Technology gets to the source of the talent

Whether you are a Sourcing Ninja or an absolute beginner, technology offers recruiters tools to help unearth even the most hidden talent, says Sue Weekes
Fri, 24 June 2016 | By Sue Weekes
FROM JULY'S RECRUITER MAGAZINE

Whether you are a Sourcing Ninja or an absolute beginner, technology offers recruiters tools to help unearth even the most hidden talent, says Sue Weekes


With LinkedIn and the professional and social networks having made almost everyone findable, you might ask why recruiters need to invest in specialist sourcing skills and tools?

Holly Fawcett, curriculum development manager of Social Talent, which runs a range of courses for recruiters, doesn’t believe all talent is easy to find. Moreover, she reckons some of those with in-demand skills actively try to stay out of view by removing certain keywords from their profiles. “I’ve even heard of people misspelling the word engineer as they don’t want to be contacted,” she says. “Recruiters have to learn to fish where the fish are, and realise some talent will be hiding from plain sight.”

The high level of interest in Social Talent’s sourcing education programmes show that many recruiters want to upskill in sourcing. “Some of these are organisations that didn’t go with the curve first time round and now want to skip the experimentation stage to take advantage of the learning so they can move to a sourcing model,” she says. “We are also seeing companies change their strategy completely and are separating out sourcing as a function. In RPOs [recruitment process outsourcing firms] and larger agencies, we don’t see a 360-recruiting model any more. Some recruiters just source and never contact a candidate.”

She also reports that Social Talent’s sourcing tool SourceHub, which allows recruiters to create Boolean search strings that can be run across professional and social networks, has 50,000 people using it on a daily basis.

According to the 2016 Global Recruiting Survey by RPO firm Alexander Mann Solutions
(AMS) and Social Talent, social media once again topped the poll as the primary source for finding candidates. It led paid job boards by 37% to 26% of respondents. The survey also highlighted the likes of Pinterest and YouTube as among the emerging new channels for sourcing, while Fawcett points to tools such as WhatsApp and Snapchat as likely to be used by recruiters in the future to communicate with potential candidates.

While recruiters must be ever alert to new tools and platforms emerging, there is a case for honing skills in those you already use. The survey found 72% of search results aren’t relevant and that 72% of candidates contacted following searches never respond, suggesting that many recruiters still aren’t using the tools available as effectively as they should be and are wasting precious time. 

Steve Preston, managing director of Bristol-based Heat Recruitment, says he has seen a marked improvement in the effectiveness of LinkedIn since working more closely with the company on using its paid-for Recruiter product. He says the company has increased its LinkedIn licences from 17 to 35 and one of the biggest benefits is bringing together its 50,000 connections in one place.

“We can see what actions are taking place and it eradicates duplication of activity,” he says, adding that the tool is helping the agency create pools of skillsets for different regions. “Traditionally, it takes a lot of work to do this but LinkedIn allows us to map an area really quickly. For instance, for some reason we have a lot of accounting firm clients in Norfolk and we are constantly looking for particular skillsets. Pooling really helps with this.”

LinkedIn relaunched the Recruiter tool in April this year. Updates included making it possible for recruiters to see, in real-time, the size of the talent pool available based on skills, experience or other factors important to them.

LinkedIn also acquired the recruiting tool developer Connectifier earlier this year (featured as one of Recruiter’s Game Changers in February 2016 issue). Connectifier indexes information from social and professional networks across the web and brings them together in one place (it has collated more than 400m candidate profiles) and will display and rank candidates that it believes best fit a role. LinkedIn and Connectifier have said that they will operate separately with their own customers but will be collaborating because of the cross-over on their products. Already they have introduced the Connectifier-LinkedIn API, which claims to deliver more accurate profile matches and more complete profile data.

Connectifier is one of a number of platforms aggregating data from publicly available information in social profiles and, in theory, takes a lot of time and effort out of sourcing.
Others include Entelo, OpenWeb, Monster’s Talent Bin, TrendyCoders and 3Sourcing. One of Connectifier’s claims is that it can provide email and phone numbers with many of its profiles, which clearly delights a recruiter. Direct contact information is still the big challenge.

Dice Europe has developed OpenWeb, which aggregates available data across 180 sites, and Dice Europe’s sales director Adam Clarke says recruiters welcome the multiple contact options included in profiles. “It makes the initial contact simple and efficient,” he says.

Other options for seeking out contact information exist beyond these platforms. And there are ways of seeking out contact information if you know where to look. Andrew Robson-Graham did his first internet resourcing course back in 1999. When Social Talent approached him about doing its Sourcing Ninja course, he said it was partly “hubris” that made him give it a go.

“I’d worked in recruitment for more than 20 years and thought I knew everything about sourcing,” says the talent acquisition and training manager at technology recruitment agency Redline Group. “One of the things it showed me was the routes to get a direct email address and phone number. Eight times out of 10 now I manage to find this information and go direct rather than sending a connection request.”

Robson-Graham, now a certified Boolean Black Belt Sourcing Ninja, explains that several people at Redline are going through the Social Talent programme. Another valuable skill he learnt was how to create custom search engines using Google. “I was pretty competent at Boolean searching, but I learned how to build custom search engines that can be run and re-run on networks and forums. It saves a lot of time.” He is fortunate that the technical recruitment market has plenty of online hangouts to fish for talent, such as GitHub and StackOverflow. With lateral thinking, though, he says recruiters should be able to hunt out relevant talent from across most sectors. “For instance, if you are looking for chefs, go to Instagram because they all photograph their food.”

Expert sourcer Katharine Robinson, aka The Sourceress, says nothing “drastically new” has excited her on the sourcing technology front over the past year but explains she is using more tools to automate and speed up her sourcing than ever before. “I think some others have been doing this for longer, but I’ve always preferred to go the more hands-on route in the past,” she says. “It seems in the last 12 months though that the tools are getting more reliable.”

Among the most useful, she says, are:
  • Prophet, which helps uncover contact details from social profiles
  • EmailHunter, which, as its name suggests, hunts out email addresses
  • Rapportive, which shows information about your contacts inside your inbox.

“They are suddenly some of the most important in my tool kit,” she says. “Anything that can take you beyond what’s on LinkedIn is going to be a winner at the moment, I think,” she says. “So all those aggregators like OpenWeb and TalentBin are still worth getting excited about, especially if we start pushing to use them outside the tech bubble they started in.”


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