5 BOOSTERS FOR SOURCING PRODUCTIVITY
1. FINISH THE DARN THING!
You open LinkedIn, make your string, add some keywords, and hit search. A flood of profiles appears: 14 pages, 137 results—promising!
What do you do next?
You check the first two, maybe three pages, looking at about 30 profiles. Meanwhile, your Teams is going crazy, you’ve got three new emails (one from your boss), and it’s almost lunch time.
You quickly save 5 promising profiles (feel like a sourcing hero), and rush to lunch with that colleague who never stops talking. Thirty minutes later, you can’t remember where you left off, so you start a new search and check more profiles.
Bad practice.
Going through 137 results might seem boring and endless, but if you focus, you could finish your sourcing in under an hour. Try this next time:
Don’t stop sourcing until you save 20-30 profiles. If you can’t do it in one search, keep searching until you have this many potential candidates.
Only then should you switch to another task.
Finishing a task feels amazing—a sense of a job well done.
Focus and get it done!
2. PREPARE FOR THE PAIN
Let’s be honest: most recruiters hate reviewing LinkedIn profiles in large volumes. There is probably no more soul-killing activity than this.
The beginning is always better. It can even be exciting: a new search, new candidates, new markets. You learn, you assess, you grow. Fresh air, everything is so hopeful.
But then you still have to review 45 more profiles, one by one, and your soul starts to protest. You start losing faith. You believe there is something wrong with your Boolean search as there are too few great candidates anymore. It doesn’t seem worth it to check them all. It can’t be the one, right?
Welcome to the Hell of Sourcing.
Here you must believe in your search string, in your sourcing skills. You must know it’s just a painful process, but you need to endure it. There may be the one on page 8. LinkedIn may have hidden your future hire on page 14.
Don’t give up, just stick to it like a tick and get through it.
Yeah… like giving birth. Or being born. Never easy but necessary to win the game.
3. MULTIHIGHLIGHT SAVES YOUR LIFE
There are those keywords that MUST be on the candidate profile. Period. If they are not there, that candidate is out of the running.
Now, candidates take great joy in hiding these keywords in the most obscure corners of their profile. In the About section, under Experience, buried in Skills, or even tucked away in Recommendations.
As much as you loved hide-and-seek as a child, you probably hate this version in sourcing.
Use Multihighlight.
It’s a Chrome/Edge browser extension that highlights these keywords for you and saves hours of searching (and hours of frustration). It works with every online platform: LinkedIn, job board CV databases or even with your ATS.
Here is the link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/multi-highlight/mmkdibnjnmdebbhnddmpknnedpcokonh
I know. You’re welcome.
4. TRACK YOUR WORK (YES, REALLY)
It’s not enough to source; you also have to track your sourcing somehow. Sounds a bit obsessive, but here’s the ugly truth.
Sourcing has at least four major activities:
- Search
- Contact
- Engagement
- Endorsement
The challenge is that these four steps, once you’re deep in the jungle of sourcing, usually run in parallel. Candidates you searched for a week ago start coming back to you. Some are interested, some have clarifying questions, some say no, and some you need to schedule an assessment call with. Meanwhile, you still don’t have enough candidates, so you have to run a new search. But… do you remember what your search string was last time? Where did you search? Which platform did you finish?
Nope, you’re not supposed to memorize all of it. Instead, write it down somewhere. Track it.
Always know where you are in the sourcing process—what has been completed and what’s supposed to come next (and after that). Keep your brain focused on the real stuff and let a tracker handle this chaos. Because let’s be honest, your brain has enough to juggle already.
5. CONSTANTLY IMPROVING AND TWEAKING
I don’t know about you, but I always find myself constantly correcting and improving my sourcing methods. Even after 20 years of doing this with patterns that usually work, I still reassess and tweak my sourcing when needed.
Maybe you have an email template but suddenly feel a paragraph is no longer necessary. Remove it!
Maybe your favorite call to action now sounds a bit cheesy. Find a smarter one!
Maybe you always start a search with LinkedIn Recruiter, but now you think a LinkedIn Alumni search would be a better start.
Don’t let sourcing become just a routine.
Let your intuition constantly inspire your work. Not only will you enjoy your work more, but it will also keep sourcing fresh and alive.
The beauty of good sourcing is that it always adapts to new searches.
Well, that is, if you find constant change “beautiful” and not just endlessly exhausting.
That’s it. We could give you 55 more tips, but we doubt there’s even one reader who made it to the end of these five. If you’re one of them, hit the heart now. Thanks for staying with us!
Happy Sourcing!
Responses