My Sourcing Story : Q&A With Victor Soroka, EPAM

Name: Victor Soroka
Country: Ukraine
Company : EPAM
Position: Global Leadership Hiring

Q1. Can you tell us about your current role and what problems you are solving on a day-to-day basis?

My current role at  EPAM is about Leadership Hiring mostly. We are growing in 20+ countries for 25-30% every year so leaders’ attraction is a critical point for us. EPAM has its own unique engineering culture so sourcing and recruiting our type of leaders requires combination of sourcing creativity, global market and industry understanding as well as deep knowledge of company DNA.

Q2. How do you define sourcing?

As we all know there are no only one “right” definition of sourcing. For me sourcing is range of activities focused on identifying and attraction professionals who are qualified for the specific position based on initial requirements. Depends on the specific situation your sourcing strategy can be focused on passive or active candidates (or both groups) but the main goal is the same – fill the pipeline with specialists who meet the role requirements.

Q3. Sourcing tools I use daily?

It may sounds a little bit old fashioned but I’m a big fan of tools which really work so I would like to put LinkedIn Recruiter at the first place in my sourcing tools list.

Except that:

• Facebook Search Chrome extension from Shane;
• Request Maker – it allows you to log, edit and send HTTP requests which can be useful for some advanced sourcing hacks;
• Link Klipper for extracting and exporting links from any webpage;
• Extensity for easy management of different Chrome extensions;
• Evernote for quick notes;
• MindMeinster for building and visualization of sourcing strategies.

Q4. Can you tell us the people you admire most in sourcing?

I would pretend that this question is not about specific names of sourcing masters we all know (however I have my own favorites in this listJ) and try to put this in the following way… Most of all I admire people in sourcing who are brave enough not to follow old patterns and constantly trying to invent something new, even if it means replacing sourcers with algorithms (just joking).

Q6. Is sourcing conducted differently in the CIS region?
I do not think there are some major differences compare to global sourcing, however we can definitely talk about some local specifics:

• sourcing as a separate function/role/unit is present in tiny % of companies, in most cases one person does a full cycle recruiting, in some companies HR and Recruiter is still the same person;
• active sourcing is common mostly within IT industry, in most other cases “post and pray” approach is used;
• RPO is not really popular in this part of the world but you will find number of freelance recruiters available (especially in IT again);

Q7. What sourcing tactics work best in CIS?

• right mix of global and local sources should be used; penetration of LinkedIn is relatively low (especially when we are talking about not-IT candidates);
• % of English speaking population is low so make sure to include local languages titles into your search strings;
• global people aggregators may have not enough information about candidates in this part of the world so don’t forget about old good Boolean Search and X-Ray Search.

Q5. One sourcing advice I can give to my peers is…

…get into details. You can have all possible sourcing tools and systems but it is not possible to run effective sourcing without deep understanding of the role you are working in. So my advice – before starting searching (or even worse contacting candidates) make sure you do understand who you are looking for and what this person supposed to do on day to day basis.

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Victor will be at #sosueu in September. Get your tickets now.