Last week, Natalie Berezine, Head of Recruitment Group of GMS, the IT recruiting agency, returned from her trip to Sourcing Summit in London. She shared her impressions of the event with us.

This year, more than 150 professionals from various European countries, including leaders of thoughts and sourcers from large international companies, took part in the conference.

Among the most discussed topics of the summit were building sourcing teams, sourcing tools, and lifehacks, cooperation between recruiters and sourcers, communications with the candidates, and GDPR.

Now, on to the most interesting reports. Let’s go!

An unusual topic for a large sourcing conference was brought up by Natasha Cluskey, recruitment manager at Mediatonic Games. She spoke about hiring people when you don’t have a strong employer brand.

First of all, LinkedIn is an ineffective tool for such companies. The candidates receive too many proposals via this site, and a message from a little-known organization is sure to be lost in the overall stream.

Second, you have to use the highest possible level of personalization. It’s worthwhile writing to the candidate that John Smith, his university buddy, works for you, here is his review and his contacts, join the team.

Third, it is critically important to keep a blog to convey your values and inform people about the company’s activities. This will be helpful in forming a correct perception of your business in the eyes of the potential candidates.

Lastly, it is necessary to reject the candidates in a constructive way. Most of the time, the majority of candidates are almost suited to your company’s needs, and if you provide them with quality feedback, explaining which skills they need to improve, after a while, they may become the best fit for your open positions.

Karen Azulai‘s report focused on modern sourcing tools and the importance of their implementation. When LinkedIn is the go-to tool for the sourcer in any situation, the probability of finding unique candidates is greatly reduced. Back in the day, LinkedIn used to be a platform for professional networking, but now it is perceived as recruiting tool, so the professionals are not always interested in posting up-to-date information there.

A sourcer should place greater focus on specialized resources such as GitHub, Deviantart or ResearchGate. These sites allow analyzing the professional skills of the candidate with greater accuracy.

*Karen Azulai at SOSU UK

Iker Jusue spoke about the importance of technical skills for a recruiter, even if they aren’t engaged in searching for IT specialists. In his view, robots can never replace recruiters, but the latter need to evolve in step with the development of technology.  You have to be able to automate your work not only by installing lots of extensions and opening 1,000 browser tabs but also by creating some basic solutions.

Iker advises getting started with learning platforms: Codeacademy, Sololearn, Grasshopper, Udacity, edx, Coursera. You can also check out some specialized Facebook groups: Sourcers Who Code, Data Miner User Community, Growth Hacking Recruiters.

An interesting presentation was made by Andrew Moutney from Atlassian. The team set a goal to double the number of its employees by 2021 (from 2,500 to 5,000). In order to achieve this objective, the company organized a three-way collaboration between the recruiter, the sourcer, and the collaboration buddy.

The sourcer knows everything about the channels and resources, analyzes the background and professional achievements of each candidate, studies the field-specific community, and actually can name all of its members.  The main task of the sourcer is to compile a long list of relevant candidates.

The recruiter understands how to interest the candidate is working in the company and prepares him or her for the successful passing of the selection process at each stage.

The collaboration buddy helps the sourcer and the recruiter to keep their focus on the business. This specialist analyzes the company’s needs and sets objectives.

Thus, there is an explicit task sharing, but at the same time, the recruiter, the sourcer, and the collaboration buddy closely interact with each other and jointly help the company to achieve global goals.

Why you should go to the Sourcing Summit

Participation in such conferences is good for getting in touch with professionals working in completely different markets. Networking allows exchanging experiences, tools, and life hacks with them.

It is also an excellent opportunity to learn about the latest trends in the field, to understand which topics are most discussed, and then to analyze your market from the perspective of global trends.

Moreover, the reports of Sourcing Summit belong to different sections and are often made at the same time. Each participant can choose the most relevant topic and delve into it. And if you come to the summit as a team, you can cover the whole ground.

*Irina Shamaeva & Ivan Stojanovic at SOSU UK