A typical recruiting sourcer job description will include many things: who you’re accountable to, what you’ll be doing on a day-to-day basis, etc. But what the recruiting sourcer job description often lacks, is a vision of the strategic mark a great sourcer can make.
Commonly, the corporate environment fails to define and support the long-term professional development of talent sourcers. The business implications of this are significant. It’s one thing not to provide career development to talent sourcers. It’s another thing altogether for organisations not to fully exploit the industry knowledge of recruiting sourcers.
The problem is, if you simply regard your talent sourcers as a business support service, and if you fail to guide them along a career progression journey, you risk missing out on the key market insights that can emerge when sourcers become strategic business partners.
Sourcing archetypes often exist in hiring teams. Generalists are generally pragmatic in their approach. They can act as a team lead, mentor, and pipeline starter. They excel at adapting to diverse sourcing environments. Specialists are focused on market knowledge. They excel at partnering up with the business and tend to be employer branding advocates. Sourcing machines are focused on efficiency.
They’re the best-practice setters, often the most-trusted tools person. Fixers focus on process, data, and predictions. They act as a crisis manager, able to solve problems and manage projects. Source: Ondrej Prochazka at the Hudson RPO masterclass, HRD Summit UK.
Of course, top recruiting sourcers are experts at finding passive talent and niche candidates, often for hard-to-fill roles. They do this by combining native language skills with cutting-edge search technology.
But, if you dig further, you’ll discover that this set of skills has the potential to uncover macro-level insights powerful enough to shape and shift entire business strategies.
Let’s explain how this is possible, starting with candidate-mapping. The ability to combine native-language search techniques with leading search technology allows sourcers to map candidate pools in different markets.
By creating long-term talent pipelines, rich with both active and passive talent, sourcers can identify exceptional candidates who may otherwise remain off the radar.
The skilled use of big data technology also allows them to understand and articulate how candidates and competitors operate across markets.
Troves of market insights can be highly influential when it comes to designing corporate strategies around new markets and offerings, and equally, where and when to scale back.
But how can you discover them, let alone fully exploit them, if your recruiting sourcers are not progressively developed into business partners?
From the dozens of recruiting sourcers who have joined our business, we often hear that the industry tends not to enable a clear career development path for recruiting sourcers.
Ondrej Prochazka, talent sourcer and alum of Hudson RPO, recently addressed this issue during the Hudson RPO masterclass at HRD Summit UK. In this clip, he talks about how a lack of development permeates the industry:
Watch this short video to see Ondrej presenting at HRD Summit UK, during the Hudson RPO masterclass.
Imagine if we could flip the perception that career progression doesn’t exist within the talent sourcing community. The good news is — with the right training, support, and investment — we can.
Explore the potential career transformation, both in terms of technical capability and stakeholder engagement, in this talent sourcer graphic shared by Ondrej:
In its flagship Centre of Excellence (CoE), Hudson RPO is actively transforming career development expectations within the sourcing industry.
Career development stages are identified for all new starters who work within sourcing, recruitment, and administration. These are shared during the new joiner’s induction session.
Every six months, colleagues within the CoE review their development goals and measure their performance, often stepping into the next development stage.
You can see how sourcing careers develop at the CoE by downloading our CoE Recruitment Researcher role profile.
In that example, you’ll see how the different stages of skills development are clearly identified. The role focuses on talent sourcing development; successful candidates collaborate with onsite recruiters and offsite recruitment specialists.
Experienced recruitment researchers can offer strategic value to organisations, thanks to a range of skills in:
From researcher to onsite recruiter and team lead, our colleagues can look forward to transparent professional development and progression. This is made clear in our recruitment-focused job descriptions, inductions, and ongoing training and support. We believe in this model, and recommend it to clients.
“Across the industry, a lack of transparent, long-term career development often permeates many stages of a talent sourcer’s career,” says George McRobbie, Service Delivery Director (EMEA) at the CoE.
“We seek to redefine that experience by providing structured career development at the CoE. As a result, our individual talent specialists are benefiting from tailored career development.”
George continued: “We are proud to help train some of the industry’s most respected recruiting sourcers, including people like Ondrej, who has gone on to further his career in technical sourcing at Facebook, while also becoming a highly sought-after speaker in the sourcing industry.”
In the graphic below, check out the four stages of talent sourcing career development, as shared by Ondrej during the Hudson RPO masterclass at HRD Summit UK.
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