Funnel Cake: The State of Sourcing

I started my career in sourcing. And, without revealing exactly how old I am (obviously, I’m ancient), I can tell you that the only reason my career took off was because I started sourcing at almost the exact same time that Google was closing in on information ubiquity, but still lagged far behind Yahoo or MSN Search in terms of market share. It was a time when you’d be better off asking Jeeves (I miss that dude) than “feeling lucky” when it came to relevant search results.
 

On my first day on the job, a week after my college graduation, I became the top performing sourcer in the company that ultimately became Manpower’s Global RPO group. The reason was pretty simple: I was like 20, and knew how to use search engines and social media.

Both were completely novel at the time, and my finding a sourcing job before I knew what sourcing actually entailed was fortuitous for me. I got to play wunderkid, never really letting on that finding candidates online was really friggin’ easy if you had an even rudimentary understanding of how to find a niche or esoteric information online.

As a newly minted fine arts graduate, I had plenty of practice, and the policy of sharing results (names generated, outgoing call volume, screens completed, candidate submission acceptance ratio, etc) with our entire sourcing team each week made me everyone wonder how I was beating sourcers with years of experience across the board, week in and week out (best stand up meetings of my career).

The sourcing group was made up mostly of executive search veterans whose competitive advantages lay in stuff like internal company directories they’d pilfered, or having the patience to wait until after business hours just to “hack” the corporate telephone system.

This was done by pressing random numbers until the automated operator popped up, Clippy like, to offer help, which inevitably volunteered every name at every extension (eg: “to reach Ron Fogel, Chief Financial Officer, press 343; to reach Angela Li, controller, press extension 344”...)

At the time, none of us knew that cheap trick (it worked great when people used phones to talk, by the way) would someday be called “AI,” or more specifically, “conversational intelligence.” The thing is, technology hasn’t changed all that much, unless you’re funded by venture capitalists.

I never let them in on my secret, of course - I figured that the only reason sourcing existed was because it was hard and required both extensive experience and a finely oiled network - and a lot of cold calling, which, as we know, is anathema for TA professionals.

But with the increasing ubiquity of personally identifiable information available online, and the increasing availability and accessibility of ever more powerful tools and technologies to mine that information, what was true back in those early days is even more true today.
With apologies to my friends building Boolean strings and building macros to scrape online employee directories or professional association lists or whatever else it is you call “hacking” (I love sourcers, but if finding basic profile and contact information about someone online is hacking then Nev and the Catfish crew are basically the Mossad): I’m going to tell everyone your secret.

Sourcing is really, really easy.

Moore’s Law might be obsolete, but sourcing continues to become exponentially easier, and likely will continue to become even easier pretty much in perpetuity. The tech really hasn’t changed all that much; the depth, breadth and volume of people’s professional information that’s openly searchable have proliferated. The players have changed, certainly. The game has not.

Information on people is pretty easy to find. Sourcing used to be largely dedicated to naming generation, and before anyone but recruiters ever really used LinkedIn, what differentiated a good sourcer and a great sourcer - as I learned at my first job - was a combination of technological acumen and learning agility.

So, this brings me to a conversation I just had with the head of global sourcing, recruitment analytics and talent intelligence at a Fortune 500 technology company that also happens to be my long-term ex-girlfriend. It’s funny how networks work. But she texted me this gem a couple of weeks back:

“Random question for you. Did the philosophy that sourcers should “only” go after passive leads with no discernible interest in a company come from somewhere? Why wouldn’t sourcers want to identify the talent most likely to engage first?”

I couldn’t give her a good answer, and I’d encourage anyone reading this to help a brother out. But the fact is, sourcing remains one of the single biggest sources of recruiting-related spend, headcount, and, certainly, “thought leadership” share of the market.

To this day, it’s perceived, and compensated, as if it required some special skill to stalk someone online (ask any teenager to disavail you of this notion). The reason for this is, quite simply, that while everyone can agree that sourcing is easy, what’s not is what makes for relative sourcing success (or lack thereof).

It’s all about the ability not just to generate names, or pull profiles, but also, figuring out how to engage those same “passive” candidates, who by definition are not interested in talking to anyone in external talent acquisition (and if they were, they’d be active candidates, and therefore, unhireable).

This, unlike finding people, has become much, much harder over the course of the past few decades; consider that every recruiter, and every enterprise employer, essentially rely on the same data sets and sources of hire as every other company, meaning that connecting with potential candidates has become exponentially more difficult. Candidate development - building relationships instead of pipelines, and converting qualified, interested and available candidates into interested applicants has always been complex - but it’s also the core of what sourcing is all about.

This month’s issue of Talent Acquisition Excellence is all about sourcing - and despite the variety of voices, breadth of perspectives and strategies or tools represented in some brilliant bylines from some of the best and brightest leaders in the sourcing business today - you’re going to see a common theme emerge. Well, besides the inevitable rise of AI:

Sourcing can’t be done on scale, because personalization is everything when it comes to converting a promising lead, eventually, into a new hire. Sure, everyone with a niche skill set or in-demand industry experience (that’s most knowledge workers in today’s market) is getting blown up by everyone from executive search firms to the TA equivalent of offshore call centers.

It happens dozens of times a week to most, since everyone uses the same data set, outreach is largely templated or programmatic, and rarely, if ever, has information that goes beyond what you’d find in a job posting. Often, the message is a job posting (we spray and pray all day, by the way).

But as you’ll learn in this month’s magazine, it’s exceedingly rare for a sourcer to treat a candidate like, you know, a person with professional interests and aspirations, personal drivers and particular pet peeves - not just someone who looks like they could be a fit for whatever req you happen to be working on at the moment.

It’s even rarer for that sourcer to have enough business and interpersonal acumen to present an opportunity that’s a mutually beneficial match (much less a relevant job to begin with). Those who see sourcing not as “hacking” or demand gen or, worst of all, pipeline or talent community building but instead as the first point of contact at the front end of the hiring funnel, a brand ambassador and potential future colleague instead of just another recruiter, those are the recruiters who win.

I hope you enjoy learning more about the tips, tricks and techniques TA leaders today can use to win at sourcing tomorrow. We’ve got some great articles, er, sourced for this edition of TA Excellence.

This month, the articles included were chosen specifically because they offer practical, actionable advice, rather than vague theoretical abstracts and whatever the hell “thought leadership” is. If you’ve read this far, you’ve already gotten more than enough of that.

The rest of the issue, however, is worth a read. And as always, I hope that you stay excellent, my friends.