On Sourcing
R.Karthik
Pharmaceutical co.
I wanted to write on sourcing as a crucial phase in the hiring cycle;
how we go about widening our candidate populace so as to have to
greater lot to select from.
It is not always that we have budgets for advertising!
Again our experience has taught us that advertising is not all that
effective an avenue to fetch us (or our hiring managers rather!) the
kind-of pool we are looking for.
Sourcing also becomes particularly difficult when we are hiring in
tight labour market conditions.
Any recruiter would agree all sourcing tricks don't yield results for
all organizations
Posting your openings on job portals also doesn't guarantee you the
expected yield in terms of the the kind/breed of candidates you are
looking at.
It may give the recruiter a 'feel-good' of so many clicks/views and it
does only as much.
How many times have we suffered heart-burns looking at the
ridiculously irrelevant CVs we receive in response to our posts? (this
may not be true with tech. recruiting)
While reliance on advertisements/job portals can't be something we can
bank on, we as recruiters ought to give wings to our imagination in
arriving at other sourcing methods.
I am sure i have raised several eyebrows in saying the above!
Imagination....what does fantasy have to do with sourcing or hiring
for that matter??
As a case in point, i want to share a true experience of mine (with my
1st employer-the Pharmaceutical).
I took up an assignment of appointing 2 Biz Development Exec.s for
Coimbatore region in the co.s Nutrition solutions biz.
Now, specifications ran like this....3 years exp. female candidates
with a degree/PG diploma in Nutrition or Food Sciences.
A start-up based in Ahmedabad in the west will have not much of a
connect with campuses in the south.
The managers- my customers so far as these positions were concerned
demanded a pool from co.s like J & J, Mead Johnson, Novartis, British
Biologicals, Raptokos & Brett, Nestle et al. These are the who's who
co.s in Nutrition biz.
Little did they realize our constraints; we simply couldn't have done
this given the compensation package we had to offer!
They would not compromise on the experience level considering the
business stakes involved.
Nor would they look at non-nutrition grads (simple science)....subject
matter knowledge was a pre-requisite.
With not much of a choice left, i had to think through and do a little
more homework to get started with these openings.
I fantasized and finally hit on something!
Out of the blue, it occured to me that there are some businesses/
organizations which employ such qualified nutritionists in possibly
non-marketing roles.
What else does the huge population of M.Sc Food Sciences or Nutrition
& Dietics students do after their courses?
And then there was light.....
Yes, i set my eyes on VLCC, Apollo and other corporate hospitals that
turned out to be good catchment areas for us.
Now that i had zeroed in on my target, the next most important thing
to do was to quickly source CVs of some interested candidates.
How do i do that?
I am not that cold-blooded recruiter who would do cold-calls and get
access to prospects.
I fantasized further...and now that i was very happy (rather proud) of
my idea i thought 1 another fantasy would work.
Quite like Music, HR, and A.R.Rahman...Nutrition is also an interest
group.
Several thousands of A.R.Rahman fans constitute the arrahmanfans
yahoogroup.
Similarly, If i as a HR enthusiast am part of IHRC, HR Infotech
association, NHRD and so on, these folks would also have some
affiliation which would have already
manifested in the form of an online forum or e-group. But only those
passionate or rather fanatic about Rahman and HR would choose to be on
such networks.
And we were actually looking for such individuals who were passionate
about nutrition as a profession/subject.
I surfed and found to my amazement, tens of such networks on
yahoogroups.
Atleast i had something to go back and update my managers about.
We touched base with a few candidates and went on to fill the 2 slots
in record time (about less than a month) without any advertisement
expenditure.
Last and not the least, the satisfaction one derives out of closing a
challenging position which would otherwise have remained unfilled is
very soothing.
All the running around, travel, back-aches,reviews and disappointment/
angst at candidate tantrums are rubbed off when we taste such
successes.
The leit motif of this whole passage is "one can get as wildly
imaginative as possible with sourcing".
Sometimes, your gut leads you somewhere while horse sense would
suggest exactly the opposite.
Yet, a bit of fantasizing and floundering here and there helps to beat
the monotony of work.
Cheers,
Karthik