Is Reciprocal Sourcing Right For You?

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Social sourcing is becoming a key component to the most successful corporate recruitment strategies. Businesses recognize the value in using social media and the internet to source, or research and build relationships with job seekers.

Sourcing is internet research where recruiters effectively hack the internet to find passive yet qualified job seeker candidates who are overlooked because they aren’t actively applying for job openings or networking.

As the sheer number of social media profiles and the rich data it represents increases; Keep in mind that Facebook now boasts over 1.4 billion user profiles and growing; social sourcing continues to grow in importance in corporate recruiting strategies. Imagine as a recruiter, you are sourcing, searching and hacking not just sites like Facebook and Twitter but online communities, forums, chats and industry blogs. The number of profiles is mind-boggling. It’s easy to see why researching all of the profiles, managing all of the data and engaging with the talent pool requires a significant amount of time and resources.

This is why a growing number of companies employ teams of full time sourcers whose job it is to look for the next hire for your company. Except maybe, you are a recruiting team of one or don’t have the budgetary position to add a crew of sourcers to your team. Fear not, I have a solution I call reciprocal sourcing.

Reciprocal sourcing is based on a reciprocal and partner relationship with a sister company's recruiting team or teams where you work together to source, engage and build a pipeline of qualified job seekers with the purpose of sharing and recommending your partner as a potential career opportunity.

Sourcers or recruiters from two different companies recruit and source for candidates sharing the candidate pool and potentials they have identified. Maybe you happen to be hunting around a local forum to find a number of potential candidates for you except in the short term they don’t fit the bill. You are looking for someone with 2-3 years more experienced but your reciprocal sourcing partner has an opening that fits these candidates you’ve uncovered.

Could reciprocal sourcing be right for you? Businesses that participate in a reciprocal and partner relationship strategy realize these five key components that build a successful reciprocal sourcing strategy

1. It is an analytical process. It requires a team and technology that can share data easily.
2. It is a collaborative process. This adds value to the recruitment process as multiple perspectives across a variety of engagements can be shared.
3. It is cost-effective. The more you know about the candidates, the better advantage you have during the negotiation process. And, the overall knowledge you gain as you learn about more candidates across your network is priceless.
4. It promotes effective competition. This allows recruiters to cut to the chase and get things done together while having a new pipeline of candidates being funneled in their direction.
5. It collectively helps refine the workforce by honing in on the necessary skill sets that businesses are needing, and helping to define those attributes in the candidate’s profile.

If these attributes complement your recruitment style, you may want to consider integrating reciprocal sourcing into your overall planning.

I used reciprocal recruiting strategies in the past with great success and created my own referral network with colleagues outside of an organization. The key to successful reciprocal sourcing is a relationship among teams built on trust. You can’t be direct competitors for the exact same employees. Together you must share the workload and work towards helping one another. My referral team and I would actively search, engage and share candidates that fit our referral network’s ideal candidate profiles crowdsourcing the recruiting process. I will share more about how working together in your sourcing and recruiting efforts can be a recipe for success for you.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

C#9 of Social Recruiting: Compute — The Candidate Engagement Index™

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

We have already discussed:

 C#1 Continuity,

C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding,

C#3 Culture — your core values and credibility,

C#4 Courtesy and Candidate Centricity,

C#5 Conversation — Live video screening and discussions and

C#6 Curation — Pre-recorded interviews/questionnaires

C#7 Content Marketing — Addressing real people

C#8 Conversion — Socializing applicants in corporate repositories

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Today, the qualitative ROI of being social is obvious to any company. In truth, if you are not social, the risks for your organization to come across as outdated are very high: "The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2015 millennials will overtake the majority representation of the workforce and by 2030 this hyper-connected, tech savvy generation will make up 75% of the workforce."

Active and passive job seekers are out on all the major public social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn and their number increases every year. It's not an option to avoid being social: Social sourcing is a must for companies because they need to engage with people where they are.

Now that social sourcing is just for everybody, how will you stand out? You will if you cultivate excellence in your social recruiting network.

Using TalentCircles, your social sourcing efforts become measurable social recruiting results and allow you to fine-tune your engagement strategy on social networks. It's critical for you to measure your Talent Engagement Index™, which is the percentage of active or passive candidates who join from public social networks into your private network.

Because TalentCircles tracks about 350 data points, you can measure how you execute on your social recruiting plan and establish guidelines as well as goals: This is your Candidate Engagement Index™.

C#8 of Social Recruiting: Conversion — Socializing applicants lost in corporate repositories

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

We have already discussed:

 C#1 Continuity,

C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding,

C#3 Culture — your core values and credibility,

C#4 Courtesy and Candidate Centricity,

C#5 Conversation — Live video screening and discussions and

C#6 Curation — Pre-recorded interviews/questionnaires

C#7 Content Marketing — Addressing real people

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Over the years, your company has accumulated a lot of information about potential candidates. Most of them have applied for a job you posted months or years ago — but they never heard back from your company, because for one reason or another, they were filtered out of the top of the pile.

Socialize this huge pool of untapped potential! Past candidates may have gained valuable experience since they originally applied and can be interesting candidates for today’s open positions or great connectors to other talent through their own networks. They sometimes represent huge investments.

TalentCircles enables you to leverage these valuable assets at a negligible cost by allowing you to:

• Mass import the candidates' records stored in a corporate repository (CRM, ATS, or any other database).
• Import electronic or paper resumes.

In all cases, TalentCircles automatically creates a profile for these candidates. Once these candidates are imported, you can send them an email offering them to opt into your talent network. While opting into your network, they can use their favorite Social login (which helps you keep their contact information up-to-date). At least a portion of these candidates will be telling you that they are still (or again) interested in your company — which means that you do not have to re-source them.

Socializing past candidates is interesting in two ways:

• First, you can save significant money through this "inside sourcing" strategy.
• Secondly, this gives you an idea of the actual value of your dormant assets, and enables you to assess your social footprint. If a lower percentage of past applicants respond to your call, you can ask yourself a few important questions:

o   Were these past candidates just looking for a job and not especially interested in joining your company?

o   Are these applicants upset at your company because you did not bother to connect with them at the time they applied?

Mixed results can be extremely useful: Most of the time, they will mean that you have to address a brand deficit and put special efforts into a more proactive social recruiting strategy. Even if you are very new in social sourcing, start now — because you are not late at all in social recruiting.

C#3 of Social Recruiting: Culture — your Core Values and Credibility

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

This week, we have discussed "C#1" Continuity and C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

As most social media gurus like to say, social media is about speaking with, not "at" people. It's not about pushing generic and bland statements that would define just any company. It's about telling people what's unique and exciting about you.

The primary purpose of your home page in your talent network is to offer a personal connection with your core values, to create the desire of being part of your world and or interacting with you.

The flexibility of TalentCircles allows you to upload videos or create new content about your company as often as you want. If it is compelling, your creativity may be a reason for your candidates to follow you more closely inside your talent network and invite their friends to show them how awesome you are.

You probably do not have a team of artists creating a new Google doodle every day, but you may have great employees who would love to share their story and speak about your company’s core values. The credibility of your talent network is dependent on the trust you instill. If your company really is a great place to work, your best spokespeople will be your employees!

Storytelling videos showcasing real people are an essential dimension of HR marketing. This is also what will entice the candidates in your network to share your jobs, speak about your events, or re-post your blog entries on their personal social networks.

The nine "Cs" of social recruiting: C#1 Continuity

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

The engagement gap today

Today, the "social" aspect of the candidate experience is virtually nonexistent! You have invested time and money to source candidates across various social media channels. You’ve started to come across as an engaging brand. However, the minute a candidate is impressed enough to want to work for you, your social capital plunges: You ask them to fill forms and go through the hoops and loops of your career site or your job application forms. You go from a friendly approach and a compelling message to a cumbersome and robotic interface that yields terrible results: 

• Up to 90% of the people you have attracted to your career site may drop off and lose the opportunity to increase your talent pools.
• Most of the people who have filled a form or left you an email will never hear back from you, which will destroy any brand capital you have built and damage your company's reputation.

Your social recruiting efforts will be disappointing because you break the first and most compelling rule of social networking: the ability to connect and make people feel connected.

The traditional candidate experience today is mediocre at best. The experience of socially sourced candidates is just the same, and may even come across as worse because of the canyon between how candidates see you on social networks and how they’re treated once they try to apply for a job.

Experiential Continuity: Articulating social sourcing and social recruiting

Continuity is the absolute first requirement to leverage your social sourcing efforts into a powerful social recruiting strategy. You must offer candidates a smooth transition between public social networks and your corporate precincts.

Social login
Make it easy for candidates to respond to your call. Joining your talent network must be easy – it should leverage the identity candidates feel comfortable disclosing. For social candidates, their ID is typically a social login. Instead of asking candidates to fill a lengthy form, let them import their professional information from LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google+. Candidates must be able to join from anywhere via a link or a button.

Live social profile

Being social is more than enabling candidates to connect via a social login. Your private talent network is a live engagement platform designed to enable interactions between the candidates and your company — not a passive repository where you store candidates whose data will be stale after just a few months.

When candidates join your network using their social login, their profile is auto-populated with their professional information from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Plus. Even more importantly, candidates have the ability to access their profiles and add supplemental information, such as a video resume, which gives you an immediate insight into their personality. In the social world, we hire for attitude just as much as for aptitude[1].

Continuity requires: a network and candidate opt-in

Again, social recruiting is not just about scouting public networks for talent (that’s only sourcing through social networks). The power of your public social channels is the fact that people opt into these networks and voluntarily provide the information they deem relevant to share.

The strength of your candidate network must be predicated on exactly the same principle: By opting into your network, candidates indicate that they are interested in being and staying connected with you. In other words, your talent pipelines include real followers, instead of just names you’ve scraped from the web.

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[1] In his book Hire for Attitude, Mark Murphy explains, "Our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament."

You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy! (Part 1)

 This will be a series of 10 posts focuses on social recruiting.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

In May 2013, the Aberdeen Group reported that "social networking sites have jumped up to the second most effective source of hire," after employee referral. According to a study published by CareerArc, two out of three companies will implement social recruiting in 2014. Their June 2013 study surveyed 350 hiring employers and 2,117 job seekers and showed that:

• 72% of companies use social media to advertise their jobs;
• 59% of companies find they get more referrals and 50% get more applications by using social recruiting;
• 1 in 3 job seekers use social media as their primary tool for job searching;
• 50% of job seekers spend more than 6 hours per week using social media for their job search.

Today, social sourcing is a fact: 92 percent of U.S. companies are using social media networks to recruit talent. Are you able to make the most of it? Probably not: your "social" efforts likely hit a wall - because you drive "social" candidates to your career site and ask them to fill the same convoluted forms just as you did five years ago. So, despite significant investments in social sourcing, your company probably comes across just as antisocial as it did five years ago.

Can you stop relapsing into the old days? Yes, you can, and it's easy. You need to go beyond social sourcing and have a social recruiting strategy. You need:

• A destination within your corporate site that allows you to transform a follower or a connection into a contact and a link into a relationship. In short, you need to continue to engage.
• A network to scale engagement capabilities. You already know, based on your experience with social networks, that engagement can only happen if parties share a common space where they can interact. Follow-through must also happen on a network. It's not enough to store candidate information in a database.

TalentCircles is the talent engagement network that enables you to:

• Expand on your social sourcing efforts.
• Transform these efforts into a coherent and rewarding social recruiting strategy to offer an optimal social candidate experience. 

Social recruiting is the ability to better engage with candidates, engage with more of them, know them better, nurture a vibrant community and build up relevant talent pipelines for immediate or future positions in order to save time and money.

This series of posts will describe the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and leverage our Talent Engagement Index™ and our Candidate Engagement Index™ models to assess your progress and performance.

• C#1 Continuity — Articulating social sourcing and social recruiting
• C#2 Consistency  — Follow-through your branding strategy
• C#3 Culture — Your core values and your credibility
• C#4 Courtesy — Social recruiting means candidate centricity
• C#5 Conversation — Live video screening and discussions
• C#6 Curation — Pre-recorded interviews/questionnaires
• C#7 Content Marketing — Addressing real people
• C#8 Conversion — Social sourcing, social sharing and socializing past applicants
• C#9 Compute — Mastering Talent and Candidate Engagement Indexes

Sourcing: What It Was, What It Is, What It Could Be (Part 2 of 3)

By Bryan Chaney

Last time, we stepped in the way-back machine to look at what sourcing used to be.

Surprisingly, people got very sentimental over their dusty binders full of candidate prospects.
As someone who keeps stacks of paper - and not very well organized - I can honestly thank my lucky wildcard asterisks for the internet.

Sourcing has changed in three evolutionary ways, according to my perspective. It’s the technology that supports the sourcing activity, the architecture of the teams that tackle the research, and the tactics that today’s sourcers have learned to leverage.

Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool

Tools

There’s a bevy of sourcing tools out there. Sourcing automation tools are intended for finding larger volumes of candidate prospects. They can take many forms and data sources, including:

- Resume database access from job boards, both general and niche

- Manual and automated search from major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo

- Custom career search engines like Indeed, SimplyHired and Beyond

- Sourcing aggregators like InfoGist, Broadlook Diver, TalentHook and SourcePoint

Sourcing augmentation tools are about finding those “purple unicorns” or the hard-to-source prospects. The majority of these individuals are passive and have limited information online.

Most of these take advantage of social conversation data, based on influencers, keywords and semantic search.

- Social sourcing platforms like Entelo, Diver, Gild, TalentBin, Rolepoint and OpenWeb

- Alternate search engines like blekko, blinkx, DuckDuckGo, sperse, socialmention

- Twitter Search, Facebook Graph Search, Google+ or FindPeopleOnPlus

- GitHub, StackOverflow, Reddit, the list goes on…

Teams

“Sourcing is typically part of the recruiting function performed by the HR professional, but it may also be conducted by managers within the company.”

  

Full Life-cycle Recruiters

Long-been the champions of the corporate world, the full-desk recruiter manages everything from the approval of the requisition to the job description, the sourcing, screening and assessment, all the way through interview and offer. Taking on every stage of the process means that the recruiter is the admin, brand ambassador, talent advisor, quality control and master negotiator, all in one. Which also means that he or she can realistically only handle so many reqs. The process of sourcing leads typically (but not always) takes a backseat to filtering through existing applicants.

Sourcing Plate-spinners

I’m talking about individuals that serve in a corporate or agency environment supporting a recruiter, or more likely, a team of recruiters. Having spent some time in the RPO world at the start of my career, I understand this model intimately. It wasn’t the most common method at the time, but has gained popularity. By separating responsibilities, you’re able to focus and refine your skills on one aspect of candidate generation: the research. You’re also able to work more closely with each recruiter and hiring manager (depending on the client relationship) to understand the job requirements.

Sourcing Teams

Separating what I call the upstream activities - research, first contact, pipelining and engagement - the sourcing function becomes the new face of the recruiting team. The de facto employment brand ambassadors in a system that understands the value of sourcing. Most teams are divided by internal business function or simply by geography, which allows deep understanding and a network of knowledge about a company’s hiring needs. After the prospect applies in the applicant tracking system, it’s up to the recruiting team, which now serves as more of an assessment and account manager function for the hiring managers.

The hiring managers also do their fair share of sourcing, because they have industry contacts and established networks to give the talent acquisition team a head start.

Tactics

“Sourcing can identify either candidates who are not actively looking for job opportunities (passive job seekers) or candidates who are actively searching for jobs (active job seekers).”

Sourcing passive job seekers can include direct calls to businesses that employ individuals who match the key requirements of the position. Some people call it rusing, others just call it telephone sourcing. It can also be accomplished through networking with various business-related groups.

Both passive and active job seekers can be located by sourcing job boards, social media sites, corporate alumni associations and through all types of networking. After all, a resume that’s three years old in a job board database, may lead you to someone who’s no longer looking and thus no longer source-able on a career or job site. There’s gold in them there databases.

Another powerful tactic that’s gaining momentum is community engagement, or leveraging inbound marketing strategies to start recruiting conversations. By taking a holistic view of a candidate profile or persona, you can curate shareable content that’s keyword-engineered to attract talent. Using a free service like Google Trends, you can see what others are reading online and searching for by related terms. (Side note: Who knew actuaries like to play Sudoku?)

Becoming a reliable source of information, you gain both of the key ingredients to unlocking employment commerce: 1) trust and 2) relevance.

Next up, Sourcing: What It Could Be

About Bryan Chaney: Bryan Chaney is a Talent Branding and Attraction Strategist. He most recently led employment branding and social media for corporate recruitment at Aon. Previously, he developed the recruitment marketing arm of a Texas based RPO provider that serves SMB and Fortune clients. He serves on the board of Social Media Breakfast in Austin and founded careerconnects.org, a community event platform, to gather niche recruiting and HR professionals with candidates to share career strategies. The Huffington Post recently named him one of the Top 100 Most Social HR Experts on Twitter. Connect with Bryan for consulting and speaking availability at Bryan Chaney.