Have you ever heard the question, “How do you eat an elephant?” One bite at a time, that’s how. You have to implement this philosophy when it comes to growing your knowledge and learning new ways to source as well.
So how do you juggle it all? By that, I mean, how do you find enough candidates to fill the 20-30 reqs on your desk, implement the new sourcing strategies you brought home from SourceCon and improve the ones you’ve been using all along?
I love learning; especially, new tips, hacks, and sourcing methods. I still lose sleep at night over discovering a new way to do something or improve the way I’ve been doing it for better results. I’m also easily distracted by shiny new objects. Every time I hear of an original sourcing method or tool that’s out there, I want to try it out. This is an easy trap to fall into, but you can’t. Not if you’re going to stay focused and deliver the results you are being expected to.
I remember the first presentation I gave to my co-workers when I came home from SourceCon. To say it was rough would be an understatement. I was excited and went at a pace; I know left them with more questions than answers. Here are a few tips to help you avoid this happening to you:
- Start with a couple of easy sourcing game questions and then move into what you want to share with them.
- Attempt to make it a lot of fun.
- Keep in mind that people seem to retain more of what you are communicating with them if they have the opportunity to apply it on the spot.
Eventually, I understood that less is better. Also, I changed the format of how I was sharing with others from a lecture to more of a lab or “lunch and learn” environment.
“If you want to get the most out of your time at SourceCon, enroll in SourceCon Academy after you have attended the conference and let Mark Tortorici explain in detail what you heard at the conference as well as give you even more tools to increase your sourcing knowledge.”
Success Breeds Success
Here are a few things you can do to keep yourself focused:
- Give yourself a day or two after the conference is over to let your brain recover from the massive information overload.
- Find a quiet place, review your notes, and begin to organize the information by topic. Much of the information, although gathered from different places, can be categorized into similar topics.
- Review the information for just one take away that you can start using that will have an immediate impact on your search results?
Avoid implementing too much at once. You may feel overwhelmed and have the perspective that it’s too hard to learn or that others are just way smarter than you, but that’s ok. I know there are others way more intelligent than me, but I am excited about how much I have been able to learn. It’s astonishing, how much I have been able to improve my sourcing skills over the last few years.
- If you are using LinkedIn Recruiter, look for ways that you can extract more or better results from your searches. Even if you feel you have exhausted LinkedIn Recruiter, I promise you; there are ways to get better results.
- If you don’t have LinkedIn Recruiter, there are great tools and resources for learning how to extract the most out of those databases as well.
It’s true that even a one-person operation with no budget for tools and all you have is a spreadsheet and telephone; can take away applicable tools and strategies from the conference. Whether it is learning how to use free OSINT tools, craft better messages, or find ways to scrape data from public pages you didn’t even know existed, there is something to learn!
Don’t be overwhelmed. Give yourself time to grow. With time, you will find your sourcing strategies and methods improve. Also, your search results will provide better candidates while on your quests to find the elusive purple squirrel.