The Art of Sourcing Top Talent; notes from the #rechangout

This week’s google+ hangout was our last of 2014 and we had a very well known guest in the form of The Sourceess, GrandMaster Sourcer (bestowed by SourceCon), AKA Katharine Robinson, joining us to discuss the art of sourcing top talent for 2015. Our host Alan Whitford (Recruitment Strategist from Abtech Partnership ) was supported by Mark Stephens (Technology in Recruitment Alliance and founder of the F10 Group) and  Louis Welcomme(Colleague Software) on the hangout.

Katharine has experience in talent sourcing in direct hiring and executive search and Katharine’s business Sourcing Hat provides bespoke training and mentoring in this field. The hangout covered quite a lot of ground this week so you’ll need to watch it to pick up all the information (and to get a good look at Katharine’s Christmas jumper!).  You can watch the hangout here:

In addition to watching the hangout you might like to check out some of these articles/blogs which I think support the themes discussed:

The Talent Puddle < a phrase coined by Alan back in 2005

Don’t Fill Pools; Build Pipelines < Article written this October referencing Alan’s concept above

UK Sourcers < a group and website established by Katharine Robinson

The magic of search engine sourcing > loads of great links and information

How To Source Candidates Using Google Plus and Twitter > from Andy Headworth (read everything else he has written!)

Stop Relying On LinkedIn InMails And Use These Contact Methods Instead > referencing the stat that the majority of people ignore LinkedIn Inmails.

Advanced techniques for using LinkedIn to source candidates and leads – Notes from our #RecHangout with Mike Clark and Bert Verdonck who are LinkedIn trainers

8 free tools that will make you a smarter, more effective recruiter –  with Johnny Campbell on one of our  #RecHangout’s

The Recruiters Resource – tools which can help sourcing from Colleague

Mark Stephens has written an article in which he says this about Open Web technology. As the pressure to find suitable candidates for those hard to fill positions grows, so does the desire to look outside of the traditional talent pools when searching for passive talent. The missing link for the last few years has been the ability to harness the open web easily and to search Google’s extensive data resources for the skills and experience required. Some sourcing experts have mastered the art of running Boolean search to interrogate sites and repositories and have been doing this for years, but a technology platform has not been developed until now, to provide a simple user interface that can do this for you without going on an advanced Boolean training program. These systems will not only generate results, they will also rationalise them so that recruiters can prioritise and engage with candidates generated in the results.

Following this episode we will be producing a Slide Share highlighting the key takeaways from the hangout. Our next hangout is soon to announced on Colleague’s google+ hangout page.