What do you see as the biggest challenge for 2023?
The biggest challenge for Sourcers is to take advantage of professional Big Data spread across sources. Sourcers need to become familiar with some scraping and manipulating data in Excel.
What would be a lesson to share from 2022 based on your professional activity?
A lesson is to be open to change and learn to enjoy it. Change is part of being in our industry. In 2022, we started with a strong candidates’ market and the most challenging job to fill being Recruiter. By now, we are in a near-recession phase, though Tech has been affected the most.
What is the biggest sourcing challenge today?
The perception remains that Sourcers are Junior Recruiters, resulting in less pay and mundane tasks assigned.
Is there life beyond LinkedIn/can we live without LI?
We cannot live without LinkedIn – it has the most significant amount of professional data that is self-entered and, therefore, reliable. LinkedIn has become a standard channel of communication between candidates and Recruiters. But we won’t get far if we restrict our work to LinkedIn only.
If you could give one piece of advice to a sourcer at the beginning of their career, what would it be?
Be curious. Experiment. Practice makes perfect.
Do you believe in automating sourcing?
I do believe in automated message sequencing to potential candidates. I believe in Recruitment Marketing. I do not believe in AI matching resumes against jobs – not at this time. No system can replace an individual in sourcing potential candidates. Our jobs are safe.
What is your favourite sourcing automation tool?
It’s not an automation tool, but it helps to speed up sourcing and outreach – SalesQL We offer our own sourcing tool. Of paid people aggregators, my favorite is SeekOut.
If you had to name the 3 most important sourcing hacks or tools, what would they be?
Ability to get many results from Google X-Ray – the rules have changed in 2022 Cross-referencing email lists against LinkedIn and elsewhere Scraping tools, starting with Instant Data Scraper
Thank you for the anwers Irina Shamaeva, the partner of Brain Gain Recruiting and founder of Sourcing Certifications!
