“In the criminal world, you’re still considered as bad as the person who pulled the trigger if you hired the hit man to do it. The person who hires the hit man can’t just stand there in court and say, “well I didn’t do it your honor, I paid this man to do it so it’s all his fault.” Isn’t the hirer just as guilty as the hitman himself because he ultimately instructed “the hit” in the first place?”

Mr. Zebra was the best damned IPX Engineer we’ve sourced in the past few years… Image: ornello_pics

I’ve always shared the belief that headhunting is a non-ethical issue, though I may be somewhat biased because I work in the industry. Having been on both sides of the fence as a employee and employer, in my opinion, nothing overrides the fact that if you have the opportunity to move to a better workplace (whether it be increased salary, better environment, better location, etc), your employer has no right to prevent you from having the freedom to choose where you want to work. This autonomy sits within the restraints of your legal obligations to abide by all non-compete clauses, respecting your previous employer’s right to protect their own IP, etc etc. Loyalty is earned and it’s a two way street. How much has each party invested into the employment agreement beyond the statutory requirement of remuneration for work?

Regardless of where you stand on the ethics of headhunting, he suggests that there are some strategies companies can adopt to reduce the likelihood of your staff wanting to leave:

• Train the actual hiring managers how to interview and how to best represent your brand. Not just training, but sitting in on interviews and giving constructive feedback.
• Having a structured end-to-end interview process in place where candidates aren’t faced with countless repeat interviews where too many people can’t reach a consensus on a hiring decision.
• Having a clear and well-defined feedback policy for all candidates who come to interview with a service level agreement that hiring managers must adhere to in terms of providing feedback.
• Having a first class onboarding process with adequate feedback channels to be able to track in real time, the effectiveness of them, and the satisfaction of the newly onboarded candidates.
• Working with your own recruiters and suppliers to maintain accurate and up-to-date competitor salary and benefits information and leaning on the business to take action to maintain a competitive environment.

What are your thoughts on headhunting – do you consider it an ethical practice? What Google-like perks do you offer your staff to keep them happy? Share your thoughts below.

[See the full article on ERE]

Actual photo half way through my initial draft.

I’ve summarised portions of it to help put things into perspective.

Gripe/Nag/Rant:

I’ve re-written this section more times than I care to remember in the hope of keeping it short and succinct. The final iteration is as follows:

“It is so frustrating that there are no reasonably affordable solutions based in the cloud that is catered specifically for sourcing. I’ve done plenty of test driving and demos with numerous vendors however to no avail.”

The Problem:

There is simply not enough demand for this type of product. Let’s face it, the sourcing teams that are active today in Australia are far and few between. No vendor is going to dedicate time and money into developing a solution for a highly specialised industry with customised needs without charging contractor rates. Why? Because they literally are spending additional resources on building-on or customising a system for each and everyone of their customers. This is on top of the inconvenient fact that the general consensus in the industry regarding the definition of sourcing is so blatantly vague that there is no overarching defining aspect worth focusing on that isn’t already covered by a plethora of readily available recruitment management systems (RMS) or applicant tracking systems (ATS).

Sure we’ll provide you with an awesome sourcing platform, just so long as you cover my monthly salary and the rest of my team… indefinitely. Image: mrcolinlim via flikr

The Solution:

There is no one size fits all as it really depends on your own sourcing and reporting needs. One thing I would suggest if you embark on this endeavour is have a plan of what you want first. A lot of vendors will sell you how awesome their product is and what functionalities they have. That’s great but few will sit down with you and ask what it is you actually need. This probably has to do with the fact that the majority of their clients are generally either internal HR teams or recruitment agencies – they all have common needs. The questions I asked myself when I went out looking were:

• What is at stake here – Do we actually need this system?
• How will our business function with and without this system in the short, medium and long term?
• What type of sourcing do we do – Active or passive? Proactive or reactive?
• What type of information do we capture – Is it in a single format?
• How much are we looking to invest – What are the monthly costs?
• What are the must-have’s and like-to-have’s?
• Is it scalable – Does the platform support a team of 2-5, 10-15, 20+?
• Does it only become a cost-effective solution if there is a minimal amount of people on the team?
• Is it cloud based – Would you prefer if you can access it wherever you have an internet connection?
• How easy is it for you to migrate your data – What are you currently using and is it compatible?
• How much support is provided – Are they familiar with the common issues of the sourcing/recruiting industry or do they just provide general technical support?
• How much time do we have to implement this and to iron out the creases?
• What reports do you need to generate? Does the system support them?

Next week I’ll cover the reasons why we ended up with SalesForce.com as well running through the pros and cons of having a customisable CRM.

If you’ve been through the task of implementing a new ATS/RMS system, what factors did you consider? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shane Barnfield highlights the importance of managing a pipeline of talent reminding us that its as critical as finding them. First and foremost, talent pipelining is not a database.

The KENTZ approach

What they do?

Maintain relations with their hard-to-find and high-volume talent. Not dissimilar to what agency recruiters do but it goes beyond the phone catch-up every quarter or so…

How they do it?

Shane sees that there are 4 key elements to talent pipelines:

1. Identification

Know what your business needs and profile the hard-to-find and high volume roles cf: Lou Adler. Know where to find these talent. They utilise external search firms to identify talent which they use to build their talent pipeline. They also rely on LinkedIn.

2. Qualification

Prequalify candidates through phone calls – not necessarily about an active job. This process is normally just an introduction and the opportunity to surreptitiously ascertain if they are interested in working for your organisation. One interesting tool they have been using is evolveondemand. It crunches big data on profiles based on previous experience, job titles, etc then outputs a shortlist of suitable candidates. He notes that its definitely not for all roles but its great for high volume positions.

3. Engagement

In his eyes, the most important aspect of talent pipelining but he finds it’s the most poorly managed. It’s not just about sending the company newsletter. He believes that the agencies are ahead of the game on this. In Kentz, their  hiring managers often catch up with suspects to talk about upcoming projects. In this way, they are not actively pursuing these potential candidates for hiring purposes but they ensure that their business is at the front of their minds and they have an opportunity to subtly entice them  across.  He further suggests other ways to engage with candidates by holding:

• Lunch and learn sessions
• Open days/networking events (think Sourcing Breakfast)
• Mini-conferences

4. Conversation

The transition from suspect to candidate.

The Big Takeaway: Do you need a talent pipeline?

Consider:

• Do you have a lot of hard-to-fill roles or high-volume roles?
• Can you invest in a talent pipeline? It takes a lot of time and effort.
• Are you losing business from not having these talent?

Mahsuri Bianchi talks about how best to build a sourcing capability from an internal perspective at Monadelphous, an Engineering firm. She covered what it takes to be a successful sourcer in the world of engineering, resources, energy and infrastructure.

When she was brought on-board to build a sourcing team she found that there was more administration activity than “pure recruiting”, a frustration many internal recruiters share. She hired end-to-end recruiters however she found that some were initially disenchanted. Specifically she found that they simply had no time to:

• Fill out job briefs
• Properly respond to candidates, if at all
• Phone screen candidates

She reminds us that candidate is king especially for hard-to-fill roles. To address this, she implemented a sourcing team that functioned as an internal search service with minimal administration that were empowered to affect change and to be able to use their initiative. Essentially, her team talks to people about critical roles and maintains contact with them.

Not all recruiters make the transition to sourcing

Good sourcers’ don’t stand still, they use their initiative. She covered the importance of:

• Low-hanging fruit
• Recycling your “silver and bronze medallists” – Many recruiters build talent pipelines but don’t maintain contact with them
• Get to know your database – it’s a gold mine
• Ensure your Sourcers know how to use your database and how to search it effectively
• LinkedIn – Many use it, but not many use it well.
• Need to be well informed about the company, facts, key leaders, achievements, articulate culture well — value proposition. Sourcers and recruiters are brand custodian. Sourcing is your organisation’s voice box.

TIPS:

1. Know value proposition and be a brand custodian.
2. 80:20 rule
3. Be a competent profiler
4. Relationships take time
5. Back to basics (recruitment)

Image: Thanks to seriykotik1970

-Sourcing Ninja

The above questions was posted on the Australasian Researchers Network group on LinkedIn. I thought I’d write a little post about this because it seemed like this was a common problem especially for those looking for people in the not-so-mainstream cities.

Long story short, this is the response I posted:

For those of you who are interested to know what investigations I conducted, I’ve outlined how I came about my conclusion.

The Investigation

Step 1:

I first tried Googling it. I mean, why not right?… Unfortunately I could not find the answer in the first few pages despite trying a few different strings.

Step 2:

I then thought I’d see if LinkedIn already had the information readily available but “hidden” in plain sight. Seeing that the advanced search only allowed you to refine by zip code. I decided to see what we could find in the ‘Lookup’ option.

That link brought me to geonames.org with a list of postcodes from all around Australia. I thought that perhaps LinkedIn had simple referenced this list to what was available on LinkedIn’s location search and that this might have been the solution. However, I ran a quick search for Wagga Wagga (postcode: 2650) on LinkedIn and it came up with profiles in the “Wagga Wagga Area, Australia” but unfortunately a quick find search (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) (1) revealed that it was not on the geonames.org list. Wagga Wagga was however found when I used the actual search box (2) on the geonames.org site.

Step 3:

Next I decided to see if I could glean a list from their database through a drop-down menu by changing the location of my actual profile. I was somewhat disappointed to find that LinkedIn requires a postcode to identify your location…

Step 4:

Failing that I remembered that LinkedIn also allowed you to filter your results by location if you didn’t specify a location in your search. What’s more is that if you try to refine your search by typing in a country, LinkedIn will actually try to help you by providing a drop-down menu full of suggestions to help minimise your keystrokes. For this experiment I typed in ‘Australia’ hoping to access the haloed list of all available locations within Australia…

As you can see, unfortunately LinkedIn only provides some of the more “popular” locations in their suggested list. I thought it might have been the case that LinkedIn only provides suggested locations based on your network and seeing as my network for ‘Conditional Monitoring Technicians’ was fairly limited, I conducted the same test for ‘Engineers’ and ‘Managers’ as well. The results were the same as the above.

Step 5:

Lastly I tried using an omission search in both the ‘keyword’ and ‘postcode’ section of the advanced people search in an attempt to filter out the major cities and leave behind the regional locations…

I tried them individually and with the boolean operators “-” and “NOT” because I couldn’t remember which one LinkedIn recognised (I think it’s NOT) however to no avail.

From there my Google instincts kicked in and the rest is history… Check out the original post here and see what our other sourcers have to say!

-Sourcing Ninja

Let’s hear it below if you know of a better way to find all the regional locations available on LinkedIn!

It came as a sad surprise for me when I logged into my Wotnews account earlier this week to setup another feed. I was notified that after three years since its launch, Wotnews has decided to close down their operations.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Wotnews is a customisable news aggregation site. Sound a bit like Google News? Well, yes and no. What’s unique about their service is that it’s free to use for individuals! Well okay, that’s not unique but their technology enabled search from multiple Australian news sources (or international) and allowed you to customise your search for topics, companies and/or individuals. Similar to Google News you were also able to add your own news sources to search from. Not to mention they were an Australian startup that began initially as Plugger.com.au and I’m a massive fan of Aussie startups!

The ability to stream live news feeds about a particular industry, company or person is so powerful that the multitude of uses are almost endless. Power is knowledge. ‘ Competitor intelligence’ first springs to mind for me. But for sourcing, think about the other “research” aspect of conducting market intelligence reports for a client or for your own knowledge before you engage the community… Want a touch point for a potential cold call? Having prior knowledge that your prospect’s company is cutting staff might be good to have up your sleeve and would certainly affect your approach. It would be equally important to know this if you’re pitching for work (jobs or projects). The list goes on…

So my conundrum is this: What’s a good alternative? I’ll have to look at this in detail over the few weeks but I’m keen to hear from the sourcing community (or anyone who reads my blog… anyone?) Come share your suggestions below or email me at ken@sourcingninja.com!

P.S. Boolean search doesn’t work in ‘Personalized Google News’. *Shock and horror*.

Bill Bartee, venture capitalist speaking at Recruiters’ Hub last week offered his thoughts on what works and what does not for startups. Much of what he said can be applied to establishing sourcing functions:

1. No problem = No business
This simple equation is important when you’re busy writing up business cases for budget approvals and drafting business plans. Even after you have transitioned from conception to operation, I think it’s important to remind yourself of this simple fact. Always be cognisant of the value that you’re providing to your customer. You need to know why your sourcing function exists in the first place or else it will be a hard sell convincing anyone to retain it.

2. Only hire A+ people
This notion can be found countless of times in any book about starting a business or leadership. The key point is to hire people who are smarter than yourself so that your business or team can expand beyond what you can offer. On the flip side, you need to ensure that you have an open environment which fosters creativity and affords freedom and autonomy. There is nothing worse for a highly talented individual to be fox holed into a static job. They need room to grow and spread their wings. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will take up a management position, I know plenty of people who shy away from the responsibilities of a managerial role and prefer to work as a specialist. The thing that strikes me is that you don’t really know where they’ll end up, you only know they will be exceptional and succeed in what they do. That in itself is evidence that your team will grow beyond the vision you can offer.

3. Understand your customer in detail
Whether you are working as an outsourcer or as an internal function you are still providing a service to client or customer. I think that the best internally focused departments within any organisation, whether they be recruitment, HR, payroll, etc, are those who frame themselves as providing a service to a customer. That way, they tend to really want to understand who their customers are, build strong stakeholder relations and identify pain points in their workflow. Working as a sourcer both internally and as an external resource, I’ve noticed there will be certain people in the organisation you work with that really champions your services. They may be recruitment consultants, hiring managers, the executive team, or simply someone in HR. What I’ve found is that these people act as an enabler to the other parts of the business and help you to grow your business or sourcing function.

4. Be remarkable/Legendary service works
Everybody wants to do a great job. Everybody gives 100%. If everyone is providing a good service what makes you and your sourcing function so special? Be remarkable in everything you do so as to stand out from the crowd. This is especially true if you’re trying to establish a research function. You need supporters. People within the organisation need to know about you and they need to want to utilise your services in order for you to maintain your business case. It makes very little commercial sense to maintain a function within a business that is under utilised.

6. Fail fast and learn faster
Fail fast, learn faster then iterate. Just like any product development cycle you want to minimise the cost of failure and quickly learn from your mistakes. What works for one sourcing function in a business might not work for you. Failure is a necessity for progress, how else will you know what works and what doesn’t? Just make sure you maximise that opportunity to learn. For sourcing, this may be in regards to the breakdown of your sourcing team, they way you function, new  technologies – CRM, ATS, platforms.

7. Manage meaningful metrics
This point is ever so pertinent to any sourcing function. We learnt about sourcing metrics at SOSU2011 and we also covered this topic at a SourceClub meeting last year. What is important to note is that what works for one sourcing team focusing on a particular industry or sector might not work for another working in a different industry. Similarly, you need to differentiate between the different types of services the sourcing team is providing. If your sourcing team is conducting a market map then time to fill and looking at the conversion rates from suspects to prospects to hires might not be the right measurements. Similarly, a quality based metric would only give you part of the picture of what are the appropriate channels for a talent attraction campaign. For a researcher or sourcer conducting search, this information is part and parcel of their sourcing strategy.

8. Be a leader –> Love what you do
Having a passion for what you do is really going to help you keep your head in the game and push through the low points when you’re building a startup, believe me. However, your passion alone can’t help your business or sourcing function thrive especially if you’re working in a team. Whether you’re working in a big or small team or closely with other parts of the business, what is important that you have the right “chemical fit” as Bill calls it. He gave the example of SEEK during their startup stage while they were still looking for investors. There were many reasons to avoid investing: strong competition backed by large corporations (MyCareer, Monster), the Executive team was prone to in-fighting as it was built around two brothers and a close friend they grew up with. However he cited the key reason why he decided to back them was that their culture and team dynamics were simply “amazing”. They adopted a “no excuses responsibility” mantra throughout the company and everyone was onboard.

9. Never quit
In true entrepreneurial spirit – the ‘never die’ attitude. Setting up sourcing function is easy. Setting up a good sourcing function is hard. There will be nay-sayers, obstacles, roadblocks, low points and at times doubt but if you persevere you can achieve what you set out to do!

-Sourcing Ninja

I ran into the issue of not being able to select any text from LinkedIn profiles a few weeks ago. The first thought that popped into my head was “they’re on to me”… but then I realised that it could just be a technical problem on my end so I decided to investigate.

After doing a quick Google and ‘LinkedIn answers’ search on the issue I realised I wasn’t the only LinkedIn customer experiencing this problem. After clearing all my cookies and caches’ and using three different browsers I deduced that this was problem perpetrated by LinkedIn.

I recalled a subscription news site that had a similar security feature which presumably prevented their competitors from copying and pasting their work and at the time I laughed at the notion because I simply ran a screenshot of the page through an OCR software then proceeded with my task. In this instance, considering that I copy & paste a substantial amount of data from LinkedIn for relevant projects I knew that this work around was not going to fly. Alternatively I figured out that I could download each profile as a PDF and from there be able to manipulate the text but this again seemed to me as too much an encumbrance to my workflow.

The problem with the above solution is that you’re disabling JavaScript for your entire browser meaning all the other sites which play nice and require JavaScript to run properly will be effected. Seeing as I only wanted to disable JavaScript for LinkedIn I downloaded a free add-on for Firefox (also available for Chrome) called ‘YesScript’ that allows me to do just that. I suggest this approach for a more permanent solution.

I note that solution 2 does not help our colleagues who are running Internet Explorer. For those of you who are, you have my condolences. The next best thing is to just disable Java for your browser outright (solution 1). You can do this in the preferences/tools –> content/advanced setting.

Let me know if you’ve experienced the same or if you need help getting unstuck.

-SourcingNinja

Image: Thanks to Jascha

Update: Recently I decided to re-enable Java as some of the other parts of LinkedIn rely on it. When I tried selecting the text on a few profiles I able to do so, so I’ve left Java enabled. Perhaps they decided to bin the restriction given the spate of complaints I’d imagine they would have received.

Update #2: Upon writing this article I came across a LI Answers post and it appears that Irina Shamaeva and Glen Cathey (the Boolean Blackbelt) have already addressed this issue. Trust them to be at the forefront of sourcing issues!

So here we are, it’s 2012 and Easter is already fast approaching. It’s only been three short months and there’s already so much that has happened.

In the US there have been some major reshuffling in the sourcing space with some prominent sourcing leaders securing new positions and the fall out over at Arbita. Closer to home, we have not gone by without our own sourcing-gate (related) incident and since the new year there have been a number of new independent sourcing startups eager to make their mark.

For me it’s been a constant juggling act as a I readjust, push through the ever-growing projects, streamline the sourcing process and find ways to better the business. Let’s hope i stay on track with blogging for SourcingNinja.net this year!

Feel free to get in touch if you have any specific sourcing questions or if you’d like to help contribute.

-SourcingNinja

Image : Thanks to U. Edinburgh

A spectre is haunting our industry – the spectre of sourcing. Too long have we spent time under the shadow of recruiters, under the guise of recruitment. Fellow sourcers, I am tired of having to explain our value-add to people who just don’t get it, to justify our worth to businesses who simply aren’t interested in moving beyond the status quo, and I am tired of having to validate our very existence.

Right now, as we’re starting to gain some real visibility, it is time for us to properly define ourselves and consolidate ourselves as a unified industry. The community has its eyes on us and it’s up to us to show them who we are, beyond recruitment, marketing or a PR piece, and to carve out our own future.

What do you want to see your sourcing association/council do to legitimise your industry? Now the time has come for us to emerge as an industry unto itself. The question is, do you want to be a part of building it?

We’re rallying the troops and plotting our path to the top of the mountain. Let me know in the comments section below or email me at ‘ken[at]sourcingninja.net’ if you’re keen on contributing to building a sourcing association/council in the hopes of legitimising our profession in the ANZ region.

[Image from Mirko Simeoni]