So if as stated above, our differences might be definitional. The whole focus of the original article was targeting passive candidates. In my mind the heavy lifting comes at first contact – on the phone – convincing someone who is not looking to a least seriously consider your opportunity, and as minimum, plus get 2-3 referrals on every call of pre-qualified candidates. Since 83% of the professional employment market is passive, to me this is where all of the action is. Spending time on Boolean is not necessary to do this – the 5 steps in the article are all that’s necessary to be great a finding great people, recruiting them, and getting them hired.

This however is not to say that two people shouldn’t be doing this work. I work closely with my researchers/sourcers on searches I conduct, making sure we both support each other. As the recruiter/account manager I track referrals per call, and cold calls vs. warm calls. I also make sure the sourcer knows the job inside/out, becomes an SME in the industry and company, and knows how to convert a job into a career during the first five minutes of the first call. We usually can develop a list of potential leads and nodes in 1-2 hours using LinkedIn Recruiter. Then we’re off to the races. For every person sent to me, I network with the prospect and send my warm, pre-qualified referrals to my sourcer to make the initial connect. Our warm to cold call target metric is 4:1. A warm call is returned 80-90% of the time, and since they’re already pre-qualified 30-40% of the 2nd level calls results in a worthy prospect to send to the HM. This is the process we use – without a pipeline – to be able to send 3-4 prospects for the HM to conduct an exploratory conversation within a week from the starting gate.

As for the LinkedIn comment, I’m going to assume that you simply skimmed my comment and felt you had a witty analogy to throw out even though it was irrelevant. I never said that sourcers don’t use LinkedIn or LinkedIn Recruiter. I simply said not all have the luxury of a full paid Recruiter account so they must know Boolean to circumvent the system and still access the talent. There are many ways to be effective and efficient with a simple Free account.

As an FYI to you – why would a node have to be on LinkedIn to be classified as that. Sticking with your own example are saying that if the headmaster in Ireland is not on LinkedIn he wouldn’t be able to connect you with the math instructor? That is absurd. There are many other ways to find a node and a true sourcer can do just that using all the tools in their toolbox. Plus they have more time to produce greater results without all the client meetings.

To even imply that a sourcer wouldn’t use the latest tools like LinkedIn Recruiter sounds pretty dinosaurish to me. It’s like a carpenter saying he/she still uses a handsaw. When you apply the trifecta of metrics as guidelines there’s no contest who will win. The metrics – quality of hire, time to fill and cost per hire.

FYI – by definition, to be a node they have to be a LinkedIn. And if on average everyone of the 160mm people now on LinkedIn is connected to only 50 people you can get to everyone in the US who’s 20 years old by one degree of separation 10x over, even if these connections aren’t on Linked. To get their name all you have to do is call the node and ask. Then if you pre-qualify the person, you’ll only have to call people who not only will call you back, but they’re also qualified! What a hoot -

You make is seem as though sourcing = name generation. That is an extremely narrow view of what skilled sourcers do, they are strategic researchers who know how to uncover the elusive “passive” talent that every hiring manager seems to want. There is a broader skill set they tap into such as competitive intelligence research, pipelining, social recruiting, building talent communities, sourcing large talent pools for events etc.

Additionally, in corporate environments recruiters typically act as “account managers” and much of their time is monopolized in meetings with their clients (the hiring manager), presenting offers and closing candidates and in general managing the reqs. This doesn’t leave much time for them to proactively source or build pipelines. In these cases a sourcer is able to become the SME on the industry, develop and execute a strategy while continually building relationships and pipelines.

Also, sourcers must be more fluent in Boolean than you are portraying as not everyone has the luxury of a LinkedIn Recruiter account at $500+ a month and not every candidate or “node” is on LinkedIn. Therefore a sourcer has to know how to find the (large) remaining professional population through whatever means necessary including Boolean, competitor research and phone sourcing.

Cheers,

Keith
keithsrj@sbcglobal.net