I believe that Sourcing is a vital skill which can be learnt by Recruiters with a desire to achieve more. The type of Recruiter who is consistently trying to secure better passive talent than their competitors. Sourcing is not Rocket Science, it is just the art of thinking differently.

I have trained several Internal Talent Acquisition Teams as well as several Agency Teams, based from Sydney to Seattle.

If we do not change our 'old school' recruiting mindsets now, you will find yourself without a job in the future. Gone are the days when you could pick CVs off a Job Board and send them to your client. We need to search for talent where they like to spend their time.

This includes searching in a variety of places, for those hard to find candidates, aka Purple Unicorns. For example, why are Recruiters so hell-bent on searching LinkedIn (740 million users) when there are 2 740 billion daily users on Facebook? (Statista, January 2021). As a quick example, sites like Github, Behance and MeetUp are completely underutilized when it comes to identifying talent.

My initial training is run over two days (or four mornings now that I mostly train online) and I have recently developed a third day of training. My training schedule is as follows: 

DAY ONE:

• Are you a Sourcer/Recruiter worth talking to? We start by looking at the importance of your online brand and what a powerful tool this can be when it is used correctly.
• I then move onto the world's largest professional social network, LinkedIn, and I will teach you the most efficient way to find candidates on here. Trust me, this will blow your mind!
• The rest of the day is spent looking at sites that we should be incorporating into our search strategies but we tend to overlook. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, MeetUp, to name a few, will be covered.

DAY TWO: 

• We start by looking at sites that people don't view as talent sourcing resources - sites like ResearchGate, Behance, AngelList etc.
• I will then guide you through six different Tech sites which are the best places to find Tech Talent - we start with GitHub and end with Dev - can you imagine the other exciting sites that we cover?
• The afternoon session is dedicated to finding contact information for these candidates so we can now get in touch with them. We will also cover several other awesome tips & tricks that I have learnt over my years of sourcing.

Day Three was born out of questions that I received during the first two days of my training. Questions like:

• We have found the perfect candidate, but now what?
• What do we put in the message to ensure that the candidate responds to us?
• How can we use our online presence to stand out from other recruiters?
• What other sites can we use to find the best talent?
• Are there any other Boolean search operators that we can use?

DAY THREE:

• I normally complete this day's training a few weeks after I have completed the first two days of training so that the new learnings have had time to be implemented. This training is broken into three sessions.
• We start by looking at the messaging that Recruiters are using when reaching out to passive talent. We look at what, and how, they are saying; their email cadence; their subject lines as well as more factors that will empower them to craft an excellent outreach message - that will elicit a response.
• The next section looks at how people can Growth Hack their online brands to make sure that they are being noticed by the best candidates. It's easier when Talent comes to you than you always being the one doing the chasing!
• We finish off with a section around advanced Boolean search strings and we look at even more sites that Recruiters or Sourcers can use to find talent.