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People get hung up on Twitter being difficult to search - it’s not at all, you just have to know which tools to use – every public aspect of it is searchable easily.
Perhaps what really stumps people is the brevity of all the information. Bios are small so even when someone hits your keywords it is impossible to be 100% sure that they have got the skills you are looking for.
Tweets are not always a good source of information either – the majority of people that use twitter to demonstrate their expertise are probably self-employed or running their own business and not interested in the opportunities you have. The folks you want to find are using twitter to chat to their friends, get advice, gripe about trains and twitpic their cats.
It’s important that you don’t see this as a negative thing. You can attract the right people to you and twitter is just perfect to aid real life meet-ups and networking. If you are honest and open and tweet about the things that really interest you in your geography, your industry and your niche then the right candidates will find and follow you and chat to you. Then they’re part of your network. Twitter is immensely powerful for building trust – you are now part of your candidates’ trusted network and they of yours. Ask them the next time you need help with a tricky search assignment. You never know, one of them might be the perfect candidate – or at least know the perfect candidate. -
When I think of a head hunter I think of a recruiter that fills senior roles or jobs requiring very rare skills. Due to their rarity, there people are less likely to be found actively seeking a job.
A sourcer can help unearth this rare talent, through research and community management online, over the phone and by tapping into their network of contacts. These people can then be approached by a recruiter or head-hunter about the job opportunity available. The recruiter of head hunter will then try to sell them the opportunity or try to see if they could recommend someone else that might be appropriate.
A sourcer is really valuable when you need to hunt down rare skills or attract those currently happy in a job because these are the people that won’t respond to job advertisements or have their CV on a site like Monster or Jobsite. These people are often referred to as passive candidates.
There are of course advantages to having a sourcer work on all roles, even when there are likely to be active candidates. Sourcers specialise in candidate attraction and are specialists in writing job ads, any database of candidates is only as good as the person searching it and it can never be detrimental to find some candidates your competitors won’t have access to. -
I think that the role is still a very young one. It could definitely benefit from having its profile raised within the recruitment industry. Here in the UK especially the role is often considered to be a trainee recruiter or at least junior to a recruiter. I think this needs to change. A sourcer has a massively different skill set to a recruiter. A good sourcer will not make a good recruiter and vice versa. Sourcers have a wide aray of skills that need to be recognised in their own right. While sourcers may come before recruiters in the hiring process, they are by no means junior to them.
I am all for being open about what we do. In fact, I think there is nothing to be gained by holding back “secrets”. We search the internet (and some of us even get on the phone!) to find people with very specific talents, it’s nothing more magical than that.
I do like the sense of mystery that surrounds it though, the notion that we can find things others cannot. But that is nothing more than taking pride in being good at my job. People marvel at what we do the same way that everyone secretly loves to watch the odd episode of CSI and marvel at how the detectives figure out “who done it?”. -
I can’t say that I have ever sourced for an SEO expert. I would imagine that a genuine expert would make it easy for you to find them and examples of their work so that you could judge for yourself. They would not be a real exert if this was not the case.
For this search I would want to have a detailed understanding of what my client would be looking for in an SEO professional. What do they see as the traits of a genuine expert? What techniques do they not endorse? What websites do they view as displaying excellent SEO? Do they have the profile of someone they respect in this field that they could send me? I wouldn't begin the search without that kind of information.
While I think a genuine SEO expert would have a twitter presence, it might be that they are hard to identify with certainty due to all the wannabes and spammers. I would start my search with LinkedIn (where I would expect to find links to examples of their work or to their personal websites) or go straight to a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing. I would certainly check out the Twitter presence of any apparent experts I found before sending their names on to a recruiter or hiring manager. -
I do. I do it from the perspective of generating business development leads. I think the best tool for this is an RSS reader.
I set up Google alerts based on target companies and keywords. Some niches have certain job boards that attract more direct employers than recruitment advertisers – it can be handy to set up RSS feeds from these. -
I think there is a place for it. I know that the likes of Primark (a high street retailer, looking to recruit directly) and Chinwag (a job board and networking website for the digital sector) have seen success when tweeting job opportunities. I think that job feeds should have their own separate twitter account. If you simply want news, information and conversation with an employer or recruitment provider, to keep getting job tweets irrelevant to you appearing in your stream would be annoying. With a dedicated account for jobs it becomes impossible to spam people in this way. Who receives your tweets is opt-in. So anyone that follows your jobs account must have an interest.
I would recommend distributing your tweets evenly, not in large batches. It can be irritating when one twitter user blasts out 10 tweets and takes over the streams of its followers. Be considerate and set your feed only to send out one or two tweets every half an hour as an absolute maximum.
Ideally you would then have another account for engagement and active use of twitter. Providing interested parties with a way to contact you and a way for you to help those that need it. These two accounts would reference each other in their bios and the main engagement account could occasionally promote the jobs account (on #FollowFriday for example) to ensure those interested are aware of it.
I would not judge the success of the jobs account based on the number of followers it amassed. I anticipate that a lot of people would stop by, see if there were any interesting positions tweeted recently and follow links to your recruiting platform to sign up there if interested. I would measure the success of your jobs account based on the amount of traffic generated to your recruitment site and any increase in applications from there. So always be aware of these metrics before you start using a new method of job distribution like Twitter and have a well designed career site to direct job seekers to.
I could go on...
So feel free to question me more. -
It might not always be apparent, but by trade I am a Sourcer.
Sourcing is the very first part of the recruitment process. It’s the finding of candidates that might be suitable for a job role you need to fill. I do this using the internet, usually for 3rd party recruitment companies but sometimes for direct employers too.
If you've not heard of it before, that’s not surprising. Sourcing is very young as a profession in it’s own right. It’s more established in North America than anywhere else - they were the first to give it a name and start a conference just for us sourcers.
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Loading...Katharine’s Bio
The Grandmaster Sourcer, Internet research monkey, social media explorer and tea drinker.
