For anyone who is currently attending SourceCon Orlando and is a first-timer – whether live or via Twitter – the amount of information being received can seem a bit overwhelming. You may be thinking, “This information is ama-a-a-a-azing but how in the world can I use ALL the tools and resources? I barely have time to check my ATS!” There’s an old saying that goes, How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Day 2 of the conference began by helping to distill some of this information and instruct how to add bits and pieces into your existing workflow. The best way to get a handle on all of the great tools, resources, tips, and tricks that you’ve learned from this All-Star sourcing lineup this week is to think about what’s going to fit into your own unique workflow, to start there and build forward.
One of the reasons Stacy Zapar is such an in-demand presenter – aside from the fact that she’s been-there-done-that as a sourcer for about a decade – is that she walks step-by-step through good workflow, sharing best practices and tools along the way. During her presentation this morning, Zapar outlined a beautifully simple ‘farm-to-table’ approach to the whole process of talent attraction, from developing a productive intake meeting to the care and feeding of silver medalist candidates. While outlining best practices along the way (which included telling hiring managers who they know in their networks vs. asking, showing genuine interest in prospects, and selling the sizzle without giving away the steak in an initial email) she dropped tool tips here and there, recommending resources to help optimize certain steps along the way, almost all of which are free or low-cost. Some of those included:
- OneTab for all the browser tab organization
- EmailHunter for finding contact information
- YouCanBookMe for call scheduling
More information from Mark Tortorici’s and Jim Stroud’s presentation involved resource recommendations coupled with instruction on how – and why – to use. Stroud covered retention sourcing, a topic which, frankly, I don’t ever remember seeing presented before. The concept of sourcing for individuals who are more likely to stick around for a longer period of time is one that really resonated with the audience, and Stroud provided some suggestions on where and how to find these types of individuals, as well as how to really compel them. Some suggestions he made were looking for high IQ individuals by looking for MENSA members or checking out IQ test games and groups on Facebook, as well as considering offering benefits such as student loan payoff or household chore services. Ultimately, Stroud encouraged discovery of motivating factors and tailoring your initial conversations with these individuals to those motivators to develop a compelling reason for them to make a move – and then stay with your company.
Tortorici’s presentation dove into the creation of effective Boolean search strings. He stated that Boolean in fact is not dead, and provided argument that we just need a better understanding of why and how to manipulate it to return more quality results. He walked through four ‘secrets’ to unlocking Boolean search:
- Secret 1: natural language
- Secret 2: action words
- Secret 3: titles
- Secret 4: technology
These ‘secrets’ boil down to making sure your search strings group like things together so results are the best quality possible. Tortorici incorporated applying iterative search process to Boolean string refinement as well, which Glen Cathey reviewed in his presentation on day 1. Additionally, he shared a few handy tool suggestions to assist with string creation, such as using a word cloud generator (like Wordle, ABCya, or TagXedo) to pull recurring keywords from a profile or job description.
Please continue to follow the remainder of SourceCon Orlando on Twitter via the #sourcecon hashtag and add to the growing list of “open sourcer” resources!