The Talent Acquisition and Sourcing Conclave (#TASCON15) that was held on April 15^th 2015 in Pune was a smashing hit and the attendees walked away happy & excited about the excellent learning. In the Sourcing Lab we also had the Mega Sourcing Contest which we’ll come back to in our next post as our main focus in this post is on the Sourcing Lab – A practical insight into many aspects of Talent Acquisition & Sourcing tools & techniques presented by hands on experts from within the Talent Acquisition space.

Sharath Kumar, partner at SourcePRO was the Host for the Sourcing Lab. The session began with comments to lighten the mood by sharing a funny Job Description that said “We’re looking for someone with the wisdom of a 50 year old, the Experience of a 40 Year old, the Drive of a 30 year old and the Pay Scale of a 20 year old!”. Sharath also mentioned that a Sourcer is like the Intelligence Agent of the Recruiting World! Think about it – Portal Intelligence to get active resumes and SOCINT, GOOGINT, TELINT to gather intelligence about a target while profiling him/her for a mission. We use MOBINT to attract the target to the mission and assess the fit using all of the sources I mentioned using HUMINT! Sharath had the crowd entertained by involving them in activities in between the sessions.

Let’s find out what went on at each Speaker Sessions…

Sessions with Speakers

LinkedIn Hacks

Anshuman Mukherjee was the first speaker to enlighten the audience on “LinkedIn Hacks” where he covered the points mentioned below:

• Uses of X-ray search
• Google Search’s range option
• Linked In messages & education page
• Conduct an email search
• LinkedIn Search candidates using pin codes and mobile numbers
• Tips and Tricks to assist Sourcing

This particular session had lot of takeaways.

Source faster than ever before using Chrome extensions

The next session was presented by Namratha Nandish, who spoke on “Source faster than ever before using Chrome extensions.” The Extensions she focussed on were –

• Rapportive
• Prophet
• Lippl
• 360social.me

These simple tools that were shared will definitely help you to Source faster than ever before using Chrome extensions.

Purple Squirrel Sourcing Tools

The next session was conducted by Sathish Ganesh whose topic of discussion was “Purple Squirrel Sourcing Tools”. He focused on tools like…

• Recruit’EM
• Sourcehub
• AIRS free Resume Search
• PropelIQ
• ReferYes
• BRUPT

The incredible tools were quite eye opening as they simplified the hunt for the Purple.

Magic of 140 Characters

Up next was Kunjal Kamdar’s session – “Magic of 140 Characters”. As the name suggests we are talking about the micro blogging site Twitter. During the session he highlighted that it was started on the idea of SMS but unlike 160 characters in SMS it allows only 140 characters and here’s why. The creators of Twitter wanted to keep those 20 characters for your name and Twitter handle. He also mentioned other uses of Twitter –

• Hold TweetChats, conduct Webinars & post Blogs
• Follow news articles by joining hashtags Eg. #news
• Gain quarterly reports of the progress of a competitive company by following a company # e.g. #TCS
• Post job specs that are automated through the Organisation’s Careers Twitter Account
• Use Google url Shortener to learn how many people have clicked on your URL
• Use #trend to get real time reports from organisations
• Create and use Twitter lists

This was another great session that conveyed important insights not familiar to the commoner.

Company Mapping

The next speaker to take the stage was Nitesh Kumar who spoke about “Company Mapping”. He simplified the understanding by explaining that Company Mapping is done basically to understand the structure of an organisation for competitive intelligence and to create a target list. He also provided alternative uses of Company Mapping to boost the process.

• Create lists to build Talent Pipelines
• Look for partner lists of companies that use the target skills to map companies
• LinkedIn to get a list of companies that are hiring for the same profile
• Use groups and connections called similar profiles for Company Mapping found only on LinkedIn

An amazing session that was a hit with the delegates due to the insights shared.

Contact Discovery

Our next speaker was none other than Chinmay Chavan the Lead trainer at SourcePRO who took a session on “Contact Discovery”. The tools he covered will most definitely help uncover contact details like telephone numbers and/or email ids. These incredible tools are:

• Data.com
• Zoom info
• Google Search
• Facebook
• GitHub

The other tools that one can use are LinkedIn & Facebook and even Twitter, Meetup & Google+ where you can send direct messages to a particular person.

Well this brings our recap of the Sourcing Lab @ TASCON15 to a close. and knowing If you’re interested in getting hold of the PPTs then visit TASCON or SlideShare. Stay tuned with #TASCON15 for updates that prove how impressive the entire session was.

You are probably familiar with the current trend that is followed i.e. Social Media Recruiting. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this put simply it is a new strategy that recruiters and companies use to fulfil their branding as well as hiring needs by utilising Social Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ optimally.

As a Recruiter if you’re wondering why you’re efforts are going in vain, then you are probably following the 4 habits that Effective Recruiters avoid. If that’s the case then let’s find out what are the 4 habits that Effective Recruiter’s avoid and rectify them to improve our performance.Complain that there aren’t any good candidates

This is quite common with most Talent Acquisition Professionals, but let me stop you there. It’s fairly simple to start complaining and avoid the work. So before you start complaining take a minute to make a check list and identify whether you’ve explored all your options –

• Have you taken the time out to look?
• Have you completely searched you’re database?
• Have you written a Boolean Search String with all the required information filtered?
• Have you done an advanced LinkedIn Search?
• Have you done a Monster search or any other job portal?
• Have you checked Social media like Facebook, Twitter etc.?
• Have you contacted current and past employees for referrals?
• Have you got in touch with influential people?

You get the picture, need I say more?

Spam Candidates

Do you send In-mails to everyone that meets one keyword of the job spec by using LinkedIn or any other networking sites but haven’t tailored it according to the candidates you’ve sent it to? If that is the case then it will definitely affect your chances of establishing contact with potential candidates. In such a scenario it is important to note that individuals respond better to personalised contact as compared to a generalised one.

Falsely connecting with individuals

Another common method used by many Recruiters is having false connections. When we wish to establish connections with individuals, the general tendency is to say things to get them to listen to you. The most common statement used is that you’ve done business together although that may not be the case. Once rapport is established a connection is made. This is done by almost every person on LinkedIn that is seeking a candidate. In order to get the most response it is important to stop developing false connections else you’ll lose connections rapidly.

Describing every job as a Great Opportunity

Nothing puts off candidates then describing every job as a great opportunity. Popular statements that are used are …

• This is a great opportunity!
• You’ll have the opportunity to experience X!
• You can take the opportunity to learn Y!

So on and so forth, does this sound familiar? Therefore, if you’re following these statements in your job specs then you might want to stop because no one really responds to such statements.

There you have it the aspects that can make a difference. These are but a few habits that Recruiters follow which affects their efficiency on the whole. Therefore if you wish to be a good Recruiter instead of an average one, you need to first identify if you’re following any of these habits and avoid them. This will in turn improve your hiring percentage and land you with the right candidates. Do you have any ineffective Recruiting habits you’ll like to add?

Like always our third WhatsApp Group Chat started off on an amusing note with enjoyable comments shared. I bet you wished you would have been there and I’m sure you’re curious as to what the discussion was all about. Well, I’ll try not to beat around the bush and tell you straight up. The Chat focused on Out of the Box Sourcing.

But before we get on with the interesting insights, I’d like to begin with an amazing write up that one of our members Shrikant Shirke posted on –

How To Recruit The Right Person For The Job?

Put about 100 bricks in some Particular order in a closed Room with an Open window – Then send 2 or 3 candidates in the room and close the door. Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours and then analyse the situation –

• If they are counting the Bricks; put them in the Accounts Department
• If they are recounting them; put them in Auditing
• If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks; put them in Engineering
• If they are arranging the Bricks in some strange order; put them in Project
• If they are throwing the Bricks at each other; put them in Operations
• If they are sleeping; put them in Security
• If they have broken the bricks into pieces; put them in Information Technology
• If they are sitting idle; put them in Human Resource
• If they say they have tried different combinations, yet not a brick has been moved; put them in Sales
• If they have already left for the day; put them in Marketing
• If they are staring out of the window; put them on Strategic Planning
• And then last but not the least; if they are talking to each other and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in Top Management

Now let’s get back to the interesting conversations and in the process boost our knowledge about the same. Here’s what was discussed….

Now isn’t this great? We’ve got some amazing inputs and techniques that we can all use and help each other. Well we’ve actually upgraded ourselves to new techniques that haven’t been thought of before. A big thanks to all our participants and we hope you continue to participate and share your insights. Got any topics for out next WhatsApp Group Chat, do tell?

• Chetan Indap shared his views, “I believe Artificial Intelligence is going to be used a lot to automate subjectivity in recruitments. Demand for machine trainers (hence machine Learning will be a norm). Scary part is recruitment will be ruled by Mathematicians and programmers!”

• Satish Ganesh put his views across about the same, “Technology has impacted the way in which recruiting is happening. However, there should be Human Touch involved. Gamification in recruiting will be more in coming days. Many companies would adapt to it soon”
• Yusuf Pathan had some comments, “What other changes do we expect in the coming days or years with respect to Technology?”
• Chinmay Chavan had a few thoughts, “More & more Automation in almost every aspects of recruitment. Search engines doing a lot more than just screening profiles.” He also mentioned, “Not all the work. But will make the job of scraping through the entire Internet a bit easier.”
• Harish had some views, “In Today’s world who updates his technology he will be the successful person who will get the project easily. The Update must be user friendly, and then only he can survive. But without human work search engines don’t collect data. What I want to say is that the search engines data is also collected by humans. So there is no point in search engines doing most of the work.‬ but that has some loss as well, it accepts all the fake resumes and fake requirements blindly‬. Technology is changing rapidly and currently the problem is not because of lack of data, but the main problem being  not knowing what to infer from the data that is pouring in from various streams.‬ The Problem being of plenty.”