Monthly Archives: March 2012

Top 15 Common Talent Sourcing Mistakes

26 Replies

Practically everything I have learned about sourcing and recruiting didn’t come from a mentor or any formal training.

Instead, I learned how to become a top performing recruiter “the hard way.”

What that really means is that when it came to finding top talent, I tried a lot of things that didn’t work, and because I refuse to make excuses, give up, or accept anything less than the best results, I kept experimenting until I discovered things that enabled me to find people that others can’t and don’t.

With over fifteen years of experience in sourcing and recruiting, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes along the way. I’ve also had the opportunity to assess, train and coach corporate and agency sourcers and recruiters, which has exposed me to many myths, misconceptions and mistakes when it comes to leveraging information systems for sourcing and recruiting.

Here are what I believe to be some of the most common productivity-robbing and results-reducing mistakes sourcers and recruiters make when looking for the right match.

In no particular order… Continue reading →

The 50 Largest LinkedIn Groups

33 Replies

At the time of this article, there were 1,236,675 LinkedIn groups. With so many groups, how do you find and choose which groups to join?

Depending on your LinkedIn group strategy, you may be interested in finding the largest groups of a specific type.

LinkedIn groups are very searchable, and when you start typing letters into the search box, you will get a dynamically updated list of groups matching the letters/words you input, typically (but not always exactly) sorted by the number of members.

 

 

Being the search geek that I am, I wondered what would happen if I executed a null search – a query for nothing.

 

 

Many search engines/interfaces don’t allow null searches, and others that do tend to return only partial results. For example, with LinkedIn’s people search, you can’t search all of LinkedIn without entering a keyword – you will only get results from 1st degree, 2nd degree, and group connections. You have to enter a keyword in order to dip into the people categorized as “3rd + Everyone Else,” representing the deep end of the people pool on LinkedIn.

However, lucky for us, a null search of LinkedIn groups not only works, it returns all groups sorted primarily by the number of members. That makes it remarkably simple to find the largest groups on LinkedIn. Continue reading →

The Talent Community Conundrum

29 Replies

First it was social recruiting, then it was mobile recruiting.

Now talent communities are apparently the latest cure for all of your talent troubles.

One the surface, the talent community concept seems like a brilliant “no brainer.”

However, like Socrates, I believe there is value in questioning everything. So when I start seeing  a strong buzz about just about anything, I immediately hit it with a dose of healthy skepticism and start asking some tough questions.

I’m well aware that there are talent acquisition leaders out there right now that are saying, “What we really need is a talent community,” primarily because of the buzz the concept has been building over the past year or so. I worry that these same people are placing blind faith into the talent community concept out of the hope that it will help them in some significant manner with their talent acquisition challenges.

When I attended a webinar on building sustainable talent communities the other day, I felt it raised more questions than it provided answers. Because I know I can’t be the only person wondering about the validity of the talent community concept, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you my thoughts and questions. Continue reading →