How to Advance your Talent Sourcing Skills

Posted by Jonathan Kidder on December 12, 2020January 28, 2023

Every Senior Recruiter will face this obstacle through their career. How can you advance your talent sourcing abilities when you are in the game for awhile? How can a seasoned Recruiter excel and advanced in the craft of talent sourcing and research?

You are taught to be agile and learn on the fly while managing a full-desk as a beginner. A close friend told me that the best Recruiters always acted and like it was day one for them. They we’re always in a beginner mindset.

Rookie Smarts was booked that coined the phrase this beginner mindset term. Basically, within the sales and recruiting fields you had a sink or swim mentality. An agency that I once worked at would hire entry level Recruiters and have them work for 1-3 months. Within that span if they weren’t getting hires then they we’re let go. The strong will excel and thrive. You need to have this mentality throughout your career. You will need to continuously learn and improve on talent sourcing to make placements.

I wrote a post about how beginners at start in Talent Sourcing and I received this tweet after posting my article:

This was a great question to ask. It made me truly think about this question and reflect on my own background. How have I excelled and advanced my talent sourcing and searching abilities? What has made me eager to grow within the search space? Well, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic and will highlight them below:

1. Find a Mentor

What I mean by this is connect with other seasoned level recruiters within your niche. I love connecting with other Sourcers on Facebook Groups. They might pose a question or answer a post with a well thought out response. Take the chance to reach out to that Recruiter and start a conversation. You won’t need to set up a call or invest too much time from these conversations. It’s just a great way to leverage and learn from others. A Recruiter knows how to connect – why not use these skills in practice?

I’ve at other Recruiter suggest search strings or give additional ways to find and source candidates. I would have never discovered how to source Reviews on Amazon without first connecting with Brian Fink. A random conversation sparked a creative thought that turned into a sourcing hack. Why not search for specific books in an industry and cross reference those reviews with LinkedIn profiles?

2. Build Connections

Always value others’ input and ask for advice. Go to the most seasoned Recruiter on your team and get their input on your phone screens, ask how they find and source leads, ask for their favorite Boolean search strings, just keep asking questions. Build on your connections and grow your network. The more connections and Recruiters that you meet the better you will grow and excel in sourcing.

3. Take Good Notes

Take the time to write well written screening notes. After you have an intake call with the hiring manager and understand the requirements. Every applicant that you screen type out your notes. Use tools like (GlossaryTech) to define and understand each term. Take a course on udemy or coursera to understand a job’s role. Become an expert in the field you are recruiting in. The more you understand the complete job function the better you will become at outreach, Boolean strings, and sourcing in general.

A major part of my day involves assessing an applicants background and skills. You are the gatekeeper at your company. You don’t want to waste your time or the applicants’ time by bringing them through the process if they are not a good fit. You need to really understand the preferred and required skills sets of your requisition. It takes years of practice to understand and screen for specific niches. I like to record my phone screens to help me remember certain questions that I have asked and to understand responses better.

4. Setting Attainable Goals

Everyday starts with setting a goal. My goal was to become widely known as a Talent Sourcing expert. I started this blog in 2015 and made it a goal to write at least one post a week. I have kept this goal going for over 5 years. I’ve had the opportunity to present at conferences across the globe and have gained a ton of exposure. Overall, set a goal and stick with it. Becoming an expert at Sourcing has taken me years to accomplish. It takes a lot of time – reading about new tools and new recruitment trends. Here’s how to create attainable SMART goals in sourcing.

5. Track Recruiting Metrics

What do you want to accomplish during your sourcing day? Set a daily, weekly, and monthly goals that you want to hit. How many do you need to screen, submit for a final round before you get a hire? Seasoned Recruiters track every single phase of the recruiting process. You can use this data to improve on your sourcing, and present reports to your manager or hiring manager. Data is key to building ROI and helps showcase your value. I wrote a post about Recruiting Metrics worth reviewing further here.

6. Continuously Learning

I read all the time. Blogs, websites, social media sites,& forums groups. Any topic that I am sourcing on. I like to research and fully understand the niche skill before I start searching for the role. In order to advance your Recruiting career I recommend taking training courses, finding a mentor, reading recruiting blogs (like mine) and reading posts in Facebook Groups. Invest time to continuously learn about recruitment technology trends. Our industry is constantly changing and you will need to be a student through your entire career.

7. Advanced Searching

Understand all search modifiers and operators for each search engine. Understand the reason why you use different search engines. Build on a custom search engine. Know how to peel back a website page. Understand how to find pages outside of a search engine. Know all the ways to find an email address and cell number. There’s millions of ways to find and source candidates. Get creative and think outside the box to find a lead.

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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.