The Recruiter’s Guide to Successful Sourcing
The sessions we attended ranged in topic from sourcing automation, and attracting and engaging talent via social media to Twitter tactics, and making Facebook work for you. The topic of sourcing automation really stood out to me. Why you ask?
Well, the biggest thing I took away from the presentation was that successful sourcing is strategic and there are a myriad of ways to develop the perfect strategy. Come to find out there are a bunch of tools out there that recruiters can use to look for talent, a bunch of tools me and almost every other attendee had never even heard of. Plus, on top of the variety of tools that exist, there is also a plethora of different ways to source candidates. For example, the well-known search engines like Google, Mozilla, Bing, and Yahoo only scratch the surface of those that exist, some of which work extremely well for sourcing.
Industry vets Shally Steckerl and Glenn Gutmacher took us through a crash course of sourcing and automation tips, and the following are a few key points to hopefully help you in your pursuit of top talent:
Search Engines for Recruiting
The first tool Steckerl and Gutmacher told us about is called Opera, or, as they coined it,“a sourcer’s browser.”
Features of Opera include:
- It’s free to use (which is always a plus)
- Restores all windows after crash
- Ability to sync online and mobile
- Can right click on any search box and create a search
This final point was an interesting, yet very helpful one for recruiters. Both presenters demonstrated this “custom search” feature as they created their own custom urls for a specific search. For example, if you’re a recruiter and would like to look for software engineers at Intel (on LinkedIn), using Opera, you can create a specific url that will search exactly that. You also have the ability to save these urls for later use.
Google Chrome was another favorite of the presenters’. Why? Because the search engine features:
- An amazing library of extensions,
- Custom search engine management,
- Easy to use “incognito” mode,
- Session manager,
- Unifyo, and
- Speed dial.
Resume Search Software
One of the main parts of sourcing is scouring through resumes to discover the best candidates. A software called infoGIST is a great option to accomplish this task.
Steckerl said that one of the most difficult tasks for a sourcer is logging in and out of job boards. infoGist searches databases overnight and provides you with a list of resumes in the morning, which cuts down a significant amount of time for recruiters.
IFTTT.com, or If This Then That, was another software tool the presenters featured. The service offers a bunch of features:
- Connect your apps
- Check in on LinkedIn
- Tumble your RSS
- Buffer your posts
- Send “rescue” text
- Call in an email
- Schedule tweets
“The role is: If this then that, which is good because it keeps it simple,” Steckerl said.
Other search engine alternatives to try include: Talenthook, Talemetry, ReferYes, Resume Robot and ZillionResumes.com, to name a few.
Scheduling
Scheduling is a huge component of sourcing, one Steckerl said “is a huge time suck for recruiters.” His favorite tools to alleviate the problem? Doodle.com, a free and simple tool for easy scheduling.
Benefits include:
- Meetme Page (free scheduling program)
- Bookme (professional calendaring)
- Save time making appointments
- Stop phone tag
- Publish when you’re free or busy
With so many different tools available and more and more being added all the time, Steckerl and Gutmacher left us with a few important questions to ask when evaluating new tools:
Can you verify claims about its impact?
What similar organizations successfully used it?
What do industry experts think about the tool/site?
What is required to support the new tool/site?
If not adopted now, will you need to adopt something like it in the future?