Nowadays, as technology does a lot of the sourcing (and to some extent, the recruiting), people are no longer on the phones much talking to people, exchanging information, bumping into and up against those kernels and nuggets of information that, so often in the past, were turned into wheat fields and mines of trade.
You know how this happens (or maybe you don’t).
In the old days:
- You’d receive a job order.
- You’d study it and talked to the customer to understand it.
- You’d begin to look for candidates in a number of places but in the way-back days the real old “headhunters” started calling into companies to see who had the required skills.
The really old-fashioned headhunter would talk with the gatekeeper and learn that Joe was the guy sent out to customer sites to fix the furnaces that made the buildings shake when he lit the boiler. So it was Joe the old-fashioned headhunter set his cap to talk with.
Not so much anymore.
LinkedIn delivers stuff like that right to your desktop. Right?
In the case of Joe, probably not so much.
Joe’s making six figures, is on the road covering several states most days of the week, and doesn’t have a whole lot of time for LinkedIn — or social media in general, beyond what his family’s social life consists of.
When he’s home, he has to fix his own furnace, the kitchen sink, mow the grass, and feed the dog. If you know what I mean.
It still takes someone to call into the companies Joe works for to find the Joes of the world and there’s a subset of sourcer (phone) and old-fashioned headhunter, still doing that.
You just don’t hear much about it because all the excitement and press pretty much goes to the hot, sexy internet stuff and the tools and techniques that make recruiters’ (and sourcers’) lives easy. That’s okay. I’m not complaining, phone sourcer that I am.
What You’re Missing
What I’m here to tell you about is what you’re missing out on because you’ve chosen the low (or the high, depending on how you see things) road in sourcing/recruiting.
When you’re not calling into companies, and talking to people on that early first blush of a job you’re not learning things.
You’re not discerning things. You’re not hearing the gatekeeper unthinkingly blurt, gripped in her grief, “We lost him unexpectedly last month, and he hasn’t been replaced. They’re looking for a replacement, but so far that seat’s empty. It’s been hard.”
I recently heard this on a director of operations job I was working on for a Midwest industrial manufacturer.
Unless you’re calling into companies, you don’t get the chance to speak with one of the engineers in a manufacturing environment to learn that the company hires just about anyone with CNC experience who lives within 25 miles.
You miss out learning that a company is opening a new branch in another city and the plant manager has been away all month struggling to hire in that city, and is sorely missed.
Information like that is invaluable. It doesn’t come perusing resumes on a job board or looking at profiles on LinkedIn.
Call It Job Sourcing
It comes when you’re calling into companies and talking to real, live flesh-and-blood people who give you fresh, interesting information that impacts their working lives, and which you can turn into jobs.
Calling into companies gives you insider information.
This is what I call “job sourcing,” and it’s one of the sister activities to telephone sourcing. Both activities are fueled by probing for answers, by asking the right questions of flesh-and-blood human beings, and actively listening to those answers.
A lot of people shrink from asking questions, like there’s something wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with it. This crazy paranoia about privacy on one hand, while on the other we have an obscene obsessiveness to know everything online about others speaks to a neurotic (maybe psychotic) split in the public’s consciousness.
When we ask questions of one another we show interest in one another’s lives. There are boundaries to questions. The art of asking questions is to know where those boundaries are.
In the future I’ll be writing more about boundaries, the art (and science) of telephone sourcing today and how telephone sourcing is one of the best job generators in recruiting.
It’ll be fun. Join me. Won’t you?