Guillaume Alexandre Interview Spotlight

Posted by Jonathan Kidder on March 28, 2020January 29, 2023

I had the opportunity to interview the legendary Guillaume Alexandre. He’s a Talent Sourcing Lead at Gates Solutions based in Switzerland. He recently did a fantastic presentation at SourceCon digital this past week. Overall, I was really impressed by his presentation and I hope you enjoy reading his interview below.

1. Tell us about your work experience in recruiting – how did you get your start, how did you progress, where are you at this point in time?

Recruitment is all I’ve done my whole career since I started in 2005. I got a master’s internship as a researcher in a small executive search, I took it because I thought it was a way to be in touch with many people and to learn about new roles all the time, 15 years later, it could not be more true.

Straight after graduation, I decided to swim with the real recruitment sharks and leave France to go to the UK and joined a SAP specialized recruitment agency and landed soon after in Geneva to set up a permanent recruitment practice.

I had no database, no reputation, no one was answering job ads, no local population so I had to develop my creativity 😉

In 2011, I decided it was time to move on and there was no environment that would fit what I wanted to do, so I created it and set up my company. At first as an agency that specialized on very hard to find roles. That is when I got involved in the sourcing community and went to the first ever Sourcing Summit in Amsterdam, realized I could go above and beyond what I was already doing and got passionate about it.

In 2013-2014, I was the leader of a business with 10+ employees and I… hated it. I wanted to source and I was just leading a company, managing people, dealing with problems etc. I saw burnout coming and I decided to change and kept the company but alone on a business model that no one had in the French part of Europe.

I am working hand in hand with internal recruiters, exactly as if I was internal, on sourcing mandate for very hard to find roles and it is fun. I also set up sourcing practice within multinational companies (I spend 13 months at PMI setting up a global, agile, scalable state-of-the-art sourcing team to support the largest business transformation in the world), do some consulting to realign recruitment practices internally and I train internal recruiters and sourcers.

On the side, I’m also currently setting up an online, crowd-sourced, training platform but more on this pretty soon 😉

2. What are the unique talents you bring to the field?

For me sourcing is the combination of 2 brains. A “data” brain, able to identify people’s data and an “engagement” brain able to get responses when others don’t (because what is the point of finding the best if they don’t reply to you?)

I’m really trying to push both as much as I can. On the data side, I’m doing what I call “behavioral sourcing” where I identify people through online behaviors instead of keywords which involves scraping, data enrichment through APIs etc.

On the engagement side, I went as far as working with a behavioral scientist to understand how the human brain works and shape outreaches messages accordingly.

Combining extreme targeting and good messaging works, on the last role I just finished today, I reached a 100% response rate 😉

3. Share your biggest success story in recruiting so far?

I work a “funny roles” so I have many:

– I hired a SAP Director in the Gaza strip to support the United Nations in implementing SAP.

– I sourced for some weird structural engineers for nuclear facilities, I still don’t know where the job is based hahaha

– I brought people to Geneva for roles that were so confidential that they arrived in Geneva not knowing which company they were about to interview for and left the interview room without telling me what the role was really about but that they REALLY wanted it.

– I have sourced airport planners able to design an airport from the landing strip to deciding rent prices of shops depending on the passenger flow simulations.

I have tens of stories like this, when it’s fun and sounds too “weird” for other, this is when I have the most fun 😊

4. What is the best advice you’ve received during your career path, and from whom?

In my whole career, I have had very little supervision, always started from scratch and had to discover most things by myself but a few things that I still use from my first boss was:

“You already have a NO, so fight for the YES.”: People I need to contact are already NOT working with me so, what do I have to lose?

“Job/ Money/ Location”: everybody changes job for one of these 3 reasons, everyone is different and a mix of the 3 but understand their key motivation and adapt accordingly.

5. What’s your favorite recruiting tech tool?

I’d say that I would never have been able to scale my behavioral sourcing without PhantomBuster (French company btw), I really love this tool. It’s an API tool that let’s you do so many things and if you’re using it wisely, it’s so powerful

6. As an recruiting professional, how do you handle recruiting to achieve the best results?

As a sourcer, my role is to convert “people” into “candidates” when recruiters convert “candidates” into “employees, they do the selection, I find the right ingredients so that they can cook.

1.To handle the best results is “easy” you need to understand what you’re looking for, this sounds easy but it rarely is.

2. Working agile directly with the hiring manager and realigning constantly helps me achieve better results.

3. Leveraging on existing data an nurturing. This is something I can not do as much as I’d like to as an external but ATS are not treated as goldmines but are cemeteries of CVs and it kills me. Leveraging and nurturing pipelines is key to success, efficiency and speed in recruitment. When I train big companies, seeing people jump on LinkedIn when they have a new role without even checking their ATS kills me.

7. What do you hope to achieve in 2020?

That would be a tough question to answer! For the first time in my career, I have time ahead of me, because of the coronavirus, my agenda cleared out like never before so the future is a bit uncertain.

But definitely, I want to get my training program out in 2020, this is my priority. It is called “the people attraction theory” and will be done in collaboration with many other sourcers willing to add to it.

8. What’s your favorite Boolean String?

This might shock you but I think Boolean is overrated (reading this, most sourcers just fainted, I know but let me explain).

Using Boolean starts from the assumption that people have filed their profiles correctly or have the data written somewhere and in Europe, on niche roles, it’s not always the case. Add to this language requirements and Boolean will make you lose more time than gain any (most people speak English but find a French speaker who can genetically re-engineer bacterias for biofuels, there are only a handful).

Don’t get me wrong, it is very useful to navigate an ocean of data, except I need to navigate in tiny muddy puddles lost inside seas

I know Boolean of course (I have actually ranked it as bilingual on my linkedin profile) but I’d rather research online behavior than keywords on profiles.

That way I’m going where almost no other sourcers/recruiters are going, the profiles that pop up on page 290 of your results is my top result, and the profile is almost empty 😉

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Jonathan Kidder

With more than 12 years of recruitment experience, Jonathan has helped startups and small businesses find the talent they need. He runs the blog WizardSourcer, which explores the latest trends in talent sourcing, provides reviews of recruitment tools, and features interviews with prominent figures in the industry.