SOURCING STRATEGY
Methodical Approach to Finding Talent
There are many similarities between managing a Sourcing team and a roster for say, the NBA or NHL. While our salary budgets don't look as impressive as the $101M cap for basketball in the 2018-19 season, we both share the same goal. How do we maximize our team's output with the finite amount of money we can spend? And how do we do this when we don't always have the deeper wallet? The answer - moneyball the entire process.
Everyone wants the best talent, a crazy technique or an amazing tool - but a superior sourcing plan is about the entire thought process behind the search vs. the individual talent/techniques/tools that make up the sum of the plan.
William Wong June 2019
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Simple &
Repeatable
There's always going to be a faster, smarter or better Sourcer employed by your competitor. What we lack in individual talent we can make up for with strategy. Break your sourcing strategy into smaller plans that even the most inexperienced person on your team can perform.
Measurable
For each of the plans above, throw metrics in place to track performance and efficiency. We're not only looking at the individual's performance but also evaluating each campaign's effectiveness. Rinse and repeat.
Holistic Vision
A common practice in the sourcing world is every man/woman for themselves. Instead, have a vision of what everyone is sourcing on and then figure out how to tie it all together. A focused strategy means we're not wasting time double dipping on the same profiles and doing the same things over and over again that someone has already accomplished.
Develop a strategy so that every time we source, it's a fresh type of sourcing for new candidates. A holistic approach that takes into account of every team member's time and production gives us the advantage to beat out the bigger guys.
Methodical
Sourcers often storm out the gates with no plans in place, guns blazing and riding numbers into the sunset. And if they have a plan, it's more instinctual. That works if you're a lone ranger or really good at what you do, but it'll eventually catch up to you (especially on these longer campaigns).
Break out your master plan into several phases, prioritizing the ones with the greatest Return On Time Invested. Don't get me wrong, I still look at pass thru rates and stuff, but what I would expect is if anyone follows my plan, we'll get better pass thru with this, and I feel confident the people I'm sourcing will be better than a blind approach. Strategy trumps talent every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Document
Take note of all intel and document for future use. Just like how developers utilize libraries for common functions, we too develop sourcing libraries that can be later utilized in other projects. We need to keep adding to our IP and make sure it stay's within the organization vs. disappearing thru changing of the guards.
Master Sourcing Strategy
I break down our sourcing strategy into several phases and split among several members on the team. Info sharing is done in real time and tactics/timing is re-calibrated in our daily standup. A primary and secondary objective is outlined for each phase.
[ Op 1 ] Codename: Inside Job
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Primary: network with the engineering team and try to grab referrals.
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Secondary: ask them about local watering holes where your talent may emerge. Any meetups, conventions, tech talks or companies they know uses their specific technologies. Ask each member for their GitHub username and see if there's anyone they follow or any interesting projects people are working on. All this intel will be used later to help map out our search.
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Guide: check out this article on how to perform a req intake.
[ Op 2 ] Codename: Where's the Party At
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Primary: next stop is to figure out if event recruiting is something worth doing. We need to start looking at it early because it requires a lot of planning. Does the company have any events/conventions they're hosting that we can leverage? Will any of the hiring managers be attending these events? In our case, event recruiting was out of the question because the team is just way too new, and they literally have no presence in the local market. However this is something we talked about doing in year 2.
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Secondary: if the campaign is long enough, we may be able to host an event to tackle all the candidates that we offered jobs to but declined our role. But this only works if we've been at it for a good amount of time, and have gone thru enough offer declines to make it worth while. One of my old employees told me about an idea he concocted did called "APIs and IPAs." It's basically a little shindig at a bar where you invite all of the candidates that declined your offer. You ask them to come with the premise of showing them what your group has been doing for the past year. It's more of a show and tell, but if the candidate accepts, you have a pretty solid chance of closing them.
[ Op 3 ] Codename: Low Hanging Fruit
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Primary: hit up our internal DB and all the boards and see who's out there. Peel back the onion by going 1 month, 3 months, then all the way back. First utilize a very narrow string and then open it up.
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Secondary: pay attention to which companies are utilizing your technology and in which location. Go on their career page and see if there's a unique job title. Document these in our googlesheets.
[ Op 4 ] Codename: Tight Link
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Primary: hit up LI, but do a very tight string, filtering those that are more likely to move first.
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Secondary: pay attention to which companies are utilizing your technology and in which location. Go on their career page and see if there's a unique job title. Document these in our googlesheets.
[ Op 5 ] Codename: Watering Holes
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Primary: use the intel gained from the secondary objective from phase 1 to build out your events hit list (e.g. meetups, conventions, tech talks, etc.). Whenever you talk to potential candidates, always ask them bout this to help you further expand the list. Use Google as the last resort.
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Secondary: obtain hash tags for each of these events.
[ Op 6 ] Codename: Go Social
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Primary: search FB, Twitter and Instagram with # of events and the phrase ("I'm going" or "i am going" or "who's going" or "who is going" or "i'm speaking" or "i am speaking"). This will pull up a shortlist of people that may potentially be our mark (warning many of these guys could be vendors).
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Secondary: if you are able to identify a candidate that utilizes your technology, pay attention to which company they work for. Document these in our googlesheets.
[ Op 7 ] Codename: Git Some
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Primary: hit up any leads you obtained from Operation Inside Job. Then just straight up search for TDD in the area. Check commits. Utilize https://api.github.com/users/xxxxxx/events/public and replace xxxxxx with the person's GitHub username to find their email address.
[ Op 8 ] Codename: Diversity
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Primary: seems like everyone in the valley has blocked diversity sessions, like every Friday is dedicated to hunting down candidates from UMGs. We do this too, but it's a band-aid solution. Instead, reach out to the diversity team and see if there's a more effective way to get into HSBUs and provide them with more info and gain us more visibility. Constantly partner with diversity team to get into events. During our diversity sessions, we used this Custom Search Engine to help with the cause. Since TDD was already a tight search, we opened up the parameters with diversity + a close resemblance to TDD (like "unit tests" or finding developer profiles with enough test mentality). We found most people don't write TDD in their resume so this is something we needed to pry out of them during the pre-screen stage.
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Secondary: This requires a little bit of critical thinking. I tend to ask myself the question, does our current hiring requirements exclude folks from diverse backgrounds? For example, some HSBUs don't have a core computer science program like Harvard. But if we're including these into the responsibilities/screening of an engineer during the interview process, then we're automatically eliminating them (e.g. we're quizzing them on CS fundamentals but they never learned it in school). By doing this, we're just setting them up for failure. So instead, can we change our interview process to focus on thought process? And then when we do hire them, have a training plan in place to ramp them up?
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Tertiary: This was perhaps the most fun of them all. TDD is hard enough as it is, and looking for TDD + diversity was worst than my last Spartan race. I know the team is starting off and may not have much time to mentor junior candidates, but would it be possible after a certain point? Once we hire enough sr candidates, we can surely start hiring interns/freshgrads and if so, can we forego the TDD requirement? Their answer was yes and we planned for it accordingly.
[ Op 9 ] Codename: Get Stacked
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Primary: instead of relying on the old fashion way of prying intel, we can also rely on some pretty cool gadgets/tools. One of my favorite is StackShare. It didn't help us much on the TDD search, but it's very useful on others. StackShare also has a product called StackShare API (it's in beta now so everyone can play with it). You can send the name of a technology and they'll give you back all the companies using it. Or you can go the other way by giving them a domain of a company and they'll return their tech stack. Like all tools, use it with a grain of salt. It's never a silver bullet solution. I've found a company to be using a technology that wasn't listed via StackShare. A free account gives you like 100 API requests, $99 gives you 1k and so on.
[ Op 10 ] Codename: Convergence
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Primary: now that we've mapped out certain companies to target, assign them to each team member to perform a more targeted search on LI.
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Secondary: look at these candidate's other jobs. When you get a resume it provide even greater intel on what other companies are using the technology. Document these in our googlesheets.