Published: Wizard Sourcer – Interview Spotlight with Vanessa Raath
If you are a Sourcer and you do not know Jonathan Kidder or his blog, Wizard Sourcer – you are missing out!
Here’s the first few paragraphs from his interview with me – hope you enjoy it:
I had the opportunity to interview the legendary Vanessa Raath. I had the chance to see her speak at SourceCon in 2019 and I was very impressed by her sourcing presentation.
She has over 13 years of recruitment experience, 10 years focusing on the South African Technical IT market, she then decided to launch her own Sourcing Training business called The Talent Hunter. She combined her passion for teaching and recruitment in order to offer much needed Sourcing Training to the South African Recruitment markets.
Tell us about your work experience in recruiting – how did you get your start, how did you progress, where are you at this point in time?
As I say in my training, no one goes to their parents at the age of 6 and says they want to be a Recruiter when they are big! We all kind of fall into Recruitment and it gets ingrained under our skin and we never leave the industry! 😊
Like most others, I fell into recruitment about 14 years ago. I am a qualified Teacher and I spent 8 years living in the UK while teaching at various primary schools in South West London. I then scheduled an early mid-life crisis and went to live on a small island in Thailand and trained to be a PADI Scuba Diving Instructor. After this, I spend a few years travelling around South East Asia working at different resorts. I then ended up in East Africa working in the tourism sector in Kenya before I woke up one morning and decided that it was time to go home, to South Africa!
I went to a Recruitment Agency to try and get into a role where I could do some training or facilitating and they offered me a job on the spot to join their team. The rest is history I suppose… I spent two years doing agency recruitment and then moved into an internal recruitment position for an IT Company where I spent 9 happy years!
I am now the proud business owner of a Sourcing Training Company and freelance Sourcing Business called The Talent Hunter. I celebrated my first year in business last week which I was very proud of! 😊 I am doing loads of local talent sourcing training in South Africa as well as training international companies in places like Australia, USA and Canada – I am loving every minute of it! 😊 I also do international sourcing of top tech talent whom I assist to move around the globe.