by Glenn Gutmacher (the most altruistic writer in the Recruitosphere)
Question: I'm writing an article on how to improve one's recruiting research / sourcing skills. What do you recommend?
Answer: This probably deserves to be a book, not an article! I think fundamental, wide-ranging, basic sourcing training is useful if you've never taken it.
There are plenty of vendors on the Internet sourcing side, and phone sourcing side, and some offering both. (Note to those who haven't researched alternatives to the heavily-marketed vendors -- it doesn't have to cost four figures to get robust training.)
Training is an ongoing process. You may get the best info in snippets, both on-the-job and from outside learning. The key for my learning is to absorb and process the info in such a way that I could teach it to someone else. For me, that is a formal process: I take detailed notes at every meeting, synthesize what I learn, and usually find something worthwhile to post on my employer's staffing intranet.
It may even end up in an internal group training. If it's not proprietary, I often find a way to work it into my presentations at industry conferences to share at a broader level.
Strong sourcers should be secure enough about their ability to learn and keep their skills sharp – and eager to raise the knowledge level of their profession overall -- to blog and otherwise share their latest favorite tools and tricks.
I think I'm altruistic by nature, but I find that the more I share, the more I get, too.
But it's whatever works for you. You could just try applying one thing you learn to a current open requisition to see if it "sticks." Not every sourcing method or resource applies to every req, of course, but it's good to add to your bag of tricks!
Simply by trying the technique, regardless of the quality of results, you'll probably learn it well enough to know how and where to use it in the future.
If you don't seem to be making enough headway on a particular sourcing project (or even if you are, but have a nagging feeling there might be a better way to do what you're doing), outline what you've tried to some respected peers and ask them what else they'd recommend.
If you see sourcing as a career path (or a key component of it), then it makes sense to enlist multiple mentors, though they need not be formal ones.
I like the personal "board of directors" approach that an increasing number of career coaches recommend, where you seek out people who each fill different expertise niche gaps that complement you.
Remember that recruiting research skills are applicable to different fields, including journalism, competitive intelligence, marketing research, library science, etc., so don't hesitate to pull from people working in those arenas.
I think Jason Davis's recent "best recruiting tip" contest had some great suggestions that are easily adaptable to research.
For example, to really understand your business: The better you know the subject matter of the prospects you're sourcing, the better you can understand their motivations, where they're likely to hang out online, how to carry on an intelligent conversation when you get them on the phone, how to determine which new trends, tools, competitors and other things you hear about are relevant to your searches and which aren't, etc.
That ultimately results in more targeted time-efficiency and higher-quality finds than using broad, blitzkrieg mass-email campaigns that piss off far more people than they turn up… and you will need to back to those wells again, so don't piss in them.
Last but not least, don't be afraid to acknowledge your limitations: If you don't have time to do task X from project Y, tell your (internal) customer and offer to help find someone else who can do the work (even if it need be an outside vendor).
Much sourcing work is time-sensitive (e.g., a pending competitor layoff or merger), and late could be worse than never if they're waiting and expecting it from you. As another example, if your strength is online research, don't take on the majority of the phone sourcing. Do what's going to yield the most efficient results.
But use the opportunity to learn from what you outsource – maybe you can do a post-mortem with the suppliers to find out how they got what they got, and you can more confidently take on more of that work next time. When you under-promise and over-deliver, you can't help but garner more satisfied customers.
