Sourcing top talent

Chapter 6 Sourcing: Identifying Recruits Outline 1. Sourcing Top Talent at McAfee 2. What Is Sourcing? 3. What Makes a Recruiting Source Effective? 4. What Recruiting Sources Exist? 1. Internal Recruiting Sources 2. External Recruiting Sources 3. Develop Your Skills: Conducting Boolean Searches on the Internet 5. Creating a Sourcing Plan 1. Profiling Desirable Employees 2. Performing Ongoing Recruiting Source Effectiveness Analyses 3. Prioritizing Recruiting Sources 6. Sourcing Nontraditional Applicant Pools 1. Workers with Disabilities 2. Older Workers 3. Welfare Recipients 7. Global Sourcing and Geographic Targeting 1. Global Sourcing 2. Geographic Targeting 8. Sourcing Top Talent at McAfee 9. Summary Learning Objectives After studying this chapter, you should be able to: • Describe the role of sourcing in the staffing process. • Explain what makes one recruiting source more effective than another. • • • List alternative recruiting sources and match them with specific jobs. Create a sourcing plan. Explain how to best source nontraditional applicant pools. • Explain the role geographic targeting plays in the sourcing process. Sourcing Top Talent at McAfee Global security technology company McAfee focuses on hiring smart, committed employees.1 Due in part to increased competition from other employers, McAfee has begun to find it expensive and difficult to engage and recruit the top talent in its pipelines. Although it has been able to generate high-quality leads from known experts in the field, past employees, and other sources, it has had trouble keeping them engaged in McAfee and interested in pursuing job opportunities when they become available.2 McAfee asks for your advice about how to build an engaged community of high-potential talent from which to effectively source future hires. After reading this chapter, you should have some good ideas to share with the company. After using the job analysis and workforce planning processes to determine what to look for in new hires, the organization needs to find people with the characteristics it wants and convert them into recruits. This is no small task. People who never apply to an organization cannot become employees, making attracting enough of the desired types of applicants one of the most important criteria for an effective staffing system. Great employees are like a gold mine. Just as the skills and activities involved in finding a gold mine differ from the skills and activities required to extract the gold, sourcing quality talent requires a different set of skills and activities than does attracting and recruiting the talent. Because recruiting sources tend to generate different types of applicants, sourcing is the key to finding these employees. The best applicant sourcing systems identify where the firm can find good potential job applicants who fit the organization and the job requirements and who are likely to be interested in pursuing employment opportunities with the organization. After identifying the objectives of the hiring effort (which might include prehire outcomes, including the number, quality, and diversity of applicants, or posthire outcomes, such as the time to fill the positions, new hire quality and diversity, or a mixture of both) recruiting sources are chosen to help meet these objectives. Many organizations are also developing mobile sourcing and recruiting strategies to meet job seekers’ needs and on-demand expectations. PepsiCo uses QR codes, videos, tweets, and blogs to help engage job seekers, and created a mobile app called “Possibilities” to provide users with company information. PepsiCo’s app includes an “e-mail this job to me” button to encourage users to easily access job information. The company tracks the conversion rate of applicant starts to completed applications to optimize its mobile recruiting strategy.3 Many organizations discount the importance of strategically thinking about “where” to source applicants. Instead, they post the same job advertisement with the same recruiting source they have used for years. Other organizations see their applicant sourcing practices and strategies as a source of competitive advantage, and are reluctant to even talk about them. Genentech identifies targeted candidates early in their campus careers and builds relationships with them throughout their college years.4 In this chapter, we first explain what sourcing is and what makes a recruiting source effective. We also describe several alternative recruiting sources.