As a recruiter, one of my many tasks was sourcing people through the many means available to you. I have to say that I thought I was pretty good at it, managing to find candidates that other recruiters didn't even get a sniff of. However I now know that my level of sourcing pales into insignificance, when compared to the abilities of some of the true sourcing geniuses.
Today I read a post on Jim Stroud's excellent blog that just made me sit back and read in pure admiration. Jim is a founder of something called The Sourcing Conference, which is devoted to candidate sourcing and using the best techniques and using all the tools available, to locate and recruit the best candidates.
Every so often they have a competition to find the best sourcer, that would rival the skills of James Bond and Sherlock Homes together. It is to find the Grandmaster of Sourcing.
The Challenge for 2009 was not just complex, but also somewhat cryptic - but the nub of the challenge was to find the three names of the 'August Roosters'. The winner was - Irina Shamaeva (@braingain)
Now for all of you who like to see how Irena solved the challenge, read on................this is just brilliance (make sure you read the challenge first though!) So in Irena's words here goes:
When I first read the announcement on The Source Newsletter, I noticed the mysterious “colapts auratus,” pasted it into Google and it turned out to be misspelled “colaptes auratus” which is “Northern Flicker.” It prompted me to go to Flickr to look. A search for “tweety bird” landed on Mary’s profile, which had 7 images, many tags and a profile. Most of the pictures on the profile were taken around Phoenix AZ. There was also a map that pointed to somewhere on the 42nd street which Google maps showed as a place with warehouses and ruins of houses. That was probably where they were growing up.
Mary’s profile mentioned “a rocking good time with Ed Twinge”. Searching for “Ed Twinge” on Google leads to http://edtwinge.com related to shows in Edinburgh; it allows to tweet about actors using the tag #edtwinge.
Searching for this tag on twitter leads to the profile of http://twitter.com/mscott42 with just one message, that was clearly related to our story. The profile had a name of “Lady Denman Drive.” If you search for “Lady Denman Drive” on Google you will discover first that it is in Canberra Australia, and then that it’s the “Canberra Zoo and Aquarium” address. mscott42’s twitter profile pointed to Diigo. I spent quite some time on Diigo till I guessed to look for links to the Edinburgh performance and discovered Mary’s husband Monty Scott’s profile. I also went through the “ate my babies” page and saw that the image on his profiles was of a dingo, the wild dog. I think I was the first one to find Monty on Diigo.
Since anybody can see what you do on twitter and on Diigo I presented myself as an incognito profile and (just for fun) put the glowing egg pic on it from the Edinburgh site. This resulted in lots of DMs on twitter from buddy #scchallenge hunters – which lead me to tweeting a few vague sentences. (Sorry.) A gathering at Plurk called by my friend Jer E My was fun but it didn’t seem to be anything but a chat. After getting in touch with Monty on Diigo it all came to a halt for me. Dozens of people were catching up on Flickr, Twitter and Diigo profiles, and I couldn’t see where to go next.
When the charming Loretta had tweeted about Blondie, Dark Girl and Big Fella, I made a bit of progress, or so I thought. I Googled for “Blondie DarkGirl BigFella” and found pictures of them; they were bears at the Zoo! I landed on a few pages with their photos including tripadvisor.com. I joined tripadvisor and some other photo sharing sites. This didn’t help at all. I then found a Zooquarium PDF file with all the names. It seemed it was a useful file. It had Mike among other animals there and I thought that was “the” Mike. Mike was a “little penguin.” Those are tiny penguins and they are blue. I was thinking that Mike was perhaps a “blue bird” and was looking for Mike Bluebird for a while.
Another day passed. Shannon Myers and I exchanged a few emails and I got some “moral support” from Shannon (thanks!:)). I had to work and to spend time with my son Peter (who is not in favor of me sitting at the computer) and that was good because it’s hard to be stuck for hours. Loretta mentioned “delicious” so many times in various forms that I felt something must be there but couldn’t find anything. Last night Loretta mentioned N.M. on Diigo that a few people had found and I rushed back to Diigo. Somehow I missed the familiar link to the Zoo’s list of animals that I had visited several times.
It was in N.M.’s profile. The profile had some info but I first went to http://pipl.com/username to see where else naveedmuhammad is a member. After that, it was easy. naveedmuhammad was on twitter at http://twitter.com/NaveedMuhammad; he tweeted to http://twitter.com/mjackson4242 and that was Mike! Mike had a link to a Facebook page, used #yatchshow tag on twitter for the sailing stuff, and had a BubbleTweet (I’d never seen that before). Lots of info.
Then I went back to Pipl to look for other places where mjackson4242 was. Pipl showed that Mike was on the Pandora and related to the “The Roosters Radio.”. Mike was also on Delicious with a link to Kopan Monastery, Kathmandu Nepal, and a phone number to call. I called and it turns out that was the way to reach the real SC Dude!
So, do you still think candidate sourcing is easy?
