baselinr.

SourceSimple Success Strategies

SourceSimple has a singular focus: Baseline Sourcing (BaSo). BaSo is the practice of locating active candidates and available resumes. BaSo is best done at the beginning of a search, putting down the baseline for the search much like laying the foundation before building a house.

A thorough BaSo campaign includes searching resumes and advertising. Every resume source should be tapped, including internal candidate databases, external candidate databases, and the Internet. Advertising should be delivered via media relevant to your target audience. SourceSimple can help with BaSo campaigns, but using SourceSimple should only be a component of your BaSo strategy. SourceSimple has access to general resources, so augmenting your SourceSimple campaign with resources more specialized to your industry would probably serve you well.

Here are some basic strategies for getting the most out of SourceSimple campaigns:

* Use SourceSimple as the first step in your search. You’ll know within a few days if the candidates you seek are readily available. You won’t spend time duplicating efforts that SourceSimple can do for you. Last but not least, you’ll probably have a few days left in your campaign to explore other sourcing directions.

* Explore other sourcing directions. The most obvious course for a SourceSimple is to look for the exact candidate you are seeking. However, there are other potential uses for a SourceSimple campaign. You can ask us to find resumes from certain employers — helps with competitive intelligence. If you are recruiting a salesperson, you can ask us to find resumes for people in the departments where your target is currently selling — potential opportunity to network back to the sought candidate through a referral. Etc. Feel free to get creative.

* Resume feedback should be changes, not just refinements. Look for ways to add to the search string so that it will produce different results. For instance, let’s say you were looking for a Business Development Manager. We used the search string (“business development” AND marketing AND sales). When you received the first batch of resumes, you realized you didn’t want marketing people. You provided feedback to eliminate the term “marketing” from the search string. While that’s important and useful feedback, it doesn’t really change the search — the new results from that point forward will just be a subset of the old results. To get different results, look carefully at the search string to see where synonyms can be added — for instance, using (bd or “business development”) instead of just (“business development”). This will produce a different set of resumes, and potentially get you closer to your target.

Over time I’ll continue writing down Best Practices for SourceSimple. If you have any experiences with using SourceSimple in a unique or interesting way, definitely feel free to tell me!