we do not “post & pray”, like we used to do. We resort to spectacular boolean searches and Facebook searches. LinkedIn and Twitter became our new best friends to quickly fill the pipeline with perfect profiles. Candidates whose keywords and experience match with the company’s needs. And not only do we initiate contact. We also engage with them and do a first screening by phone. If it turns out to be a wonderful fit, our corporate recruiters specialized in selection will do the official interviews.
Secondly, through our online endeavors, we quickly realized we have to find a way to attract (but also keep) our future talent. This led us to build online talent pools and communities of different types, and introducing a Recruitment page on Facebook. Both underline what a great place Tempo-Team is to work at. We developed a Facebook app, so our Facebook Friends will be directly informed of new opportunities at Tempo-Team (and of course make it able to easily share these fantastic job opportunities with their friends).
In my opinion the old recruiting ways are insufficient. Sourcing and those wonderful online networks will be necessary to do the job right. At #sosueu you are able to add some serious sourcing and online recruitment knowledge to your recruitment department too, and you will see things start to change… If you don’t believe me, come and experience the love for sourcing yourself at #sosueu, http://sosueurope.com/ 12 and 13 September, Randstad HQ Amsterdam.
Britt van Capelleveen, is e-recruitment advisor at @Tempo-Team and will lead one of the tracks at #SOSUAU unconference session.
#SOSULIVE Challenge
One of the benefits of attending #SOSUAU is the opportunity to witness some of the foremost sourcing experts in Europe perform live sourcing on stage. Delegates can submit their sourcing challenges (sourcing tasks they cannot solve) for our speakers to solve in real-time. It’s raw, it’s immediate and it’s tough. But our speakers love a good sourcing challenge.
We would like to open #SOSULIVE to the public. So if you have a sourcing challenge you cannot solve let our #SOSUAU speakers have a go and you might win a ticket to watch it live at #sosueu.
The steps/rules:
1) Enter a sourcing challenge in the comments section below or the contact us form
2) #SOSUAU organisers will select the standout entries
3) We will select one lucky winner to attend #SOSUAU each week
4) Our speakers will tackle the challenges at #SOSULIVE on 12-13 Sep
- Tips: Don’t post a job requisition or challenges that can be solved by a simple Google search
Non-profit organisations can get a 50% discount on #sosueu tickets. Click here
By Dan Nuroo,
Been thinking a bit of late as to what is the most important thing about Recruiting… Is the ability to find that (excuse me for saying) Purple Squirrel, that “unfindable” person? Or is it the consistency of finding great people for your company?
I’m all for the latter. Finding the superstars, the unfindable, doesn’t really change the world. Sure it’ll make people happy, it’ll solve an immediate business problem, and allow you to give yourself an internal high 5, and allow you to brag to everyone how great you are as a Recruiter.
Here’s my theory. All companies have their Superstars, all companies have their good, ordinary people, those people who just get things done, and ALL companies will have a bottom 10 percent. You know that magical number that some companies brag about purging year on year! Sorry if that offends anyone, but seriously, it is a mathematical fact that there will be a bottom 10%.
When you look at the success of sporting clubs, they all have their stars, those people who can win the unwinnable game for you. But that only happens occasionally, not every week. Ultimate success is found over an entire season, and that success comes from a consistency of performance across the whole year, not just the occasional piece of brilliance. Don’t get me wrong, that piece of brilliance is amazing and a great tool to have and everyone strives for that piece of superstardom, but let’s keep it in perspective.
“You’re only as strong as your weakest link” is a great saying. You need every person pulling in the same direction, doing their job and doing it well, when someone stuffs up it can have an effect on the whole team, or company.
Here’s the thing, every company I see marketing itself in the employment space will say something along the lines of “We only hire the best” “We hire the top 2%” blah blah blah. Well that’s great, but managing a whole team of “Superstars” who normally have the ego to go with it is another challenge unto itself. Especially if you as an organization have targeted, pitched to and coerced someone to join you. You do need a mix.
When we sit down and look at our hiring strategies going forward, yes we plan to hire superstars, we will hire superstars which will help our company grow in the direction we want it to go, but, our focus is always on consistency of hire, let’s minimize the gap between our best and our worst, let’s build a consistency that will make us better as a whole. Let’s face it, those superstars tend to hire themselves. If they are looking for a change, or you’ve been able to position your company to a point that they are looking for a change, and you’re it, then the hard work is done. All you need to do is identify, engage and provide the environment for the deal to be made.
The meat and potatoes of Recruitment however is in the rank and file hiring. The people who do all the “Real work” for you. The one’s you’ll attract via a job board (yes they still exist and are effective!) . The hard yards is the constant interviewing, cv reviewing etc to uncover people who will make a long term benefit to your business. Not lowering your standards when the CEO is at your desk screaming at you to fill x amount of vacancies in y amount of time. Remember this consistency is the benefit you’ll bring to the business as they underpin the business as a whole.
Sourcing certifications are gaining in importance and popularity. #SOSUAU speaker and sourcing pioneer Irina Shamaeva runs the highly acclaimed People Sourcing Certification. For those who wanted to go down the path of certification here is a chance to attend Europe’s first Sourcing Summit and also get 40% off certification training materials. More details here
Balazs Paroczay is a pioneer and thought-leader in sourcing and is one of the leading voices in Europe. ‘Jedi master’, ‘visionary’, ‘thought-leader’, ‘hall of famer’ are just some of the sobriquets associated with Balazs’ name. Technically astute and a perennial experimenter Balazs is considered to be the foremost authority on Facebook as a sourcing channel and have spoken extensively on the subject across Europe. His deep knowledge of sourcing techniques and affable style and skills are highly regarded by his peers, clients and the wider sourcing community in Europe.
Balazs now heads Randstad Sourceright’s EMEA Shared Recruitment Centre based in Hungary and will be speaking at #SOUEU. We caught up with him to find more about his background, current passion and session.
Q.1. Balazs, can you shed some light on your background, your current work and how you got into sourcing?
Almost 10 years ago one of my friends offered me a summer-work in a Hungarian headhunter agency. It was a researcher role and I had no clue about recruitment, sourcing, interviews or so – actually, I did not even know what the word ’CV’ was meant for… I was an Assistant Mise-en-scène at the Hungarian State Opera that time and had no any intention to leave my profession. But then I joined the company and realized that I had got most of the skillset to become a quite successful researcher and honestly, I was pretty much enjoying the search piece, the new challenges in addition to the robust learning. As a researcher I was able to blend my theatrical background with my analytical and psychological interest – do not forget that was the time when we were massively relying on phone sourcing – so I made a big change and changed my career and my entire life.
Currently, I am heading the EMEA Shared Recruitment Centre of Randstad Sourceright and working with extremely talented young professionals to source and recruit all across the region. I have a team of app. 15-20 people in Budapest and we are still growing. I am much passionate to train, educate and continuously keep them updated on the most innovative global and regional talent resourcing solutions and tactics. When I closely work with them, for instance, we re-work a complex Boolean string I meet with the same enthusiasm that I had at the very beginning of my career and that makes me extremely proud, glad and driven to help them become one of the best recruiters in Europe.
Q.In your opinion, is sourcing getting more easier or more difficult?
Hmmm… Sourcing has never been easy (has it?) but the major challenges have a little bit changed. Some long years ago we had little available human capital data online and/but candidates more appreciated a recruiter’s approach. Talent identification was not easy (especially for those ones who hated cold calling), recruitment technology, Google and the giant social networks were not in place (or were in a quite embryotic mode) and the major sourcing concepts were missing. There was not a global sourcing community either that you could join and everyone was more-or-less pioneering on their own to find the best ways to search and engage with candidates.
Today, it is a very noisy and super-connected world and it looks like candidate identification and connection have got easier, however, the candidate response rate is getting lower and lower year-by-year so that the pursuing and the engagement cycle can make your work pretty difficult. I always say that a good sourcer should be a brilliant combination of a ‘secret intelligence agent’ and a ‘retail marketer’ and probably, this blended work mode is the most challenging requirement today.
Q3. What sort of sourcing tools and techniques do you find effective, are there any particular tools you find promising?
The technology is only one aspect of the sourcing world and actually, is not my first focus. I am loving to be more involved in the sourcing process and methodology angles. You know, technology is just like a gun… if you do not know how to shoot with that it will not work.
In ‘old Europe’ the technology challenge is dual: most of the super-new and well-populated initiatives are kind of mirroring some of the US concepts with little added ‘European value’ while on the other hand it is quite challenging to find the very local technology providers that may have a radical solution in place, however, have no fame, recognition and budget to promote their product within a more entire audience.
In our Centre we use app. 25-30 different sourcing tools on a daily basis (such as click rate measurement, image search engines, email verification tools and extractors, twitter and other social media plug-ins just to name a few) but I have to admit that job board database searching is still one of the most powerful channels.
Q 4. You are going to address the challenges of sourcing across EMEA at #SOUEU, what are some of the major challenges organizations face when sourcing across borders?
From an outsider point of view Europe may seem to be quite homogeneous, culturally, economical-wise… In reality though, we are the exact and clear example of total diversity. We have got 163 different countries in the region with quite different languages, cultures, histories, governmental and economical and labor work situations – and one’s life would never be long enough to learn all of it.
Before you enter into a new country in the EMEA region, and this is my topic for #SOSUAU, you have to already be aware what and how will work while sourcing for candidates. Again, not only the technology angle! Technology is certainly a massive piece in it as you have to find the channels where your candidates are present and the tools you will want to leverage but also think about process and the others.
How can you prepare yourself to the best engage with candidates in Dubai, Milan or Kecskemét? Is there any difference among these locations? What is the ideal conversion rate in Germany or in Russia? How can you learn and map a new market, a brand new business segment in Turkey and within a few hours? What is the way of communication, your style and wording local candidates may the most appreciate? What can and cannot you say and post in France or in the UK and how can you figure it out on your own?…
It is not only a cultural question but a holistic one, and in short: what do you have to change in and how do you have to adapt your sourcing strategy, process, methodology and toolkit to reach the highest productivity within an brand new, un-known European market?
Balazs will be speaking at #SOSUAU on 12-13 Sep. More details here www.sosueurope.com
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