The game of cat and mouse continues with LinkedIn. If you haven’t noticed, some of our most beloved sourcing tools have temporarily stopped working on LinkedIn. This isn’t surprising news as SourceCon first reported in April that LinkedIn updated its terms of service to its Privacy Policy and User Agreement via their blog. Most damaging to our favorite sourcing tools was the update to its User Agreement:
- LinkedIn added clarity about the activities allowed on LinkedIn. For example, we prohibit both the act of scraping others’ content from our services and the development and support of tools to scrape LinkedIn services.
The sourcing community has seen many popular extensions come and go throughout the year. Most noticeably was Candidate.io and Nymeria. There will be more. In fact, sourcing tools come and go all the time. It’s a little exhausting to keep up with. This is why we have Dean Da Costa.
With each update to LinkedIn’s User Agreement and the subsequent expiration of a sourcing tool, our community is reminded that we can’t rely solely on sourcing tools. No one is preaching from the pulpit, and sourcing tools aren’t making us lazy or inefficient. Grady Booch once said, “A fool with a tool is still a fool.”
Let’s be honest; we have been suffering from an overreliance of sourcing tools for the past few years. Blaming us is hard. There is a tool for just about everything! But, will you be ready when they all disappear? I would estimate that the vast majority of us would say no. What if LinkedIn disappeared? What if Google disappeared? Can we survive? Why, yes. Yes, we can.
As an advocate for sourcing tools, I am always on the lookout for a shortcut. However, I come from a generation that starting sourcing without LinkedIn and sourcing tools. In fact, my last employer had blocked the use of Chrome Extensions altogether. This didn’t make us weak or unproductive. We were still able to effectively source candidates without 12 Chrome Extensions, four web scrapers, multiple LinkedIn Recruiter licenses and a partridge in a pear tree. It can be done, and it needs to be done.
Recruiters and sourcers need to have a solid foundation of knowledge before they are given a shortcut. We all learned how to add and subtract before we were given a calculator. Today, though inconvenient I admit, I can still do math without a calculator or cell phone. I hope you can too. Sourcing is no different.
I’m a coach at heart, and I love to teach. I’m thankful to be apart of a community that has a thirst for knowledge and works together to share information. With each departure of a sourcing tool, we have an opportunity to advance our skillset. After all, I always tell the kids that I coach in swimming, “It’s easy to swim fast when we feel great. However, we will become faster when we learn how to swim when we aren’t feeling great.” If you agree, then I encourage you to teach or seek help. We are only as strong as our weakest link.
As for our favorite sourcing tools, the ball is in your court. The community is behind you. We know you will triumph and when you do, our skills will be stronger, and we will all be better from it.