10 Valuable Tips for Active Sourcing from SourceCon Seattle

To be a role model in recruiting, you must keep developing and staying at the forefront of innovation. The SourceCon Seattle offered this and more. Maria Harvey and Christopher Moser from epunkt in Austria not only gained interesting insights into international trends, but also learned numerous tips and new approaches to recruiting and sourcing processes.

"For us Europeans, it was interesting to find out which sourcing topics are hot in the land of opportunity: diversity and equal rights," says Christopher Moser. Numerous keynote speakers dealt with this top topic. A speaker even came from as far away as South Africa. By sharing her experiences under apartheid, she encouraged conference participants to be even more empathetic and open in the sourcing process.

Data protection regulations are not as strict in the US as they are in the EU. Many sourcing hacks and methods are easier to implement in the US than in Austria.

During relaxed networking among sourcing specialists, numerous round tables, the usual hackathon, and keynote addresses from international industry experts, Maria Harvey and Christopher Moser got ten valuable tips:

1. Explore the market before starting any sourcing / recruiting process. Specifically, this means collecting data, getting a picture of the market and generating a "talent map". Helpful tools include the statistics portals in each country.
2. Google Trends is a helpful tool for finding the best or most popular keywords when writing job ads.
3. Use Facebook sourcing primarily as a resource for more information, but never as a platform for making contact. A useful tool for finding candidates on Facebook is called peoplefindThor.
4. Formulate your contact mails personally and consider in which phase of life candidates are currently. By the way: the willingness to change is the highest with candidates who have had a bad day at work.
5. Where does it make sense to automate process steps? For example, tools that can be used to make appointments, such as Calendly, YouCanBook.me or the LinkedIn Scheduler, increase efficiency.
6. "Keep the excitement high": Follow-ups are especially important in the period between contract signing and actual start of work to keep up the enthusiasm for the new job. Otherwise you may lose candidates to a counteroffer.
7. Sometimes the most unassuming candidates have the greatest talents. It pays off to throw prejudices overboard.
8. Also try alternative search engines like Bing; they usually deliver different results than Google.
9. Think "out of the box" more often to get new candidates. In addition to establishing contact via platforms, think about subject-specific Meetups that can also be organized.
10. Do one thing at a time. Especially for tasks that go beyond routine activities and require thinking capacities, monotasking is significantly more efficient than multitasking.