Paper Sourcing

Reading through Wednesday's Telegraph whilst on a flight. I came across a section focussed around engineers. In particular it was a page showing who had recently achieved chartered status. 

Now we all know engineers are a difficult bunch to find and chartered ones have a little extra attraction. So how about an entire broadsheet spread of names including what they've chartered in...? Sounds pretty awesome. Combine that with a cross reference through social media and you've got yourself a lovely pool of candidates to target.

That led me to think if that potential pool of candidate is sat there, already verified in a paper then what else can we garner from the press? 

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has sourced (or tried to source) candidates that have come up in the press through a Boolean search. Nor will I be the only one who has sourced (or tried to source) after watching a TV show and seeing a potential candidate. But how many times do you look at the paper when your flicking through with your Sourcing hat on? Probably a number of far better sourcers than I for sure, but the rest of us... 

The world is full of little snippets of sourcing gold and some of that data isn't available from the internet or phone. Take a look around!

The View From The Other Side

All I can say is wow! Time really flies when you're having fun. I can't believe I've now been in my new role in-house for 3 months. I feel like I've already achieved a huge amount but I'm very aware that my task is just starting. A few people (Hi Kasia) have asked to find out about the transition as a sourcer into an internal role. Now I've been brought in due to my sourcing knowledge but it's very much a broader recruitment role which is a little different to my initial thoughts of what I wanted to do. Which leads on to my first point of a few about the transition:

Things change, quickly

I thought that external roles were of fast change but being on the other side has changed my view point on this! Everything from priorities through roles to your very own role and ownerships can change very quickly. Its good to be comfortable with change as it happens!

There's a lot more scope

It's not just about finding candidates, getting them interviewed and hiring. Oh no. If it were that easy it'd be no fun! The flip side of this however is that it can be very much like being a kid in a sweet shop. There's so many exciting and new things to do that it's very easy to get overawed. I've found myself (aside from day to day recruiting) looking at psychometrics, graduate recruitment, apprenticeships, marketing, reporting, on boarding, training, assessments and much more.

Access to hiring managers

One of my biggest frustrations comes from feedback and being able to fine tune searches with input from the teams on the ground. Being on the other side means that I've got access to the managers either voluntarily or by going and finding them and sitting down to really understand their needs. 

There's no where to hide

The flip side of the above point is that that when things aren't going so well there is certainly no hiding to give yourself an extra hour or two to get things done. Everyone knows where you live!

Impacting the business every day

Probably the number one reason to make a move to an inhouse recruitment role is that you really can see the impact your work has on the people around you. You really will find that when you do well people are very grateful. Saying that, the business critical role that you're struggling to fill through direct or agency.. you really do feel the impact of it.

Learning
 
Very much along the lines of the scope point above, there is so much to learn. Whether you're learning how to put together graduate scheme, how to use that ATS or even contributing (in a very small way) regarding HR issues every day genuinely is a learning experience.

Agency recruiters

It is and has been really important to develop relationships with external recruiters who have a niche knowledge of our sector. The main problem for me at the moment is the cold call. It appears that there is a cold call manual with the script for introduction and objection handling. It also appears from my (albeit limited) experience that every single recruiter has it in front of them when they call. It can be frustrating.

Sourcing time

The biggest downside for me is the other side of the coin from my reason for the move in-house in the first place. I wanted to open up my responsibilities and get involved with a larger amount of things. This has had a significant impact on the time I'm able to spend sourcing and keeping up with latest tools and techniques. Before I spent almost all my time developing new techniques and testing the latest tools along with active sourcing. Now there's so much more to do that I just can't give it that same dedication. 

If you love your sourcing then you need to weigh this up versus the long term benefits of the great stuff from above. For me it's a no brainer but I'm acutely aware I need to find more time to study and practice amongst all the other exciting things I'm working on. 

And finally... Free stuff! 

One of the lovely things about working in FMCG is that you occasionally get to taste some of the produce and get involved with taste testing for future products. If you like food (like I do) then it's a brilliant perk! 

I hope this has given an insight into the transition that I've gone through but I'm more than happy to chat further if anyone has any questions.

On New Beginnings

Today is a big day for me. Today is the day I finish my time at Talent Works International.

It's A New Dawn

I'm incredibly excited about the new challenges ahead, the new people I'll meet and the new experiences I'm going to have. I've been given a fantastic opportunity to work on a really challenging project that is going to be huge amounts of fun (more about that further down the line).

It's also a time of introspection, looking back at the past three years (to the day) and looking forward to what the future holds. 

I've had the opportunity to learn from some of the best in the business, I've had the opportunity to work with some of the biggest and best companies on the planet. I've had the opportunity to work on such a diverse range of roles that simply wouldn't have been possible in any other company. I've placed a VP of Finance for an oil and gas company in the Far East, I've placed a Brand Director for one of the world's leading beer brands, I've placed candidates across Europe, across sectors and learned so much in the process. 

Talent Works was my first step onto a road I didn't even know existed. It has been pivotal in shaping my view on how the world should work. It has been pivotal in making me realise what I want to do with my career. This is something I'll be eternally grateful for, I didn't know where I was going, what I wanted to do and what my passion was. 

Now I do. 

Really knowing how positively direct sourcing can impact a business is one thing. It's now time for me to implement that and show just how good it can be. 

It's an adventure I'm looking forward to.

Internal recruitment, I'm coming for you! 

Taking the Goldenline to Polish sourcing success.

Yes that is a pretty darn awful title I admit.

So you've been asked to complete a sourcing project in Poland. Where do you start? 

Well may I recommend having a look at Goldenline.pl. For those of you who haven't heard of Goldenline it is the number two professional networking site behind LinkedIn (according to Alexa Internet) in Poland with over 1.3 million people registered. From experience there is some exclusivity between LinkedIn and Goldenline so it's definitely a worthwhile place to search.

Whilst the internal search is there and works to some extent I've found it to be much easier, quicker and less restricted to complete a 'normal' Boolean search through Google. 

So how do we go about constructing a basic string to allow us to search through Goldenline? The first and obvious one is to utilise the site: operator.

So start with site:goldenline.pl followed by your search. In general the results are very clean although depending on the complexity of your search you can end up with some noisy results. To counteract this it's useful to focus in on candidate profiles only, unlike LinkedIn there's no /in or /pub to help to distinguish between people and 'others'. There is however a way to distinguish that I've found works pretty well. In the URL for candidate profiles the site is goldenline.pl/firstname-secondname. As such we can utilise the following to complete our search:

site:goldenline.pl/*-* plus your search should see you golden. 

If you fancy combining this with a LinkedIn search you can try a base of:

site:goldenline.pl/*-* | site:pl.linkedin.com/pub | site:pl.linkedin.com/in -dir followed by your search.

One of the benefits of Google is that it seems to translate your search into the local language so you can unleash your search in English and you shouldn't miss out on any results. 

It's a basic search but it's always good to share tips. I hope it helps. 

Searching The Official Board

I found an interesting website the other day that I have had a play around with. It seems to contain pretty much accurate top level org charts (although I would take the reporting lines with a large pinch of salt!) for a large number of companies. Having been using it we've found that it has been mostly accurate in terms of people and a large number of these weren’t available via LinkedIn or similar websites. We identified a large number (150+) of people across multiple countries and 10 companies with only 3 or 4 not being within their organisations.

The website is www.theofficialboard.com and it contains a large number of org charts for a lot of large corporates across the world. When you look at organisational structures within this a most of the names are obscured though their titles are not.

As such you can chuck in a quick search to uncover the names for each position:

site:theofficialboard.com Company Name Job Title

For example on: 

http://www.theofficialboard.com/org-chart/accenture-united-kingdom

You will see there’s a Business Process Outsourcing Director whose initials are P and G.

To search this you could enter into Google:

site:theofficialboard.com Accenture UK Business Process Outsourcing Director

The first link shows Peter George in the News section of the website, the second link points to Peter’s bio.

It’s not flawless but it seems to be pretty useful for high level searches across the world.

Markets...

How well do you know the market?

It's 3am and I'm currently sat in my car as we traverse Europe. (I've done my stint but I can't sleep in cars... I'm not blogging while driving, don't worry). Any way where was I? Right we're currently crossing Europe, somewhere in Germany. I've not seen the sign for Düsseldorf but we can't be far off. Nearly half way!

Back to the point. I've just filled up at the petrol station and it confused the hell out of me. Nothing to do with being up nigh on 24 hours. This led me to think, how well do you (me) really know your markets? I mean if something as simple as filling up your car (on much cheaper diesel) is significantly different then what else is?

There certainly must be a number of factors in sourcing and recruiting candidates that differ from home. So if you are recruiting outside of your own nation, how much do you really know about the factors that will impact your ability to attract candidates... There's two ways to find out I guess, research and immersion. I'm all for immersion myself but I guess the boss isn't going to send me out to Indonesia next time I have a role there..

I'm lucky in that I'm able to do the in depth research for my clients and have access to a fantastic team of insight consultants who are the best around at finding this info (and lots more) out. I'd be interested to learn how you find out that petrol stations are different?

The end of the /pymk/pcard?

The end of another great LinkedIn hack

It was great while it lasted wasn’t it? We’ve had a great method for uncovering the names that aren't immediately obvious on LinkedIn using the http://www.linkedin.com/pymk/pcard?mid= (candidate number) hack, recently publicised on various websites. This has allowed us to use the above address plus a potential candidates number to uncover their full name (leading to the below):

Unfortunately it appears LinkedIn has gotten wise to our sourcing games and have managed to block off this loophole. It also appears that this is a staged roll out as this method seems to still be working for me but not for a number of my colleagues. *Edit - It has now stopped working for all of us in our office. Instead of the above card they are getting redirected straight to the People You May Know page. Sad times.

Luckily for us some of the other, slower, methods still work but I’m sure it won’t be long until the next hack appears. It may even already exist! Well time to get searching.

Happy hunting and happy Christmas!

Liam

Can You See Your Candidates?

Through my normal pre-work reading of various blogs (mentioned in previous posts!). I came across the infographic below on +Jim Stroud's blog. That post was focussed more on the legal side of social media. However for the sourcing community there were a number of interesting points.

How visible are your candidates?

Of these points the ones I found particularly interesting were the 1st and 2nd ones. 

The first is about the number of adult internet users who are on social media - roughly 70%. That leaves a massive 30% of potential target candidates unavailable through internet search. 

The second point is the more important for me, it's about the percentage use of different age groups:

If the roles you are working on are towards the junior end of the market - 18-29 then luckily for you 83% of the candidates will have an online profile meaning that only 17% are a little more tricky to get hold of.

If however you're working the more senior end of the market in terms of experience then you'll probably be looking towards the 50-64 category. Here you'll only find 52% of the candidates with online profiles. Clearly this leaves a huge proportion of the potential population unavailable. 

Of course these above numbers are absolute and don't correlate with the amount of profiles that are actually findable (within the short periods of time that we are given to complete a sourcing project). Along with this caveat is that within different sectors these numbers fluctuate wildly with some having little to no online presence and others having a very strong presence.

What is a Sourcer to do?

Once you realise the number of candidates that are unavailable through internet searching of any kind there is for us one main option. That main option is to get on the phone to look to understand the size and structure of the target teams and begin to map out the potential candidates that we are missing. I won't go into the methods in this post but if you want further reading I'd recommend looking up +Maureen Sharib and her many posts on the subject!

How would you go about finding the other half?

What do you read? Part 1

Not really relevant but hilarious anyway!

I thought it would be good to share some of my favourite things to read and some of my favourite people to follow across social media (in no particular order). I've split this into two posts one based around sourcing specialists and the second part, to follow, based around the wider Recruitment & HR world.

Sourcing Specialists

This is who to follow if you want to stay ahead of the game when it comes to sourcing and searching.

+Glen Cathey (Twitter: @GlenCathey, Web: booleanblackbelt.com)

Glen is a recruitment legend, his knowledge of internet sourcing is probably second to none and his blog posts are always a fascinating educational experience.

+Irina Shamaeva (Twitter: @braingain‎ Web: booleanstrings.com)

Irina is in the same league as Glen when it comes to knowledge around sourcing, her website booleanstrings is one of the go to resources for all things search. She also runs a very interesting community who are always free to help out.

+Martin Lee (Twitter: @mrmartinlee Web: linkedin.com/in/martinjlee‎)

I had the pleasure of working with Martin during his time at Talent Works and he always had the time to help out with the many sourcing quests that we complete. If you ever have a question just drop him a line and he’s sure to be able to help or know of someone to help.

+Katharine Robinson (Twitter: @TheSourceress Web: uksourcers.co.uk)

Katharine is one of the UKs leading Sourcers (Sourceress’s?) and is always around to share great insights into sourcing techniques. She’s also a Sourcing Grand Master so is definitely worth following.

+Dan Russell (Twitter: @dmrussell Web: searchresearch1.blogspot.com)

Dan is a Google insider and his blog is an always fantastic place to hone your search skills. Some of his challenges have become legendary (the tower one in particular) and they’re a great place to really push your searching abilities.

+Maureen Sharib (Twitter: @MaureenSharib Web: http://magicmethod.ning.com/profiles/blog/list)

As much as the internet is fantastic. We sourcers cannot afford to forget telephone sourcing techniques. They can uncover a lot more information than the internet can offer. Maureen is, for me, the go to person for information around this.

+Jeremy Roberts (Twitter: @imJeremyR Web: http://jeremyrobertstx.com/)

Jeremy is the editor of SourceCon and has an extensive past in Talent Acquisition. Along with sharing all the great SourceCon knowledge Jeremy also hosts Google+ Hangouts where sourcers unite to right wrongs and help one another out.

+Jim Stroud (Twitter: @JimStroud Web: http://blog.jimstroud.com/)

Jim is the producer of some of my favourite videos related to sourcing they're always worth a watch and will always raise a smile along with provoking thought and relaying new ideas.

+Balazs Paroczay (Twitter: @TheBalazs Web: http://thebalazs.com)

Balazs leads one of the best sourcing functions around and his blog posts are always worth paying attention to - in particular see his deconstruction of Facebook searching, it really is fantastic work.

+SourceCon (Twitter: @Sourcecon Web: www.sourcecon.com)

SourceCon should be one of the go to sources for anyone with an interest in recruitment, there's always a wide variety of content based around sourcing. They are of course the hosts of the SourceCon events and the infamous Grand Master Challenge (which really does live up to it's name).

So that is my list of who to follow, there are so many great people within the sourcing world on social media that this post could've been the best part of 20 pages long. Who else should I be following or reading? 

Of course you shouldn't forget to follow me! (Twitter: @LiamTFitzG LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/liamfitzgerald)

It's good to talk...

It's a slightly creepy picture but the advert's quote sums my most important point from this post... 

As a follow up to my previous post about spam I thought I'd add to the plethora of posts out there exploring how to best use social media. From the amount of people not 'getting' social media it appears an extra one won't go amiss. Here is a summary of some of the best advice I've been given:

Pick your goal: What would you like to do? Do you want to build your network with your peers or candidates/clients? From a personal view point it's important to be focussed on one or two areas as otherwise your content becomes diluted and irrelevant for your target audience.

Curate: The simplest way to build up a network is to curate interesting content relevant for your target audience. Here one of the RSS replacement apps (such as Feedly) is your friend. Then share it to your selected social networks.

Timing: Post your content throughout the day. There a multiple tools (such as: Buffer, Hootsuite & Do Share) that help with scheduling posts for all your social networks. It doesn't take much time to set-up a schedule to ensure your posts are spread out.

Share & Interact: Retweets and Likes (+1s) are all very good but conversations can be even better. Join in and reply to posts, blogs or tweets. To quote the above advert.. "It's good to talk".

Monitor: It's always a good idea to monitor what you're doing so you can improve the content that you are curating. Hootsuite and Buffer both have monitoring tools for the content that you put out and make it easy to see what has been successful and what hasn't. If you are particularly interested in your Twitter network then I like SocialBro, the free version gives some great insight and provides a "best time to tweet" function based on network activity.

Don't spam: It's pretty self explanatory but too often overlooked.

As a bonus: Create.. It takes a while to build up the confidence to put your work "out there" but why not give it a try (like I am). It's a frightening feeling at first but people are out there to encourage and support you (thanks +Tony Restell and +Aaron Lintz!). 

Spam

spam

spam/

noun

noun: spam; noun: Spam

1. 1.

   irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to large numbers of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.

   • unwanted or intrusive advertising on the Internet.

     "an autogenerated spam website"
2. 2.

   trademark

   a tinned meat product made mainly from ham.

verb

verb: spam; 3rd person present: spams; past tense: spammed; past participle:spammed; gerund or present participle: spamming

1. 1.

   send the same message indiscriminately to (a large numbers of Internet users).

Interesting potential fact:

The Internet sense appears to derive from a sketch by the British ‘Monty Python’ comedy group, set in a cafe in which every item on the menu includes spam. (Thanks define: command on Google!)

I'm sorry to disappoint anyone that was expecting a post about the tinned meat. Instead I'm going to write about the Irrelevant or Unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to large numbers of users. Even more specifically than that I am going to focus on recruiters. Yep that old chestnut. 

For the most part anyone that moves through life faces an untold amount of spam, whether that be through your letter box or online. For the most part this is ignored and if possible the sources will be blocked. 

I'd say pretty much anyone who uses a social media service knows that there's nothing like a recruiter spamming your social networks with irrelevant jobs (of course as +Tony Melling pointed out in a conversation on G+ if there is the clear distinction of being a jobs feed this doesn't apply). If all I can see in your feed is jobs that you are working on then you add no value to my (or anyone else's) network and you tend to get un-followed. Try interspersing that constant flow of jobs with something that might be of interest to someone in either your target or peer networks. The same thing goes to all those on Twitter and LinkedIn asking the "Are you a good fit for this job?" question that is automated from Bullhorn Reach. 

These are probably the same people that then complain about how social media is worthless and that they see absolutely no ROI for their time on there...   

You're banned... (a short tale about Xing and being a robot)

I have recently had an issue with Xing that I wanted to share, just in case you find yourself working on a German language project and don't have access to a premium account. Due to the restrictions on the free search I decided to utilise Google to perform an X-ray search. 

The following is the basis for all my search strings around Xing, it usually needs some tweaking but that's for another post:

(site:xing.com/profile | site:xing.com/profiles) “Insert Search String Here”

As I was looking at a number of profiles I had a large number of tabs open at the same time (not really that many by my standards). This actually led Xing to suspend my account. When I spoke with Xing about this they advised that having multiple tabs open at any one time makes it look like you are a robot opening pages in multiple locations. I explained what I did and they advised not to open more than one or two tabs at any one time otherwise I’d be picked up as a robot again and banned. 

So in essence, don't open a barrel load of tabs on Xing or you might get yourself banned...

Well Hello

Hi there! Thanks for stopping by, my name is Liam and a I'm new to blogging. I've decided to make the leap from a curator to a creator. I've spent a fair amount of time on various social networks (Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn) and I tend to share all the great posts that I come across and enjoy. I thought that now would be a good time to add to the ever growing list to try and give something back to the communities I circle.

Primarily my intended focus for these blogs will be around my day job. I'm an Account Manager - Direct Sourcing for Talent Works International. I work on a wide range of projects in a wide range of industries and across a wide range of locations. I also used the term wide range three times in a row, is this frowned upon? I've worked on projects ranging from R&D within in global FMCG companies through: sales teams across Europe and the USA for a multinational IT provider; Legal teams throughout continental Europe; VP Finance within the Global Oil and Gas market and pretty much everything in between.. Apart from software. So I'll try and share my methods, madness and insight in this blog. Whether that's worth reading is up to you!

I also plan to share what ever rambling nonsense runs through my head when I sit down to write. You know what they say about the best plans though...