Jeremy Roberts and the folks over at SourceCon put on a few excellent events each year, and this time around, yours truly was lucky enough to attend. Aside from finally getting to shake hands with the amazing recruiters I had only before chatted with via our podcast or email, there were a flurry of exciting panels and breakout sessions serving to help sourcers and recruiters turn over new stones in their talent acquisition processes. I particularly love SourceCon because the event isn't there to sell you something, but rather to build community and genuinely help people become better at their jobs. To that effect, here are some key takeaways from the event as told by Twitter and the blogosphere.
What sourcers do in 2015 #sourcecon pic.twitter.com/BnofH5Yu0y
— Jim Stroud (@jimstroud) September 17, 2015
These survey results were a great way to get a snapshot of current sourcing responsibilities. Take note that the responses for this specific question were on frequency scale, ranging from often (blue bar) to never (green bar). The bulk of activity being online identification and phone screens should come as no surprise, however that half of sourcers are infrequently presenting to hiring managers is of some concern. It's imperative both recruiters and sourcers remain in intimiate contact with their HMs, not just at the job description phase and initial talent mapping, but throughout hiring processes so as to receive candidate feedback.
It's irresponsible to tie ALL hiring failure back to recruitment. But it SHOULD be our responsibility to conduct the analysis. #sourcecon
— Amybeth Quinn (@researchgoddess) September 18, 2015
While bad hires can be the result of any number of things, including poor interviewing by the team, inaccurate assessment, poor reference checks, or bad onboarding, typically it won't be tied to the recruiter. Bad hires are however a colossal waste of your time (in addition to being expensive and bad for morale), so you'll need to follow up to see what went wrong to prevent similar candidates from making it through the hiring funnel. If more technical and more senior people than yourself say yes to a candidate, you can't be blamed, but you can do your part to ensure you're delivering most likely to succeed candidates.
Grab your candidates Spotify list and play their favorite song in the background as youtalk with them. Great conversion starter. #sourcecon
— RecruitingBlogs (@RecruitingBlogs) September 18, 2015
SourceCon was jammed with cheeky recruiting tactics like this one. While playing your candidates' favorite song is a nice touch, Spotify can be used in other ways to engage with candidates. Music streaming services have heroic user bases and are a great opportunity to reach multitudes of people with job ads to your careers page.
textio to check your job ad's efficiency https://t.co/Dri2SWBeEH #sourcecon
— Balazs Paroczay (@TheBalazs) September 18, 2015
Many exciting tools were featured at SourceCon, but one in particular had the crowd buzzing. Textio assesses your job description as you write to help you creative a positive, non-buzzword heavy, inclusive candidate experience. You're probably not aware how certain charged words are making your applicants feel, and with Textio you can ensure you're not sending great people away because of a bit of underthought phrasing.
“Saying you should only recruit passive candidates is like saying you should only date married people.” #SourceCon
— Matt Charney (@mattcharney) September 18, 2015
Though Sourcing is, necessarily, focused on the outbound, it's important not to overemphasize your focus on passive candidates. It's easy to scoff at active candidates under the tired "all the good ones are taken" excuse, but as we've before highlighted, there are tons of reasons why great people might be looking for a job.
For some, the actual key takeaways from any given conference are booth swag. Luckily, Entelo Nutella was a big hit.
FREE NUTELLA ALERT! Come over to the Entelo booth and grab some :) #sourcecon pic.twitter.com/BfjuMFP6CK
— Rob Stevenson (@EnteloRob) September 18, 2015
Lastly, our friends over at RecruitingBlogs put together a quick write up highlighting some of the tools mentioned in Dallas. Head here to check out which tools were the talk of the conference!
