Good article. Glad Microsoft is thinking way ahead that these candidates or applicants are not only potential fits down the road, but could end up with potential business partners or with business rivals out for blood…….

Kudos on a well-written article…

Cheers,

Jim

interesting – but from an applicant’s pov the effects are difficult to see. MS stays a teflon mountain (and I do have the 180 IQ), with little obvious engagement into my fields at least (high-tech, moving very dense manufacturing information around, combining data….)

I believe we need a much richer way to elicit skills, abilities, potential. The standard resume and the resume polishing industry are an impediment to achieving this.

Well, I’m off to ping the MS Recruiting site and see if I can exploit my new knowledge!

John

We’ve built a recruitment marketing platform that helps companies automate the entire process, check us out at http://www.smashfly.com

Heidi-thanks for the kind words. I appreciate your insights about administrators. Our is and will always be a people business.

Marilou, Kristi, Sue, & Mary—thanks for the encouragement.

Jeremy- as always, you add to the conversation.

Ted—I saw the buzz in ERE that Grouper Eye us is game changing. Looking forward to your launch.

John—I will check out “bigdoghub”

Ben—I appreciate your feedback—especially from someone that “gets it.”

Marvin, since joined the conversation, how do you incorporate phone sourcing into this process?

Wonderful article! You are spot on with this, especially in a time when companies are being more selective than ever and when there are in some cases many more qualified candidates than there are jobs. Companies that ignore our lose out on those who they can’t hire today but may need tomorrow will suffer in the long run for sure.

This model is really about applying technology to cultivate relationships and expand communications on a scale that just were not possible before. On top of that, it can be relatively easy to set up (although harder to maintain), and rather inexpensive (if not free if you can do it all in house).

Thanks for sharing, I’m always learning something from you…

Ben Gotkin
National Recruiting Director
RSM McGladrey

I agree with everything you wrote except that the focus should not be on one way distribution or non-predictive friendly messaging – it needs to be based around doing real stuff. When it’s based around real stuff, it gets scary exciting. Then we flip the switch and talk about this talent community as revenue generating – this is when things get freakishly game-changing.

A lot of the ‘Talent Engagement’ folks at Microsoft (past & present) are pretty much über IQ, but they also are very curious by nature / not afraid to try something and have it fail miserably. I recall many a “post-mortems” meeting during the 3 contracts over 6 years that was my MS exp. These post-mortems were critical to hash out what went right, wrong, etc after a Strategic Sourcing Initiative.

After that, you are then able to see if you can duplicate the winning processes and move forward (which is probably where some of the above chart got vetted). This is the key difference between Corporate Sourcing Teams that sit around and just talk about how cool something might be & the folks that legitimately try it; most times on their own without any outside help. Although, I think Marvin might be promoting a couple key Vendors presently to help do the tactical to MS’s strategy.

The stuff I hear from Marvin, Kay, etc. out of there shows that MS is still a Leader in the space! GOOD JOB TEAM

jer
…………………. ★ sourcer