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A Review of the Los Angeles Sourcing Summit

By Bryan Johanson, November 19, 2008

I know it's a long way to travel to Los Angeles, especially for our East Coast readers, but last Wednesday you missed a great opportunity to attend our first ever half-day sourcing summit.  So for the benefit of those who couldn't make it, I'll provide a short summary of some of the "must know" sourcing ideas presented by our panel of experts.  When we first conceived of the idea it was an experiment of sorts.  Of course, that was also before the economy started heading south, companies like Citibank announced record layoffs (over 52,000 this month), and AIG got its first bailout check.  We were a little concerned that sourcing might be at the bottom of recruiters' shopping lists this holiday season, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that interest was still high.  While entry-level jobs are a little easier to fill, there is still the issue of weeding through increased candidate flow to find the real gems.  Skilled labor is, and will always be, a challenge to find, even in a slowing economy.  In fact, recruiters reported that getting skilled labor to move in this market is even more challenging.  Recruiters have to use all their skills to make it happen.  So our conclusion is that the war for top talent is hardly over, but the battlefield has made some dramatic shifts.  In this week's article, I'll share some of the insights and key messages delivered at the summit to help companies build talent pipelines and capture the best passive talent available. 

1. Don't Settle for the Leftovers!

Our own Lou Alder kicked of the afternoon with a compelling argument for developing an "Early Bird" sourcing strategy.  Let me explain.  If you've ever had a candidate that you've found, either through networking or from an employee referral, tell you that they're not interested because they just took another job, or because they have three other serious offers on the table and it's really too late to consider another opportunity, you've experienced the "Leftovers Strategy." Had you contacted that candidate three, four, or six weeks earlier, your conversation would have been completely different.  Even better, had that candidate reached out to you before they were totally entrenched in their job search you would have had your pick of the talent.  The goal of an early bird sourcing strategy is to focus all sourcing channels and efforts on getting to top candidates first.  All top performers go through a process for exploring new opportunities.  That process starts slowly and builds over time.  To understand that process, you can read Lou's recent article, "Inside the Mind of the Top Performer."  Most companies seem content picking through the leftovers, and in today's market there are a lot of leftovers.  A leftover sourcing strategy dooms companies to a fate of hiring average performers.

What's Shakin' at Shaker Advertising?  Talent Hubs and Engagement Strategies

Chris Johnson, Director of Client Service for Shaker Advertising, shared her vision for how companies can stand out in an otherwise crowed job market.  She has spent the last 14 years at Shaker helping companies with their recruitment advertising needs.  The key to Shaker's success is applying tried and true consumer marketing techniques to the world of online recruiting.   If you are among the thousands of companies that blast your boring job descriptions out to every job board and your corporate website, then your talent future isn't that bright.  These internal documents created primarily to protect us from legal ramifications in case of an OFCCP audit were never intended to be the primary vehicle for attracting top performers.  In fact, they repulse top talent. 

Most companies give potential employees only one option from their career websites – Apply for this job now! Guess what? 93% of the people who come to a corporate career website are not ready to buy!  Only 7% will actually hit the "apply" button.  So what do we do with the rest? We have to give them broader options for interacting with us that don't require an application, registering on your website, creating a profile, or uploading a resume. 

The rules are changing the way we measure success.  It's not about the number of applications; it's about engagement.  It's also about the quality of the applicants.  Number of applicants is meaningless if everyone who applies is a "C" player.  Chris suggested that companies offer multiple opportunities for candidates to engage with their organization.  These might include the ability to chat online with a recruiter, sign up for information with only their email address, join a recruiter's network, set up an RSS feed to track hot relevant jobs, or download a pertinent document or tool.  The metrics of engagement are much different.  Success is measured by level of engagement, not number of applications.

One key to successful engagement is the Talent Hub (if you want to read more about talent hubs check out one of our past articles on that topic).  We'd be happy to review the basic characteristics of a talent hub with you online, share some examples, and even help you design one.  Just send an email to me at bryan@adlerconcepts.com if you are interested.

Just FYI, one of Shaker's fastest growing segments is third-party recruiters who want to build talent hubs around a particular niche market.

Start Pushing AND Pulling

Dion Lim, President and COO of Simply Hired, was our next presenter.  Simply Hired is one of the many aggregators that came on the scene a few years back.  They quickly and unobtrusively scrape jobs from all over the internet putting them all in one place.  Companies like Indeed.com and Jobster have a similar model.  That's the "pull" part of every aggregator's strategy.  What's unique about Simply Hired, however, is their "push" strategy.   How would you like to put your jobs in front of qualified candidates who are reading blogs, socializing on Facebook or MySpace, or frequenting other social or professional network sites?  Most recruiters would love to do this, but they have neither the time nor the technical know-how to do it.  Now you don't have to.  Simply Hired has spent years developing an engine to push your jobs out to relevant sites including social networks, association sites, and blogs based on the content of your posting.  You don't have to do a thing to get your relevant jobs in front of qualified candidates where they live on the internet.  Did you know that only 2% of total time on the internet is spent on Google?  12% is spent on MySpace!  Where should your jobs be posted? 

"A pushed job ad and poor targeting equals SPAM!  A pushed job ad and good targeting equals information," said Dion.   Simply Hired is in the information business, which means putting relevant jobs in context for people with a particular area of interest.  Once again, if you don't have a compelling job, this is a waste of time.  Why drive potential candidates to a job description that isn't compelling?  The goal is a higher quality of candidate at a much reduced cost per applicant.

It's What you Can't See that Matters – SEO for Dummies

If there's anybody in the industry who has his fingers on the pulse of SEO and SEM, it's Doug Berg, chairman and founder of Jobs2Web.   Jobs2Web just finished an extensive implementation with Best Buy.  The results have been phenomenal.  I encourage you to go to Best Buy's career site and check it out.  Unfortunately, what you see on the site is really only the icing on the cake – the proverbial tip of the iceberg.  The most important part is what you don't see.  Every talent hub, every job description, every page, every URL, every meta tag, and every key word has been optimized to be found by the major search engines for the particular target audience.  Jobs2Web spends many weeks conducting extensive research on the web behavior of your target candidate before launching a single page.  The site has also been optimized to be tracked so that the real source of candidates is finally revealed.  When you search for retail jobs in Minneapolis, Best Buy is at the top of the list, as it is in many other target markets.  Most companies aren't keeping up with technology for driving candidate traffic to their corporate websites.  Technology is moving too fast.  Google changes its algorithm to serving up information every day.  Doug and his team have created a process to harness the awesome power of organic search.  They use this system to drive relevant traffic to your career website. 

If you're going crazy just finding the resources to do the sourcing you're doing now, you might want to check out some of these options.  They do work, and with little work on your part you can take your sourcing efforts to a whole new level. 

Happy Recruiting,
Bryan Johanson