Your Homework

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Motivating recruiters to source outside of LinkedIn is topic managers often bring up when signing up their teams for training. Yesterday, I spoke with a potential client, a thriving agency manager whose recruiters “won’t step outside of LinkedIn.” “How do I motivate them?” The conversation has prompted me to write my thoughts down.

Sourcing is not Rocket Science, but it is not science either! It never follows one channel of potential candidates. There is no tool, dataset, or process leading to the best results. Data is spread between sources. Sources differ in demographics they cover. Search capabilities vary, and some are paid. Things change daily.

But most importantly, search systems, even general search engines like Google, are increasingly skilled in interpreting the purpose of your search. (I am fascinated by the GTP-3 news.) Sourcing in 2020 is more of an Art and requires both intuition and hands-on practice and experience with a variety of search techniques.

One excellent – but involving substantial commitment from participants – way to stimulate learning without procrastinating – is to sign your team up for the Certification Exams. This past round, the exam takers passed 100%. We attribute that to each of them utilizing the new ebook “Sourcing Answers.” as part of their subscription. The ebook has 120 diverse questions with solutions, similar to our exam’s questions. (You can also use the book alone to assess your team.)

If you want, at least for starters, to only train your team in the sourcing basics, or have a custom webinar (or a series) delivered for your organization, encourage them to click every link in the presentations. It is just as vital that they try to modify examples to adjust to different sourcing needs. While the attendees can keep the materials forever, they should ideally practice in the first week after the webinar.

To promote the practice, we have started populating our materials with “Your Homework” slides in-between the content sections. Let me give you an example from today’s “Sourcing for Diversity”  slides:

Here is another one:

(Can you answer these? If you like these questions, send me your responses, and I will share more.)

The audience has received the homework with enthusiasm. Many said they are committing to doing it (we’ll see). One attendee was solving the homework during the lecture!

I trust you can complete all homework for the Diversity class in two afternoons (if you attended, let me know if you feel otherwise). You are welcome to send us your solutions as part of online support.

One of the teams of sourcers that we have been custom-training has a lively Slack channel, and everyone contributes their responses to the homework following each lecture. (Sure enough, there are Birthday wishes and baby photos, but there is a lot on the sourcing topic, and team members are engaged in discussions.) If your organization has a social channel, they would learn from each other – and develop a collective “team” language.

Part of the motivation is the enjoyment everyone will feel once they get amazing results!

Let me know if you agree or disagree.

Expect our future classes to come with “Homework.”

 

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