John Vlastelica introduces and questions what 'strategic sourcing' means, noting hiring managers often equate it with more outbound headhunting, passive candidate outreach, or building pipelines. He argues teams must both do genuinely strategic work (beyond posting jobs and 'post-and-pray') and explicitly label and communicate those efforts to hiring managers so the business understands what counts as strategic.
Chapters
So what is strategic sourcing? What would it look like to go above and beyond our kind of normal sourcing efforts to do something that would reach the strategic level? What do you think the business means when they ask us to be more strategic and what are examples of strategic sourcing? When we talk to hiring managers about strategic sourcing and ask them what they think that looks like, they often say the same things. They basically want us head hunting. They want us to do more outbound targeted sourcing of passive candidates. Or they want pipelines. They love pipelines, ready to go. Talent, right. When I ask them for examples of something that's strategic, they tend to come up with stuff that you or I may not even consider strategic. So sometimes saying things like reaching out on LinkedIn or soliciting a referral or targeting new companies. I'll tell you something that I've learned that's kind of interesting. We talk a lot about strategy and being strategic. The business says they want more of it. I'm not sure we've really defined what strategic is, and I'm not going to redefine strategy for you. But I will tell you, when you are working with a hiring manager, it's really important when you are doing something that you believe is beyond whatever the kind of core stuff you would normally do for a role is. So beyond posting it to your career site, beyond posting it on a job board or LinkedIn or something like that, make sure you highlight to the hiring manager that these are the kind of things that are strategic, that these things are above and beyond kind of the normal stuff that they might get for maybe a lower priority role, that we're not just doing kind of the post and pray kind of work, but we're doing more strategic sourcing. So in other words, we have to teach the business what strategic is and then show them how we're being strategic. Now, it turns out that a lot of us are already doing these strategic things, but we're not always great at communicating that or categorizing it. So am I saying it's all about optics? It's all about what labels you use? Of course not. Of course not. We have to actually be strategic as well. But at the same time, we have to label strategic things as strategic.
