The gist of his post was “be careful who you idolize” in the recruiting world. Definitely something to keep in mind if you’re an avid consumer of recruiting/sourcing (or any) blogs. I guess I just wanted to expand a bit on that theme with a related, if somewhat tangential topic.

The stuff I write about, and train people on internal to my company, or share externally at networking events is all my particular take on a given technique or approach to sourcing. I do my best to write from my experience and hopefully the stuff I put out is useful to you. If not, why are you here?! Unsubscribe right away! Well, tell me it stinks, then unsubscribe.

Too often a vendor, or individual or company will hail some sourcing doodad as the answer to all your problems. This is almost never the case. The myriad factors involved in sourcing are too varied to all be tamed by one thing.

The point of all the techniques, tactics and tools that are out there is to find the most appropriate use for them, and just as important the situations when they aren’t useful.

Take what you read and test it, try other versions of it, give it a workout on your sourcing or recruiting projects. Improve on it, make it fail, take it apart, try to get at why it works or doesn’t for you. Along the way you’ll not only learn something about the machinery behind the tools tactics and techniques being offered, you’ll also teach yourself to spot BS a mile away. Be it from a vendor or self described guru.

One big challenge we have as sourcers is that we’re not generally conversant in the lingo of the people we seek. Even if we have experience sourcing talented people in a certain industry we’re still not doing the work that they do. In other words, we’re not exactly speaking the language they speak. We may know a few words, or phrases, but we don’t have context, jargon, acronyms, and syntax down pat like the prospects we seek.

Here’s a thought at how to peek into real conversations happening that may allow you to both learn the professional language of the people you seek, and find some of those people to boot.

First off is a little Google app called Spy. This app was created by a colleague of mine at Best Buy, Ben Hedrington. Ben’s a smart guy, you should follow him on twitter @benhedrington. Spy tracks content posted via Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Google Reader, Yahoo News, and Blogs (via friendfeed). In the snapshot below I entered ‘SQL’ as my keyword, and set it to look at the last 30 minutes.

Click Image to see Spy in Action

As I’m writing this its scrolling through all posts with SQL in it. I’m learning about journals, conferences, individuals, and other SQL related stuff. Oh, and I’m learning about the people that post too. A real nice way to quickly find and connect with people in an industry.

Another interesting way to use Spy is to project it on the wall during a conference or any large meeting. Assuming you have Twitter savvy people in the room and they all use a standard ‘hashtag‘ in their tweets about the meeting, you can watch the collective consciousness of the room (or anyone using the key term) displayed on the wall.

The second conversation watcher is called Monitter. I just learned of Monitter the other day from Thomas Knoll, community manager for Seesmic. Monitter allows you to watch three different keywords and their ’stream’ from Twitter, again, relatively real-time. One really cool feature of Monitter is focusing on location. The picture below shows three streams following ‘Oracle’, ‘DB2′, and ‘SQL’ within 40 miles of Reston.

Click Image to enlarge

This takes the conversation watching idea to a new level. Notice RSS is enabled here as well.

What tools are you using to understand your target industry better?

Since I first discovered what RSS is and began using it I’ve thought it was one of the most essential technologies for anyone trying to stay informed on news from the web. Since that time a few years ago I’ve become even more convinced that if you aren’t using RSS you’re either wasting a lot of time bouncing around the web, or you’ve chosen to remain less informed about your industry than you could be with RSS. The best basic explanation of what RSS is comes from Common Craft:

Subscribing to blogs and news sites is only the very beginning. Here’s a sample of what else is possible using RSS:

1. Get candidates delivered to you daily

2. Promote your company’s jobs

3. Share your personal content anywhere that accepts a feed.

4. Competitive intelligence

5. Be notified of layoffs, or plant closings in relevant industries.

6. Create a scrolling email signature that rolls through the content of your choice (jobs perhaps?)

7. Take advantage of time stuck in traffic, lines for Apple Products or waiting to vote.

There’s a whole lot more, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

I realize the difficulty for some folks is maybe fear of technology, change, quixotic acronyms, or simply taking the time to learn something new. I’m here to help. To this end I’ll be posting a series here on how to use RSS if you’re a recruiter or sourcer specifically. I won’t explain the basics since common craft has done it as good as it can be done already. I’ll be focusing on intermediate RSS ninja and higher uses of RSS.

The first step for you is to go get an RSS reader. Don’t pay for one, there are many that are free and do all that you’ll need them to do. Basically an RSS reader is where you’ll plug in your feeds once you figure out how to find them or create them. Its also where you’ll read, save, browse, share, categorize, the content you plug in there.

Just go get a Google Reader by the time you get your Google phone you’ll have RSS licked and can get your feeds on the run. The Common Craft folks have a video about the Google Reader- yay! So if you were digging the ‘plain english’ vibe from the video above, check this video on the basics of the Google Reader.

Thats your homework for now.

Extra credit: take your favorite resume search string from Google and go to Feedmysearch to create an RSS feed from your resume search. More on this later.

Sourcecon Challenge 1 winner!

Hello to anyone coming here from SourceCon’s announcement of me as the first winner of the 2008 sourcing challenges. Welcome to my wee blog such as it is. As you can see the previous post to this one was from August of 07 so I wouldn’t say I’ve been prolific with the content of late. All the same here hopefully there’s some content here you’ll find useful.

Thanks again to the SourceCon folks who did a phenomenal job of setting this thing up. I greatly look forward to the challenge at the conference and hope you’ll all be there.

In the meantime feel free to connect with me on Linkedin here

Cheers,

Josh