I don’t know a single person whose goal upon graduating either from high school or college was to become a recruiter or a sourcer. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a single college that has a degree program dedicated to the art and/or science of recruiting (and no, Human Resources does NOT count, in my opinion). Yet the demand is on the rise to find people who can identify, engage, and bring great talent into an organization. I live in Seattle, and by conducting a very quick search, I can see that there are over 2,000 either sourcing or recruiting-focused roles just in this geographic area right now. Recruiters and sourcers are in high demand, which should be a good thing from a career development perspective…
However, I believe there is a growing issue within the sourcing and recruiting community that could be a major driving factor behind the need to hire more and more recruiting professionals – and if it’s not addressed I believe it could lead to a mass exodus of people from these job functions. At a high level, it’s an increase of unrelated and unproductive peripheral activities that are being tagged to these job functions (more on this later) – but at its core, the issue is a lack of basic understanding of search techniques. More and more, companies are desperate to find and hire effective, excellent sourcing and recruiting talent – I even heard a recruiting executive recently say that the hardest things to recruit for these days are not engineers, but GOOD technical recruiters. One of the biggest problems I think we are experiencing within our talent attraction and acquisition teams is a lack of fundamentals.
Going back to the title, my belief is that in order to assist the next generation of sourcing professionals in being excellent, we must first identify the basics that must be mastered, reveal the time-sucks that bog down these job functions, and provide some recommendations on how to drive your career toward greatness.
The Basics to Master
So what are some basic fundamentals when it comes to sourcing and recruiting?
Sourcing:
Recruiting: in addition to the sourcing fundamentals (yes… I’m saying that a good recruiter must first be a good sourcer) a few basic fundamentals for recruiting include:
Common mastery areas for both sourcing and recruiting depend upon the industry in which you work. If you’re going to focus on specific functions, you’d better learn your business – regardless of whether you are a sourcer or a recruiter.
The Time-Sucks to Minimize
The sad thing, in my mind, is how many other peripheral tasks have crept their way into dominating a sourcer’s and/or recruiter’s time. While they are not unimportant, they are still time-sucks, not at the core of what we should be spending our time on, and most have the ability to be at least partially automated:
There is a sad practice in many grade schools today that is commonly referred to as “teaching to the test.” Those of you who have kids or know teachers know the frustration of this – the idea behind it is to give students the specific knowledge they will need in order to pass a standardized test, so that the school may continue to receive funding or the student may receive a passing grade to move up to the next level. But by only teaching the material needed for this test, this practice doesn’t encourage creative thinking, trial-and-error approach to problem-solving, or understanding the “why” behind the “how” of the way the world works. Many students move through the grades with poor understanding of basic math, grammar, and critical thinking skills (and usually to the dismay of the teachers who are forced to do this).
The way I see it, lots of talent acquisition organizations today practice the very same methods – pushing talent acquisition along by focusing on making their numbers look good while neglecting spending appropriate amounts of time and energy on the actual practice of sourcing and recruiting or to encourage their teams to dig deeper into more innovative and scientific approaches to finding great talent. Little is done to encourage creative approach; it’s death by template or manual metrics and tracking for reporting up.
The Fix to Move Forward
In my personal opinion, if we want better sourcers and recruiters, better hiring manager partnerships, and thus better REAL metrics, things have got to change, and this can start by minimizing the amount of time spent on the above time-suck activities – and MAXIMIZING sourcing efficiency, which begins with appropriate training.
While each company has unique needs and thus would require a unique approach to overcome some of these challenges, there are a few universal things that companies can do to help properly equip sourcers and recruiters today to hire excellent talent and continue to develop skills that will help them excel in their roles.
Most importantly, however, sourcers and recruiters need to take control of their own training and career development. This means understanding that you must have a firm foundation in sourcing basics and an idea of how you’d like your own career to progress. No one is going to pay more attention to the development of your skills and your career path than you. To get you started, here are a few suggestions, and I would recommend approaching these suggestions in an ordered progression to assist you in mastering sourcing:
Leaders, please encourage your sourcing and recruiting teams to do the above, and if you have the resources to assist in any of these endeavors (like paying for search training, providing tools and user training of those, or assigning mentors to new team members) please invest in the future (and retention!) of your talented people. Additionally, I would encourage you to dig into your company policies and champion some organizational changes to help mitigate some of the time-sucks that may be taking your sourcing and recruiting folks away from actually sourcing and recruiting:
Side-note: I have found through personal experience that live onboarding works much better than sending new employees links of videos or audio files to listen to on their own. Human interaction with the onboarding coordinators as well as the other new employees helps forge relationships immediately and adds a wonderful human touch to welcome new folks.
The Method to Multiply
Finally, the most important thing we all must do to move the needle for excellence in the future is to pay it forward. When you find your stride within your career, or when you figure out a formula within your company to make recruiting more efficient, make an effort to mentor a younger sourcer or recruiter, give back to your professional communities, and pass your knowledge and experience – failures included – to the next group of up-and-coming sourcers and recruiters.
I feel that an area where we’ve fallen short in doing this is sharing failures – failing is the only way for us to discover where improvement is needed, whether it is through first-hand experience or observation of others. As a community, we don’t share nearly enough failures and I’d like to see this change. Part of how we can drive this is by removing the stigma that surrounds admitting failure to each other. And in order to do that, we must allow others the room to grow and the grace to fail without fear of public humiliation.
Listen, you’re not going to master sourcing overnight. There is a lot of trial-and-error involved in becoming an excellent sourcer. I’ve been at this since 2002 and I’ve still got a lot to learn. I started my career as an Internet Researcher and have worked for start-up companies with 10 employees as well as large, established organizations with more than 300,000, and everything in-between. I’ve worked both in contract and FTE capacities as a practitioner for recruitment franchise agencies and franchisors and on the corporate side of things, as well as in recruitment media where I analyzed best practices for sourcing. I’ve served in high-volume and specialized sourcing capacities, searching for every kind of talent from medical to IT to engineering to PR to marketing to construction. I’ve built brand presence for myself, for other recruiters, and for corporate identities. And, for the last couple of years I’ve changed gears and have been working a full recruiting desk, both with and without sourcing partnership.
I’ve seen and tried many things, failed miserably at some ventures, and occasionally succeeded marvelously in my many roles. While I don’t have all the answers, I feel I have a well-rounded perspective on what it takes to master the role of a sourcer, and I’m working on the recruiting bit too. Finding success is hitting the bulls-eye once. But mastery is knowing this means nothing unless you can do it over and over and over again.
Sourcers and recruiters, please take the initiative to invest in a solid career foundation for yourself. Leaders, please play an active role in your team’s career development. Put in the effort up-front rather than trying to apply temporary patchwork fixes so far down the road that it’s nearly impossible to change. In the long run, you will develop loyal, skilled teams who know their industry and love finding people for your company, and you will find happiness and peace in your chosen career path as you pursue mastery of your craft.