I attended my second SourceCon last week in Orlando. I learned a lot, reconnected with old friends and made a bunch of new ones. We bounced ideas off of each other from sourcing, hiring, consulting revenue models and comparing local hiring economies.
It was a great trip and I look forward to being in Anaheim in September ‘16.
Jim Schnyder of PepsiCo led a crowd sourcing session with this scenario, if LinkedIn was down and the rest of the Internet was working, what tools, tricks, and hacks would you use?
For the next 45 minutes attendees shared tip after tip after tip. A few were new to me and a couple were hacked in such a way that I was giving it a try right then and there. You can find some of them by clicking SourceCon Crowdsourced: Best Tips Of Day 1
However… something was missing from the conversation and I had to jump in:
My favorite hack that I gave: “Paul from Minneapolis, get off your ass and go meet people at user groups and associations” #Sourcecon
— Paul DeBettignies (@MNHeadhunter) March 1, 2016
There was a large number of people who cheered and clapped.
Here’s the deal… we spend a lot of time talking about finding where our people, our candidates, hang out online.
Let’s take it a step further and go where our candidates hang out in “real life.”
30 hours after landing in Minneapolis and still nursing a SourceCon “hangover”, the kind from a full and tired brain, I arrived at Midwest PHP.
When I Work (the Minnesota startup I am working with) was a sponsor of the event and two of our developers were speaking. For two days I hung out with 230+ PHP developers. I had my “pool” of potential candidates literally in front of me.
No Boolean search strings, no hacks, no LinkedIn… nothing I had just learned at SourceCon. Just old fashioned communication: shaking hands, talking and eye contact.
I know I lost a bunch of you Introverts in that last sentence. Disclaimer: I too am an Introvert.
The number of recruiting conversations, referrals, new Social Media followers, etc was big. Add in the employer branding for When I Work and recruiter branding for me and how follow up and future conversations will be much easier… you get the point.
Obviously this is not a “new” hack and one I wrote about in Fordyce in 2011:
Get Out From Behind The Desk And Network
Here is my challenge to you: if you are not getting the InMail reply rate you wish for or are having a hard time finding a (new) pool of candidates go to a user group, association or meet up and do some old school sourcing and recruiting… meet people.
P.
2016: Change the game… and the rules