Saturday 18 June 2011

Evolution of the sourcer

 

  The Recruiting Innovation conference provided a great overview of the need for a more talent-centric approach to hiring, and also of the social and other technologies that support this.

But the recent conference that I think provided the best overview of new hiring approaches, corresponding to this talent-centric model, was the Human Capital Institute’s Strategic Talent Acquisition conference last month.

I particularly like the slides presented by Ryan Cook at CH2MHill, including the de-evolution of the Recruiter from Master Networker through Job Board-Aholic to a Paper Pusher focusing on Post & Pray, coupled with the evolution of The Sourcer from Recruiting Admin to Community Architect and Social Engineer (pictured above) as I think these do capture a very significant shift in the roles of recruiting professionals.

We talked quite a bit about the role and tools of the Sourcer in my Barcelona workshop.  We talked less about the role of the Community Architect / Social Engineer, but I agree this one is increasingly important too.

A very good example was provided by Kevin Shigley at Coca Cola who discussed Coke’s dual stage talent acquisition process consisting of sourcing (of external, internal and contract talent) providing a set of talent pools for the later hiring activities:

 

 

Coke’s vision is that the company’s Talent Acquisition team knows the best talent ready to fill its jobs at all times, globally, in advance of need (they hire 1500 people per year so they need relationships with 3000 people in external FMCG).

 

I don’t know if, in general, this role is really about community though.  With the exception of graduate recruiting, where the pool is big and diverse enough to bring people together to share information and help each other, candidates for a job, or even targets for a career, aren’t often going to be keen to talk to one another.  So the community is of a particular form: the community of ‘me’ ie of the recruiter, not one in which each individual shares in developing relationships.

Still managing that is as much a new relationship management skill in the sourcer / recruiter as much as it the sort of contact management system that Kevin described.

 

 

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