Sometime last week, one of the recent FOT webinar attendees emailed me with a question,
“What would you suggest I do to grow my sourcing team’s expertise?”
The easy answer is training. Especially since the writer of said question is from a huge PR firm that can probably pay for it.
But what if you’ve done the training and got the books? Your team knows the basic tactics?
You can always bring in a guest speaker to jumpstart the team’s thinking. Maybe send them to a conference or two. Do those weekly meetings where everyone has to bring some new tactic the table.
But really, it’s time to make your sourcer’s life hard.
I don’t mean in a work 60 hours a week, no tools, grunt laden administrative work. I mean it’s time to move your sourcer out of their comfort zone. My boss, whether he’s done it intentionally or not, has helped me grow my skillset 100x by taking on a variety of clients with innumerable diverse searches. Some people view retained search, 3rd party search, agency search as the “dark side”. I’ve found it to offer a level of diversity that I really enjoy. I came to the company 2 years ago with a strong background in sourcing for telecom related companies, and had dabbled in healthcare in my early years (i.e. pre-internet for Gen Y). I also had that little feather in my cap of developing sourcing training courses.
So have I done any sourcing in that arena since I got here? Nope.
I’ve done everything but telecom. And in the beginning of my tenure, I did have the luxury of sourcing several similar positions….I really became proficient in sourcing all levels of development (fundraising for you for-profit types) professionals. Just as I got comfortable, my req’s changed. Development was off my sourcing list for months. What came on it? Marketing pros were on it. And not just any marketing pros -specific niche industry marketing pros. Public Policy pros. Java Developers. Cleared pr’s. C-Suite executives. Sales. Heads of School. Wacky finance types. Health care research. Hell, Medical Informatics. And I was not just sourcing in the land of the non-profit – which is definitely the land I know and love. I’ve dug into construction, the furniture industry, the print industry, research, education, think tanks, it goes on and on.
So how do you handle changing it up from a corporate perspective? That’s easy – I know how you corporate types work…everyone gets assigned to a business unit and many people stay for years. They figure out their fishing grounds and work them, tweaking them as the supply runs low. You need to move the sourcing team around. If your team has been supporting corporate? Put them on Marketing. Supporting Sales? Put them on Engineering. Supporting Engineering? Push them towards Executive hiring.
There will be a learning curve. The learning makes us better sourcers. Stay with me here, if every req is easy, complacency sets in. We never reach for more, never try a different tactic to yield candidates or mine a new source. Switching up req’s assists sourcers in developing the ability to strategize faster and acknowledge reality as well as achieve understanding of which resources are yield all candidates, and where our niche repositories are.
I like the idea of a change up as a training technique. A variation on that approach would be to not just change target jobs and departments supported but also to require new methods of recruitment. Make passive candidate cold callers engage in developing referral programs or in training others (hiring managers ) to recruit effectively by identifying and nurturing centers of influence. Have “farmers” engage in passive candidate search techniques. Have recruiters focus on candidate assessment and /or on best in class recruiting metrics.
Love it…I think it serves two great purposes – find out where everyone’s strengths are (weaknesses too) but also…create the ability to immediately provide coverage should one of your team decide to move on.
kd
I think this a great article as I can relate working as a consultant for several large corporations and see exactly what Kelly describes. Sourcers/Recruiters get into a comfortable daily cycle and seem not to go outside that comfort zone. I like the idea of changing it up, shuffle the deck, move things/people to other challenges. This brings a new awakening to your perspective and keeps you from becoming stale. One thing to add which was mentioned early in the article about sending people to conferences, my personal opinion is why do some many corporations not send people to solid caliber events like SourceCon for example? I have personally invested my own money to make it a point to attend strategic events where I know I will get a tremendous ROI on my investment and come back to the arena with new ways of doing things in our profession. I also believe in getting out of the office and attending your local recruiters groups, by doing so you network with other like minded professionals and exchange many ideas. Here in Atlanta, we have a strong community that shares and supports each other to make us and our profession valued in the corporate community. My ending thought is combining what Kelly has discussed and sending key folks to strategic conferences is going to add tremendous value to the organization you support.
Hey Ronnie,
Great points on all counts. And timely, I just tweeted today that everyone should get to SourceCon at least once. Now from a corporate perspective there’s always a strong regard for budget and spend….and it really depends on the company and their policy, y’know? When I worked at Thales, it was required that we attend one professional development event a year and there was a spending cap. A lot of people just can’t handle the travel and conference $$ investment on their own, it’s awesome for those that can. But I love the idea of local sourcer and recruiter groups. I wish we had a sourcer group in DC.
kd
kd