Sourcing: What It Was, What It Is, What It Could Be (Part 1 of 3)

By Bryan Chaney

The line between sourcing and recruiting has become increasingly blurred. Where does one process stop and the other begin? I’ve worked for organizations that have separated the function into completely different teams. The line was the point of application. Everything before it belonged to the sourcers. Everything after, the recruiters owned. But more and more recruiters are being tasked with candidate research.

With the adoption of social recruiting and its brand exposure, the impact of sourcing on talent acquisition has been thrust into the spotlight. And to understand where we’re going, we need to understand our past.

First, we’ll hop in the way-back machine, to look at the “old school” version of sourcing and candidate research. Since I’ve only been in the recruiting field for 9 years, I didn‘t experience the “big binders full of candidates” era.

 Let’s take SHRM’s definition of talent sourcing as a starting point: “Sourcing is the proactive searching for qualified job candidates for current or planned open positions.”

I‘ve always associated sourcing with lead generation. It’s prospecting for companies and/or people that fit targeted qualifications. In the world of sales, it would be companies with specific products, or a particular number of employees. Many times but not always, with operations in targeted geographies. The sales person had to manage the process from start to finish. Very similar to sales, the recruiter would manage the entire process, or full life-cycle recruiting.

Within the last few years, market and business development roles have separated from the typical sales role. It’s the difference between inbound and outbound sales calls, and takes a very different approach as well as alternate personality characteristics of the people doing the work. Some call it the separation between hunting and farming tactics, because it takes more curiosity and initiative to stalk your “prey.” I’m sure we’re all comfortable with that analogy like we‘re comfy with a restraining order.

Source : http://tiptopmarketer.com/setting-up-a-profitable-sales-funnel-part-1-of-2/

Previously, lead generation or lead sourcing job titles were listed as “Inside Sales” or something similar, because these people were rarely, if ever seen face-to-face by the company’s prospects and clients. Cue the stereotype of sourcers as low-level recruiters.

As the spread of information and contact details increased and sales cycles got more complex, the need for a specialized business development approach was needed. Binders and Rolodex spinners gave way to Excel spreadsheets, which gave way to corporate databases. Ultimately, the data found its way into more user-friendly CRMs or Customer Relationship Management systems. The same is true of the divergence between recruiting and sourcing.

“It is not the reactive function of reviewing resumes and applications sent to the company in response to a job posting or pre-screening candidates.”

A recruiter’s job used to be the management of inbound candidates. Whether it was office or retail foot traffic, mailed resumes, or (gasp) faxed resumes and cover letters. The reason?  Research was easier. Job requirements were simpler. Personalities were very different for successful sourcing than they were for engagement and assessment.

Then we got fancy. Our targets got more refined and niche candidate generation started becoming the name of the game. Researchers scoured printed lists and telephone directories, looking for the right contacts to hand over, for the recruiters to contact.

“The goal of sourcing is to collect relevant data about qualified candidates, such as names, titles and job responsibilities.”

Hello, internet.

Over the last 20 years, we’ve been inundated with sources of online information. At first it was simple to search, but with burgeoning data, comes the need for more complex searching skills. More sophisticated search skills, means a more sophisticated sourcer.

Next up, part 2. Sourcing: What It Is

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.

How to Create a Convincing Brand Part 3 of 3

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

In the final part of our How to Create a Convincing Brand series we take a look at improving the candidate experience one step further. The goal is to drive the conversation to a company owned platform where prospective candidates can fully experience the candidate and employer relationship using multiple mediums and technology like video, branding, relationships and surveys in one place.

Talent communities have traditionally been referred to as ‘talent pools’ or 'talent pipelines’ or talent network. As businesses become more social it’s important to first create a relationship with a qualified talent pool. In order to become a more socially friendly business, your company needs to invest in a talent network.

Talent communities are not only helpful to the recruiter, but it allows a candidate to feel a sense of belonging, which is what convinces your candidates that you have a convincing brand. If a candidate has a place to go after applying for a job, it’ll allow them to feel included in the organization’s overall recruiting process.

Creating this sense of belonging even before a candidate focuses on a specific a job will make her want to keep track of future opportunities. Without the network job candidates will apply for a job and never visit your website again, especially if they never receive any notice about the status of their application.

As we discussed earlier in the week, one of the major steps in creating a successful employer brand is hitting on necessary touch points. Essentially what Talent Communities help recruiters accomplish is staying active and engaged with recruiters while enabling recruiters to provide relevant information. In order to create a convincing brand companies must provide a method for candidates to engage with recruiters and HR professionals, build consistent brand messages through multiple platforms, and hit on specific touch points that allow candidates to feel apart of the process.

In the end, a "convincing brand" is a brand that a candidate can feel related to and internalize. Your success is predicated on your ability to engage with candidates as human beings.

If you’ve missed part one and part two, you can follow up with them here:

How to Create a Convincing Brand Part 1 of 3
How to Create a Convincing Brand Part 2 of 3

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit. 

How to Create a Convincing Brand (Part 2 of 3): Managing impressions

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

In part one of How to Create a Convincing Brand I talked about the importance of sharing your story as an employer across multiple platforms. The importance of having a consistent brand when it comes to your career site, corporate blogs, and any video used to convey your employer’s brand cannot be underestimated. Employment branding is showcasing what sets you apart from all the other brands out there. This week we will cover the importance of understanding the touch point intersections in relation to where candidates spend their time both online and offline and why these “channels” are the key to growing and establishing your employment brand.

In most organizations, brand ideology is embedded into some activities more than others. For instance, it is usually a standard practice of each new employee to learn the history of the company and its beliefs. It’s in these moments that employees learn this is how we do things here lessons about the brand. It’s easy to overlook day-to-day processes and the implications it has on your brand. With recruiters brushing off a phone call or ignoring someone at the monthly AMA luncheon affects your brand without even thinking.

The three major touch points in recruiting and human resources help define the type of experience each of your candidates have with your specific brand. In order to recruit more effectively and increase your overall employment brand it’s important to follow these simple employer touch points:

Pre-employment experience: One of the first and most important touch points is the pre-employment experience. We’ve heard candidates submitting their resume into the black hole, recruiters being unapproachable, and laborious processes that discourage candidates from applying for open job requisitions. Creating an atmosphere direct communication will enhance the candidate’s pre-employment experience and increase your employer’s brand image, in other words, create a mutual "first impression."

On-boarding experience: The on-boarding experience is a candidate’s first impression of a company as an employee. Company history and culture are at the forefront of your new employees' mind and how you handle their on-boarding will determine how long they stay. The on-boarding experience should be considered as a critical "second impression" because it’s how the employee will view everything about the company.

I remember when I started at my first job, the first week was amazing and learning new processes and how everything worked was a utopia. I instantly told all my friends how great this company was and that everything about it was perfect. This is a touch point that many people miss, but should be looked at as one of the most important.

Post-hire experience: The final touch point for recruiters and human resources should be the post-hire experience. Once a candidate has jumped into a specific routine it’s important to keep them engaged and feel like they’re apart of the company and have an impact in the workplace and provide a positive "third impression." Without this touch point candidates may lose interest and become disengaged. In a 2012 survey, over 18% of employees are disengaged which costs the United States alone, $450 – 550 billion dollars in lost productivity.

Although day-to-day operations vary from company to company, the overall root processes don’t change much at all. Each candidate has a pre, current, and post experience with a company and how you handle it will determine the success of each candidate turned employee. This will help you not only build a convincing employer brand, but will end up reducing turnover rates which could save your company millions each year.

On Thursday we will discuss how employers can take the candidate experience one step further by developing a platform that offers real transparency and works with candidates to recruit better within your organization.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit. 

The Art of Lean HR (Part 2): Leveraging Past Applicants

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

On a previous post, we discussed a lean approach to talent acquisition: Eliminating Waste by reducing the drop-out rate of candidates who come to your website (sometimes up to 90% of those candidates). Today we discuss another way to eliminating waste: By enabling you to leverage extremely valuable assets, past applicants.

Over the years, your company has accumulated a lot of information about potential candidates. Most of them applied for a job you posted months or years back — but they never heard back from your company, because for one reason or another, they were filtered out of the top of the pile. What if you started to take a closer look at these people who were quietly stored away on your traditional corporate repositories (ATS, CRMs, or other databases), in countless folders on your desktop, in Outlook, or in boxes of papers?

A new dimension of "Inside sourcing" is about the art of leveraging 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 that you may over the past few years.

Just calculate... Information about past applicants obtained from various means represent significant acquisition costs. Although these costs vary depending on the company and the type of talent sought, an empirical analysis performed by Marty Brack and published by ERE in December 2009, shows that the average cost per resume through LinkedIn (which is the least expensive source) is $18. Based on this number, the value of 20,000 resumes is $360,000. Supposing that all these resumes are of lower quality or related to easy to find talent and of no higher value than a regular "like" on a Facebook page by unqualified leads usually estimated to be $3, the value of these resumes is still $60,000, which is not trivial for cost-conscious organizations.

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 these cases, TalentCircles automatically creates a profile for the candidates. Once these candidates are imported, you can send an email to these candidates offering them to opt into your talent network. While opting into your network, candidates 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 still (or again) interested in your company — which means that you do not have to re-source them.

The ROI is clear...  especially considering that this capability of TalentCircles is just a small feature of the platform! The immediate benefits are obvious too. By doing so, you:

• Expand your live corporate Rolodex;
• Show candidates that you care by inviting them to opt into your network (and eventually make them forget their disappointment about the fact that you didn't interact with them when they originally connected with you).

For more information, request our white papers:

— TalentCircles: ROI of a talent engagement platform

— TalentCircles: Leveraging Past Applicants

Send an email to : info@talentcircles.com

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[1] http://www.ere.net/2009/12/02/just-one-look-at-cost-per-resume/

How to Create A Convincing Brand Part 1 of 3

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

The popularity of social media has accelerated the convergence between HR and Marketing, and attracted special attention on employment branding. Employment branding is all engaging candidates, looking at them as potential customers and transforming them into brand advocates. Employment branding is a new dimension of marketing and is the most advanced form of social recruiting.

Companies have started to flock anywhere and everywhere they see potential candidates and customers. Whether they are tweeting out open job listings, hosting virtual career fairs public networks creating compelling videos on Youtube, or pinning company branded material on Pinterest, recruiters are everywhere. No longer do they stay behind the veiled curtain and are inaccessible to the everyday candidate, but recruiters are now seen as the first line of defense (or marketers).

According to a report sponsored by Jobvite.com, over 51% of job seekers are using social media to land their next opportunity and like marketing you better be where the customer is or they won’t purchase your product or apply for your job. Human resource professionals no longer are responsible for process payroll or benefits: they are now in charge of attracting the best talent to their organization. To do so they must be able to share their story across different platforms. Here are some of the top places that recruiters and HR professionals should be in order to successfully brand their company:

Career Site: One of the top places a candidate will be visit on their search for a new job will be your company’s career site. This is considered the hub for sharing your company’s story and should be used to highlight employees, your company’s culture, and everything that makes your company stand out from your competition. However, you can't put everything on your career site: candidates can be lost. Offer them to enter your talent network and within your talent networks, create "circles" targeted as your various types of candidates.

Corporate Blogs: Blogs are one of the best places to share your message. My favorite employment branded blog is Nuts About Southwest where the marketing and public relationships department showcase everything big happening at Southwest while highlighting their employees. Using TalentCircles, you can create blog posts in each of your circles and, here again, offer your audience very targeted messaging.

Video: Well written employment videos will help your company truly relate, engage, and tell a story about the company culture and environment going beyond your standard careers page. Job postings with video icons are also viewed 12% more than postings without video. This should encourage your staff to get creative and start posting more videos to go along with open job requisitions. From a candidates perspective they’ll be able to see what is happening in your company and be enticed into joining your talent network and eventually work for you.

Employment branding is not one single message that you broadcast to everybody with catch phrases that company would be able to come up with. It's the art of showcasing what makes you different and more interesting!

Next week we will take a deeper look into the employment brand and the importance of candidate engagement through various touch points.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit.