I was reading an article today about the ferocious talent wars for tech going on right now in Silicon Valley and a sentence caught my eye.

“Whether she is scouring Stanford or Parsons for up-and-comers or more established candidates, de Baubigny says, ‘I am always very open-minded about what good talent looks like.’”

Maybe it’s because I watched a new show this morning called Brain Games

or maybe it’s because I’m a compulsive anagrammer, or maybe it’s my Dyslexia kicking in — for whatever reason when I read the word “scouring” I saw “sourcing.”

I started to think.

Has sourcing become scouring?

I believe it has.

What a few of us began doing (and talking about) in the latter days of the 20^th century and on into the present century has turned into an incessant scouring (for many) of what can be found on the Internet. keep reading…

There are many different things a phone sourcer says everyday, but there are some that are said most everyday.

You have maybe three seconds to engage a Gatekeeper.

What you say in those first few, fatal moments will determine in what direction your sourcing call will go.

The following are the most used words and sentences you’d hear if you could sit next to a phone sourcer for a day. keep reading…

There is no index of character so sure as the voice. – Benjamin Disraeli, British prime minister and novelist 1804-1881

When we open our mouths, we reveal all sorts of things about ourselves that can have nothing to do with the words we’re using.

We all know that our tone is important when talking with a Gatekeeper, but how many of us realize that pressing on just one word in a sentence can change the impression and sometimes even the meaning that the emphasis gives?

In all of our jobs there are times when we must think about how we’re going to say something (in order to get the best result) before we say it. So my advice below applies not just to phone sourcing but to any recruiting or business-related call, such as a call with a job candidate, not just a gatekeeper.

Nuances that include inflection, stress, and context are all meaningful signals that convey information but inflection is the one that can change entirely the meaning of a sentence and the idea(s) behind it.

The emphasis on a particular word implies additional information than what the words say.

Say the following sentences with emphasis on each bolded word. keep reading…

“Send me a text!”

“I’ll text you!”

“Visit my webpage.”

“See the attached file…”

“Please electronically sign the contract and email it back to me.”

“Apply online.”

 “’Like’ me on Facebook, Twitter, whatever…”

“Join my “GoToMeeting.”

It’s not at all unusual for new technology to produce crude results.

In our case, new technology is opening the door to weak communication skills.

Few stop to consider that all these impersonal communications may be endangering our work! keep reading…

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. – Tom Stoppard

I recently did a search for managers and senior managers in Tax out of second- and third-tier accounting companies on the East Coast.

The customer had sent me a list of names he already had — informing me they’d be a nice addition to my “database.”

The problem with that is 90% of his names were on LinkedIn.

I’m just not that interested. keep reading…

There are many reasons why gatekeepers reject your efforts to breach their lines. I’m going to go over four of them with you in this article, but first I want to tell you a story. keep reading…

There are three messages that need to be conveyed to a customer early in a prospective sourcing transaction.

Most sourcers never discuss these concepts that are directly linked to building the value of your services and obtaining exclusivity of your services in the future.

The three messages that matter are:

1. All sourcers are not the same.
2. It really matters who represents a customer’s interests.
3. My market knowledge and search skills are superior to other sourcers.

Let’s look at each of these messages that matter: keep reading…

Hello?

Anyone see this?

Just when you thought not poaching another company’s employees was the right thing to do – BAM!

You get blindsided by none other than the United States justice system.

All this havoc resulted from this in which the U.S. Justice Department settled in 2010 with Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel, Walt Disney’s Pixar, and Intuit for not “cold calling” one another’s employees.

In their defense, the companies argued that they “LinkedIn” mailed other company employees and contacted (by email) those they found on the Internet.  keep reading…

You get what you pay for.  You sometimes get less, but you never get more. – Something I heard a long, long time ago, somewhere

One stone for two birds?

I don’t think so.

I know all you hiring managers and staffing officials out there would like your recruiters to be expert sourcers and your sourcers to be expert recruiters.

I know you all would like to kill two birds with one stone, but I can tell you right now, right here, it’s not going to happen.

It’s not going to happen because the two types of personality types are generally not found (in one person) in an organization.

They’re found outside organizations in the form of third party recruiters who have been cutting this mustard for years.

Now that we’ve given this brave and heroic special set the recognition and laurel crown they so richly deserve, let me tell you why you’re not likely to find these people inside your organization. keep reading…

I saw an interesting discussion posted in one of the LinkedIn groups I belong to. It asked:

When “cold calling” on a company for the first time, what is the best way to make contact that gets results? Assume you have no “in” at the company.

There were 64 votes. The voting results follow:

• Email (4%)
• Telephone (until you reach them live) (18%)
• Inmail once (1%)
• Email, then follow up by telephone (28%)
• Telephone, then follow up by email (46%)

I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to change “company” to “person” and change “assume you have no in at the company” to, “You don’t know this person.”

Which would you choose?

I’m a phone sourcer who’s asked many times to take my research one step further and contact each of the names I’ve sourced to “profile” them for their interest in the opportunity my customer represents. So, I would choose Door #2.

Telephone (Until You Reach Them Live)

I know that makes me a minority, but I have my reasons for doing this. keep reading…

I had that singsong experience again yesterday while (phone) sourcing.

What’s the singsong experience?

It’s when a Gatekeeper starts offering information, in a continuous pattern, to your request.

Don’t misunderstand — I had spent several hours sourcing into a particular entertainment company with very little — almost none — success.

Several hours.

Admittedly, the customer said it was a challenge.

Then I got “lucky.” keep reading…

Someone called me yesterday in a rush.

“I need to find Application Engineers installing medical equipment — x-ray equipment to be exact — and I looked on LinkedIn and there’s not much I can use. Oh, sure, there are some application engineers who list ‘medical equipment’ in their profiles, but I need people from specific companies — companies like GE, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Medtronics, Becton-Dickinson, Boston Scientific, Stryker, St. Jude, Varian, Cordis — you know, the majors. And I don’t need them if they worked at those companies in the past — I need them working at those companies today!

“I also don’t need all the desperate substitute offerings LinkedIn is giving me because they don’t have exactly what I need –I can’t wade through that mess of misfits.”

“Can you help me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Can you help me fast?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said again.

“I have to warn you, though, a couple of those companies you listed are customers of mine so I won’t be able to source them but I think we’ll be able to add some other companies that will yield you a list of 30 or 40 that might do the trick for you,” I added.

“And you’ll be able to get me names of the application engineers at those companies who are installing medical equipment today?” he asked. There was an emphasis on the word “today.”

“Yes,” I answered.

“And you’re sure they will be application engineers — the guys in the field installing the equipment?” he pressed, still unsure I knew what he was talking about.

“I promise,” I solemnly swore.

“How long will it take?”

“Give me 48 hours,” I answered. I’ll be able to send you probably half of what’s out there to get you started. Give me another 48 hours and I’ll send you the rest.”

I heard the surprise in the silence that followed. keep reading…

Krista Bradford recently wrote a timely and provocative article here on ERE about LinkedIn.

One of ERE’s long-time members, Ted Moore, in a comment to that article, stated, “If you rely heavily on LinkedIn and similar tools to connect with those your clients can easily find and recruit on their own, at least as they perceive it (and what else matters?), I look forward to competing with you.”

I know Ted and I also know he means what he says.

I also know as time marches on those who think LinkedIn is sourcing are eventually going to pay a heavy price for their growing addictions.

In my “Help Me Help You” document that I send to all my new customers requesting telephone names sourcing, there is a paragraph that instructs the customer to provide me:

– Any names you might already have — this does two things: 1) avoids me duplicating your efforts and 2) gets me in to the targets faster. Be sure to include their titles and any contact info you have on them — their titles help me understand how close I am to the target and what these folks may be called at the respective companies and their contact info gives me clues as to how to get inside their organizations.

More and more we have the LinkedIn discussion. keep reading…

I was talking to a dear friend this morning who told me all the rain we had recently washed out the rear of her house and caused substantial damage to her foundation and the low-lying rooms on that level of her home.

“Insurance doesn’t cover this. I need a second job,” she said, matter-of factly and in the common-sense tone I have always known her to adopt.

We went on to talk about several other things — how the “guys” in her male-dominated industry don’t appreciate or are willing to pay her fairly for the tremendous extra volume of business she has drummed up for the sales team in the past three years she has been with the company she works for now.

Granted, that’s her side of things and there may be another.

However, at the end of our conversation she happened to mention that she had developed a business relationship with someone who hates the telephone.

“How does that work for him?’ I asked, laughing. keep reading…

When I first started names sourcing I used to think to myself, “I wish there was a database of names with titles.”

In fact, I used to do wistful dogpile and altavista searches that looked something like this:

“Hewlett Packard” “employee list”

or this:

“Hewlett Packard” employees

You get the idea.

That was back in 1996.

Once in a great while I’d get lucky and something would come up but not usually.

I’d search for something — anything — that could get me inside of a company and then I’d call and bounce around until I got the information I was tasked to find.

It’s pretty much what I do (still) today.

Someone called me a “dying breed” on the Recruiting Animal show the other day because I use the telephone.

I’m okay with that.

In fact, I’m glad to be recognized as such because in this dying I am experiencing a rebirth.

More of that in a bit — let’s get back to the late 90s in this industry. keep reading…

(In this article @ before a name denotes a person’s Twitter name.)

@ValentinoBenito guested on the Recruiting @Animal Radio Show on Wednesday, June 15 and he was regaling the crowd with tales of his past recruiting successes.

Early in the interview he made the broad statement that “Recruiting is pretty straight-forward.”

“Uh-oh,” I thought. “He’s going to rile some up in this crowd.”

What I didn’t expect was for him to explain what he meant so succinctly.

Usually, guests who come on the show and blither on and on about how successful they are get ripped to shreds and given low scores in the one half hour AfterShow that @Jerry_Albright hosts.

That didn’t happen with “Tino.”

It seems a ways back he was tasked to hire engineers on an historically large defense project and one of the companies the customer wanted to see lots of engineers out of was Boeing.

The great need meant that he couldn’t be too picky — he was grabbing engineers with generally correct experience by the bushel.

The customer knew the correct experience resided at Boeing.

They were smart because they were competing for people with other firms who were working on the same huge defense project and they recognized that they were in the midst of a war for talent in which speed was essential to beat the competition.

He was given the green light to offer people (from Boeing) jobs ON THE SPOT. keep reading…

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. –Wallace Stevens

Penelope Trunk wrote a recent piece about how to find satisfying work.

She made the important point that in order to find work you love, experimentation is required.

You might have to try your hand at 50 to 100 jobs!

I know that will surprise many people but I remember a stat from about 30 years ago that surprised me: that the average number of jobs a person would have during their lifetimes was 16.

I’d repeat that to people and they’d tell me surely I was wrong.

Interesting stats on this phenomenon are here.

I think nowadays the average number of jobs a person is expected to hold during their lifetimes is around a dozen with the most number of changes occurring early in a person’s lifetime.

I’m not sure why that number has gone down but I suspect it has something to do with education.

This surprised me from that study:

On average, the least-educated men held more jobs than the most-educated men, while the opposite is true among women.

Penelope went on to say something else that caught my attention:

“…satisfying work is the intersection of what you like to do, what you are good at, and what an organization values.”

We all know that, right?

Then why are we so perplexed by putting those three circles together?

Let me tell you how I did it. keep reading…

In this last and final installment of this series we’re going to talk about how to use low and high technology appropriately to tailor your message to your audience.

One of the ideas behind technology is that it empowers us to work creatively. By blending different technologies we can democratize communication in new and surprising ways.

If you buy into the theory (and I do) that future generations will design and build their own technologies by blending what works and what doesn’t work in different situations, then you’re far on your way to understanding that what works for one person might never work for another.

Once again, I’m going to approach this subject from a phone sourcer’s perspective and demonstrate how I blend the use of high technology with low technology. keep reading…

We often ignore the basic elements we use in both our personal and business communications.

In truth there’s not a lot of difference in the two.

In both, you want to engage people naturally. Talking with a business associate should be not much different from talking with a friend.

Talking with a friend employs many of the same techniques we use in business communications — respectful and tactful interaction.

There are some areas of intimacy that should not be transgressed. Revealing too much of your personal business in a business transaction is generally thought to be not good advice. Use common sense here.

We’ve all heard the so-called “7%-38%-55% rule”: that communication is comprised of 55% body language, 38% tone of voice, and 7% content of words.

That’s mostly true except when… keep reading…

…after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.

Mr. Disraeli’s supper companion’s remark demonstrates to us how the prime minister made the young woman feel after their engagement over supper.

I say the word “engagement” knowing that nowadays we all hear a lot about how we can become more bonded in our communications with others.

One of the synonyms for engagement is commitment.

When you say the word commitment, you cannot ignore the meaning of assurance and obligation that lies behind it.

If we are to “engage” another we must naturally offer our pledge, our vow, if you will, that we will stand behind what we’re offering.

We must be trustworthy.

In order to be trustworthy we must also be able to trust.

Conversation is almost always about feelings.

Seldom is it about facts.

Facts might be the starting point to a conversation, but it’s most always the feelings of the conversationalists that color the outcome.

What we think and feel is not always what we say.

Many times it’s in what’s not said that carries the truest meaning. keep reading…