It was a year ago I presented to an enthusiastic crowd at SourceCon Royale in Vegas, when I discussed Proactive Talent Acquisition and Sourcing Strategy to a packed room of nearly 100 participants. The inspiration for that presentation came from another one of my more popular SourceCon articles which you can read here: Building Your Talent Bench Before You Need It – Sourcing for Pipelines. It was a fantastic opportunity to share my passion and my love of sourcing, and what I have learned along the way to try and make a recruiting desk work for the best. Along the way and since that time much has indeed changed in over one year. Can hardly believe that statement as I write it, yet that’s what it is. This time, my topic is ever more clear and ever more important to my heart. As I write this, I am trying to strategically set up my staffing desk to be on auto-pilot as much as possible while I take a week to re-energize, renew, and revitalize my passions about what it takes to launch in essence a rocket ship of success. I’d love for you to join me and wanted to encourage you to find me and discuss sourcing strategy. My topic is well named, the goal of it to impart what I have learned along the way that has helped my desk to be reinvented, to achieve offer and fill goals as never before – in other words “Go Where You Have Never Been.”
When I first chose my title – I pondered and researched for hours – and then it hit me: “Go Where You Have Never Been.” Launch your career, drive your staffing desk, make the fantastic possible. It stuck. As I started to prepare this, I realized I wouldn’t have much time only 30 minutes to deliver something extraordinary that would leave my brand with participants and help them get to their next level – whatever they aspire to be. And I would have to prep an addendum to share everything I would love to share. But focusing on the fundamentals – the intake, and the key strategies of Staffing Consultation was a vital component that I would need to be successful. A few years back I wrote my first SourceCon Article – to be honest, it was one of my more popular posts. It focused on the fundamental foundation for staffing success: The Intake Meeting. Here is that article: Mastering the Intake Meeting As a Sourcer.
As it came to be – this outlined my philosophy. As is only fitting, I have decided to make this a fundamental aspect of my presentation at SourceCon this time around in Seattle. The foundation of the Intake Meeting is the ten steps I outlined in that article. Furthermore, gathering Competitive Intelligence, Market Intelligence, Salary Market Yield, and strategizing your sourcing approach, understanding a job description, etc. make for some marvelous Sourcing wizardry. In Seattle, you will be blessed to see some remarkable presenters. Quite frankly, I intend to make “Go Where You Have Never Been” an incredible opportunity to walk away with some new ways of looking at things. Just recently I delivered my first ERE.net Webinar which had over 700 sign-up and 200+ live attendees. I’m sure the rest of the 500 will see it at their leisure from the recording, and I heard some excellent comments from the participants. I desire to make this presentation just as unique as that outcome. To be sure, I will learn something from those who attend my session as well.
Beyond that I intend to talk about some other fun approaches to sourcing you might not have tried – like hashtag searches – for instance, say you wanted to find a Business Resiliency/Business Continuity Candidate with Disaster Recovery skills – after some research I found some excellent insights from the International Association for Disaster Recovery: Disaster Recovery International. I learned they had a conference and stumbled upon a wealth of information in a recent search I conducted using terms like #DRIConference, #DRIInternational #Resiliency #BCP.
Many of us might not be aware of how incredible results are when you get creative and see what is trending via hashtags. You start to find all sorts of candidate clues via multiple social channels. Twitter is the most likely source you would use, but I began to notice that LinkedIn (free accounts mind you), and Facebook can help you drill down to your desired candidate pools, their followers/friends, etc.
I’ll walk you through the same recent search I conducted using the metro area of Alpharetta Georgia for this Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery skill sets. And how I came up with a creative approach using certifications I gleaned from the search. Say you wanted to find a certified Business Resiliency/Disaster Recovery Professional with certifications from DRI International. The certifications they use are Associate Business Continuity Professional & Certified Business Continuity Professional designations. Now, even if you don’t want the certifications, you still have to drill down to find these folks. I’ll show you how I gained buy-in from the hiring manager after showing her the pool/market and getting buy in to realign the parameters to fill this role quickly. Data was the key to maneuvering because there are only so many of these professionals. From there you can also recalibrate, nurture your candidate relationships, and find ways to Always Be Closing through different phone techniques, and your approach.
Here’s an example of how I conducted this same search and my string I came up with for a Google resume search:
(intitle:resume OR inurl:resume OR intitle:CV OR inurl:CV)(“risk threat analysis” OR RTA OR “incident management” OR “business continuity” OR “pandemic planning” OR “business resiliency)(ABCP OR CBCP OR certified OR certification) -jobs -samples –job
My Results
To “Go Where You Have Never Been” requires some ingenuity, reinvention, strategy, and poise. Setting and resetting expectations, and using and trying different tools and knowing what tools to use and when to use them is all part of the strategy. Along the way, I’ll open the vault and share some things you may have never thought about, on the way to making yourself emerge to a newer level of achievement and reinvention you may have never thought possible. Hope to see you soon! Find me on the Welcome Wagon and say hello!