Tips for Sourcing During the Pandemic | Johnny Campbell & Stacy Zapar

Sam, It's Wednesday, 5th of August. It's 4pm here in Dublin, so it must be time for the shortlist. Welcome back everybody. We had a break last week. I had my annual leave, taking some time out to not think about work. I hope you've done the same this summer if it's summertime in your part of the world. And I've enjoyed just tuning out of work, hopefully staycationing close to you and discovering the joys of the simple things again. That's what we've been trying to do in the Campbell household for the last couple of weeks. But we're back this week. It's Wednesday and I have a brilliant guest on the show today, someone who I've been trying to get on the show for several months. I'm so thrilled that she's able to join us today. She's someone I've known for, gosh, the last six, seven, eight years. She's someone who always impresses me and impresses crowds when she speaks live. And she gives such insightful, practical tips. And she's given us the privilege of coming on the show today to do the same. But before we introduce our guest today, let me just remind everybody that if you want to try and subscribe to the shortlist and follow our future shows, if you'd like to listen to previous shows, if you'd like to find links to where you can find the podcasts, the videos of these shows, please go to socialtalent.com the shortlist and you can find all that information, including our upcoming shows. So today we want to talk about sourcing. Sourcing in a post pandemic, or actually not really post pandemic, but a pandemic. Covid19World I've been asked by many people, many recruiters, many sourcers, many HR professionals, what's changed? What's different in the world of recruiting, in particular, sourcing in a pandemic. And to be frank, I don't source anymore. I talk to great people who source and work with sourcers. And one of those is my guest today, and that is the fantastic Stacy Zapar, who's joining us live from San Diego this afternoon and this morning, her time to share with us her insights from the work she's been doing over the last year, but particularly the last five, six months. Stacy, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. I'm hoping maybe you can share with the world outside. For those who don't know you where what do you do, what's your background, why you're on the show today, why you're passionate about sourcing.

Thank you Johnny. I'm super excited to be here. I too am a huge fan of you, Johnny. So that's mutual. The mutual love society is in full swing here. But big fan of you and your whole team and what you guys do and thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. 8am I had two sips of my coffee so I'm going to power on through here. But what I am, I'm a recruiter. I've been a recruiter for 20 plus years now. Sourcing recruiter that whole time. I love my job. I love recruiting. About eight years ago I started my own business and I do. There's my husband. That's all right. It's Covid times in a nutshell, right? Pandemic world. Hopefully he'll not make too many trips back and forth today. But I warned the kids, but I forgot to warn the husband. But. But what I do is I do training, consulting, search, you name it. I love top of funnel strategies the most. Sourcing especially is kind of my favorite thing. I say it a lot. If I ever win the lottery, I'll probably still source and do other fun things too. But basically I do sourcing as a service right now. I really enjoy it. Sourcing and engagement is my favorite thing to do. So I'm helping companies fill up their pipeline. If they have some fluctuating hiring needs, I'm here to jump in if the recruiting team isn't able to fully handle that bandwidth. What else can I tell you? I love talking about this topic and it is definitely a new world right now. 2020 is full of unique challenges when it comes to sourcing specifically. And I've tried some things that have always worked and they don't work as well and some things still do. And what works for one person is very for other people. I just see. You know, I did a lot of crowdsourcing recently in preparation for a talk I did last month and the answers varied widely. My response rates are way up. My response rates are way down. My hiring is craz. I have way more applicants. Oh my gosh. Everything's on hold and I'm nervous. So there's a lot of fluctuation and there is no normal or standard. But I have found some things that tend to work universally no matter what you're recruiting for. So hopefully I can share some of those tips with everybody today and you all can learn from my, my trial and error and my mistakes as to what tends to work well in this crazy kind of challenging environment we find ourselves in these days.

Well, I must share with our audience that Stacy's Secret Sauce course on the socialtown platform is one of the most popular today, being watched over a million times by recruiters and sources around the world. And Jeetendra Pradhan is live on LinkedIn at the moment saying, is this Stacey's Secret Source Part 2? It might be Jeetendra. Certainly more updates. And if you liked Stacey's Secret Sauce on the platform, you're going to hopefully love what she's going to share with us today. But I'm going to get to that in a moment. I just want to quickly remind our viewers and listeners that if you want to listen to this on podcasts, we're now available on podcasts on all your favorite podcast platforms, on Spotify, on Apple, etc, etc, so go find as a great sourcer that yourself. You'll figure it out. Type in the shortlist, type in some other names. You can't source our podcast. You shouldn't even be listening to the show.

Oh, God.

We're gonna, we're gonna launch into the news, first of all, to see what's been going on in the world of work in the last seven days. Niall, what news articles do we have today? So first up, Stacey, this article appeared in Forbes in the last few days, right? And the author here, Caroline Castellon, is arguing now is the perfect time to job hunt. And for our listeners and viewers who haven't had the opportunity to read this article, essentially what Caroline is saying is that, you know, because we're all working remotely, it's one of our main points is that there's never been a time, better time to search to upskill to do interviews because you're not sitting in an office under the nose of your boss. And so therefore it's actually a really good time to be a job seeker. You can engage with recruiters, spend time people aren't watching your, you know, you work for eight hours a day in lots of professional jobs. I don't think Caroline meant this for every single job. So her argument there is it's a good time to job hunt. What's your opinion, Stacey? Would you share that opinion, agree, disagree with some of those points?

I think maybe for reasons that might be slightly different than what Caroline chose to point out, I think if you're looking for a job, people find a way to job hunt, whether they're in an office or they're working remotely. I've been working remotely since 2002. 2003 people can job hunt on their lunch break, on their cell phones. They don't have to be sitting at their work computer. I don't know that that's necessarily my primary thought when I read the headline and scanning the article and the summary that you provided. I think that really the number one reason why I would say that now is a good time to job hunt is simply that so many people are fearful and reluctant and cautious when it comes to making a voluntary career change. Right now, very few people are applied, you know, not in all cases. Right. In some industries, it's gangbusters. But in many cases in tech, for instance, you know, it's gotten extremely difficult and we're going to, you know, talk about that, I'm sure, some more today in this call. So if companies are struggling having fewer applicants for some jobs, and as sourcers, we're seeing lower response rates in some cases because people are hesitant. They want to ride it out a little bit, see what the industry, the job market, the economy does before they make a change. What's going to happen with schools? And am I even going to have childcare? Do I have to save time for homeschooling? There are so many variables that people are sort of pausing on their job search or their willingness to change jobs right now. So if you are able or willing to make a switch, now is the perfect time to do it because frankly, you'll have less competition than in a regular job market, in my opinion. So, for sure, if you're ready to make a change and you're feeling confident and ready to go for it, like, by all means, it can't. It can never hurt to have a conversation and be transparent about it. Say, I'm not sure I'm ready to make a change, but I'm open to having some conversations. And recruiters, I'm sure will be very responsive if you've got a match there on the skills and experience.

Yeah, I tend to agree. I think there's a perception that because there's such high unemployment in general that there's loads of people looking for jobs. So it's a bad time to be a job seeker. And I think to your point, in some job sectors, there are, there's, there's an overwhelming number of, of, of applicants. And we'll get to that in a second in our next article. But in a lot of roles, there's, you know, there's the same demand or similar demand, but the supply. To your point, I think, Stacey, is the supply just dropped because the, the average number of People quitting jobs are being available in the market fell or is right down, actually. I think we might have some data on that now. Maybe you can share with us. Stacy shared this graph with us just before the show and it's relevant to the us, but I think it probably extends around the world. You look at the kind of number of people in the US who quit their job by month. It plummeted this year, like absolutely fell through the floor. So whilst people might be available, people aren't choosing to be available. And that's a really, really fundamental difference, I think, which is key to your point. I'm going to expand that in a second, Stacy, but we might jump to the next article because I think there's more in the next article. It's related and it appeared in one of the the publications in my country. The Irish Times actually borrowed from the Financial Times, from the ft though. And this talked about hiring in a pandemic is not always as easy as it looks. So the first article from Forbes was saying, hey, job seeker, you should go out and look there. It's never been a better time. But Palita Clark, in this article, she spoke to three different recruiters or companies recruiting and asked them what it's like to be hiring three different companies who, because of the sector that they're in, are actually hiring more than ever. You know, one of them is Hermes, who do the pick and packaging of online sales for companies. Not Hermes, the bag or design company. One was Vodafone, the telecoms company, who are, you know, again, you think about telecoms infrastructure. It's in massive demand all around the world at the moment. I can't remember the third one. Oh, Tesco stores, retail retailers hiring more as well. And they were for different reasons saying it's really difficult to hire. Some of it being around we're getting too many applications. So I think that was the Hermes folks were saying that they had whatever number of applications, but the ratio of inbound applications just shot up and they're actually all quite high quality. So there's an extra burden on recruiters to filter inbound, which is because I've talked to lots of recruiters who've been telling me that they're talking to hiring managers and hiring managers are thinking, well, your job just got easier. Recruiter, you know, Ms. Sourcer or Recruiter, isn't it easy now? And they're going, no, because, you know, I have so much money, more inbounds that I have to filter through that I didn't have to do before. And you know, people aren't, you know, are reluctant to move the ones I want to try and target. So actually, it's got harder, you know, more people in the market doesn't mean it's easier. And this is probably. This is. This is, you know, this is not. It's not intuitive to a hiring manager. But I guess recruiters and sources, they get this, don't they? They understand that it's actually not necessarily easier.

Sure. And I think, like I said, my last client that I was sourcing for recently is a warehouse automation robotics company. Right. So they're building robots that take the place of people in warehouses and warehousing. Right now, as we know, Amazon and all these companies that are in kind of this online retail space and the warehouses that power those behind the scenes, a lot of industries are really booming and hiring more than ever. So going back to your point, there are industries where certainly they're harrying and gangbusters and there are droves of applicants because certain companies are impacted and others are not, and everyone's scrambling to kind of find their next thing. And so as recruiters, I say this a lot. I mean, our biggest competitor is not the company across the street. It's not our competitor, according to our industry, necessarily. As recruiters and sourcers, our biggest competition is time the clock. We have to get all the million things done in a day that we need to get done and working efficiently and streamlining and being able to quickly identify the right people for the right roles and have coverage for all your positions and create an amazing candidate experience. And everyone's getting feedback and everyone's getting the attention that they need from a candidate applicant, hiring manager perspective, et cetera. So more volume doesn't necessarily mean better. It just means that we have to work that much more efficiently. We have to be able to process those applications quickly. If you are the type of person, and I used to be this person too, and I had to break myself of this temptation, I would come in, in the morning and I would just sift through all the people that applied the night before. Some cases you can do that if you only have a handful of applicants. Sometimes I'd apply, post a marketing job and have 250 applicants by the next morning. Many were good and I only needed a small handful. So how do you quickly pick out the ones that are the best and not have to read all 250 for that one job? 15 of the jobs that you're working on or whatever? Definitely, if you're able to source your ATS and Just sort it by keywords and use your Boolean. Sort it by current applicants in the last however many days by rec. Whatever it is. If you can sift through that quickly so that the best talent bubbles up to the top, it's unfortunate that a lot of good people are not going to get looked at in every case. This is not a computer or a machine doing it. I see that on Twitter. There's some perception that the ATS is weeding people out. This is a recruiter making people decisions and judgment calls based on the need and what the actual qualifications are. So I think it just. To your point. Yeah. How are all those people going to get feedback? Are we considering people? Are we able to find the diversity candidates out of that population of applicants? That's a big priority right now, too. So how can we accomplish those things? What will our technology and our ATS enable us to do? And how can we find ways to process all of this information very quickly and get the coverage that we need while still creating an amazing experience for our hiring managers and candidates? So, no problem.

I think you make a really good point around. You know, the process isn't often well understood, and as a job seeker today, you probably have a completely wrong impression about how hiring works and how technology works and forget all this stuff. You know, I know that we. I'll make a plug here. We're hiring at the moment in our curriculum team, and we put the post out a couple of weeks ago. We've had like 70 or 80 really good applicants, you know, and, you know, that's from that pool. I'm really confident we're going to find someone really stellar. I had planned and mapped a sourcing project around this with. With my colleague who's managing the role. And, you know, I just don't think we'll need it because we got really good applicants there. But there's a lot of work involved, and my colleague's been overwhelmed going through those applicants, giving them the time and consideration they need. And actually, it's been slower hiring for that role because we've had such quality. You haven't been able to go, but. No, no, no, no, no. It's like, actually, yeah, not bad. Actually, I need to read this one. This is kind of interesting.

You know what it reminds me of? It's almost like having to source through your applicant pool because the pool is so big and so qualified. You're almost having to source through this talent pool of candidates to pick out the best ones. Your sourcing skills come into play with applicants in that context, if you really think about it.

I'm interested to discuss pools with you, but I'm gonna actually go to our last article if NA doesn't mind sharing it with us. And this is hot off the press from LinkedIn. LinkedIn announced another layoff list. But it's interesting. You know, LinkedIn are no stranger to layoffs. As you can imagine, their whole business relies on companies hiring for their revenue, and hiring dropped overall. Notwithstanding that some companies and sectors are hiring more than others, generally people are hiring less. Right. LinkedIn laid off a whole bunch of folk and they announced, I think, last night that they had built a search tool on LinkedIn to find talent. Their own ex staff, if you like, that have opted in to be found for people to look. What's your view on these layoff lists? Because this is not the first one. I think, you know, Airbnb's list was probably the first most publicized one and there's been many more since then. So on the ground, are you seeing sourcers taking advantage of this is a good or bad thing?

Yeah, I think layoff lists are a wonderful resource for recruiters, for sourcers, for, you know, the companies that. That hate doing this. But it's unfortunately a necessary evil in these times. And of course, for the people that are impacted, this is a wonderful way for them to get their information out there. And it's not just their name. It's got their title, it has their contact information. It makes it very easy for the recruiters involved. So these layoff lists, and there's. I'm not plugging in any way, but the big one that you see oftentimes is this layoffs IO or FYI. And there are ways to search and there's a database and you can sort it. There are actually links to each company's individual, if they have an Excel spreadsheet that they've created or a website or what have you. Lots and lots and lots of people that are essentially raising their hand saying, I'm impacted and I'm available, which is recruiters and sourcers. That's a wonderful thing. What I experienced when back in, I guess, maybe March, I was hitting these lists up pretty hard when I had some openings and I found a. That the people on the list weren't necessarily some of those senior tech folks I was looking for. There were more junior folks or people that were interns or many actually needed a visa, which I wasn't able to work with, visa transfers or whatever. So not everyone on the list was actually going to be super applicable to my particular needs. But the big thing that I found is that when I did reach out to folks, I reached out to a handful of front end developers I think and they were very kind at first. They were like, gosh, so sorry, it's taken me a while to respond to you because I always do my three step follow up as you guys have heard. But when I followed up they're like, gosh, I'm so sorry, I have to tell you, I've probably gotten 100 recruiters in the last emails in the last three days and I'm completely overwhelmed and I'm trying to process it all. So they have kind of the same issue that we just talked about from the last article in that they're getting bombarded and having to decide which role, which company really makes sense because I can't respond to everyone. And so my thought in looking at that as well, I've identified several companies in the GEO where I'm sourcing that have been impacted. These companies have done layoffs. The industries are clearly impacted. Travel was a big one, you know, TripAdvisors company that I was kind of going through their list and certain industries, it makes sense that they're impacted more than others. And so what I chose to do and this worked out really well for me personally is of course scrub these lists, help the people that you can consider everyone that's available. But I use that as a research tool that I then identified. Okay, these companies have done layoffs. If 10% of the company's been impacted, 90% is still there. But they're probably a little worried saying am I next and when's the next round and will I be impacted? And is my industry or company the best place to be right now given the fact that travel may not bounce back for quite some time, so they might be wondering and looking for higher ground or open to at least having a conversation so that when the time is right, you'll have already started that dialogue. So what I did is I used those lists as a research tool to go out and go where the competition isn't. And maybe there's still some competition, but certainly much less than these poor people that have gotten 100 emails in two days or whatever. And so I was able to target and reach out and source and have great calls and find amazing candidates that are really qualified, very strong and frankly a little kind of nervous right now. And so that was much more fruitful and productive and a higher ROI for me personally. And so that's, I think a nice little tip that people can all use these lists as an idea of where should I be sourcing right now? That I might actually get some responses back and start some conversations.

That's a great tip. We've got Digvija Singh, who asked a few minutes ago, any pointers for podcast passive sourcing? I think that's a great pointer if that helps for Digby, which is not necessarily just using them explicitly as candidates, but using them, to your point, as research. Who are the companies who have laid off folks because their colleagues left there may be nervous and maybe their skills are of a higher quality or more in demand quality because they weren't laid off. Right. But they're in a company that is going through uncertainty. I think that's a really good tip. Right. You know, we've always done this. We've always tried to take advantage of sourcers of these types of fragilities in the market of teams that were nervous being laid off. Right. And they've got lists being created. I don't think the companies want us to source their staff, but, hey, that's not our problem. You know, as sources and recruiters, we've got to go find the right people.

And as sourcers, no one ever wants us to source their company. You know, no company ever wants us to source them. And that's no different now. But frankly, it's a free world. And if people, you know, decide that it's time for them to make a move and, you know, then it's really kind of. It's not a bad thing that we're reaching out. I don't want it to be perceived as negative. Sourcing is always, you know, this is the nature of what we do. We introduce opportunities to people and they kind of make the decision if it's something they want to learn more about or pursue.

So what else are you seeing, Stacey? You're, you know, you've always been wonderful with very, very practical tips. I think that's a great first. Practical tips. Use these lists for research purposes, not necessarily just for the people on them. Great tip. What else have you been putting into practice? You mentioned there are certain commonalities. You're seeing things that work. What are the things that work?

Yeah, one of the things that I noticed, and this is, you know, maybe a little, you know, egg on my face. It's a little embarrassing. As someone who kind of prides herself on her sourcing skills and her response rates and, you know, my 85, my blueprint to an 85% response rate, I'm not. I wasn't I haven't been getting 85% response rates. When I was doing my normal kind of sourcing and I was going out on LinkedIn, I was doing my, you know, personalized messaging and doing my follow up and making it easy and all the things that I kind of talk about how to drive up your response rates. And I was seeing less response and I was seeing many, many fewer yeses in those responses. So before I would get maybe 70% said yes and 30% would say no thanks. Now of the responses, which are dramatically, maybe a little more than half what it used to be, of those responses, 70% were saying, not right now, but let's stay in touch. And 30% were saying, let's have a conversation. So my yes responses have gone way down. And that was like, okay, I've got to change this up. I can't just do what's always worked. It's not going to work right now. And maybe it's gotten better in recent months. This was very early on, but still for me, I found that there are five populations of candidates that we can target who are much more likely to respond and be very viable candidates, even in this crazy market. And I want to preface this by starting with saying the obvious. Can I do this, Johnny? I'm just kind of throwing something else in there that I think contextualizes it a little bit. So obviously people are nervous about making a switch right now. We saw that chart. Yes, it's in the US But I would imagine that this is pretty universal, that people are not voluntarily leaving their jobs and nearly as much as what we're used to. And so people are hesitant to quit their job, which is what it takes when you're sourcing. They have to quit their job to come to your job. If they don't want to quit, we've got a barrier there. And so why is that? Obviously they're working from home. They're virtual, maybe sometimes for the first time. They've got childcare concerns. They're wondering if schools are going to reopen. They are working right now with a boss who knows them and knows what they're capable of and knows that maybe right now this isn't their top output and maybe they're juggling a lot of other things right now. So if they're only able to put 80% into their job where before they were a top performer, their boss gets it. If you go to a new job, is that boss going to be cool and get it and understand that I'm actually better than what I'm able to show you right now they're having to change jobs to a place where they've never met anyone, they have never met their boss, they don't know anyone on the team, they even meet in person. They've never seen the office. And now I'm going to this unknown place with these unknown people where I'm not able to do my best work. Of course, people are kind of down in their little meerkat hole and they might peek up a little, but people are afraid and everything's a visual for me. Sorry. So this is what we're dealing with. So as sourcers, we always have to have empathy, even not just from a kindness perspective. And yes, in Covid, we have to show empathy in so many areas. But I think it's really important that we put ourselves in our candidate's shoes and think, if this were me, and I was really afraid to make a move right now because there are so many scary and unknown things. This whole last in, first out, you know, fear that people have, what would. Who would be more likely to maybe make a move to my company or my role right now? So kind of think about the psychology of it, the empathy, the putting yourselves in your shoe, their shoes. And I came up with five avenues to try and they've been all very kind of. They've been better than cold sourcing, let's put it that way, to varying degrees. So I'm going to run through the five, if that's okay.

Go for it.

All right. Of course, people who follow your company on LinkedIn, and if you're able to see that and you have a, you know, LinkedIn recruiter account, those people are probably more likely if they follow you, they kind of, you're on their, their list. That's a simple place to start. That's kind of an obvious one. I'm a big, big fan. No matter what time of, you know, whatever the climate is, I'm a big fan of sourcing Our own ats, of course, we've got, you know, you can cold source on LinkedIn, you can look at applicants. Cold sourced is cold. LinkedIn applicants are hot. Or people that come through your website. But those people in your ats, those are warm leads. These are people that have either applied to your company before, they've interviewed before, they've expressed interest, they've gone through the process of filling out your online application. You know, they've been to your careers page, they've consumed the content. Like they've gone beyond just liking your company on social media, they've actually, you know, raised their hand and said I want to work for you at some point in the past. And you have their contact info right there, their full resume. You can compare it with their LinkedIn profile if it's a little dated. So definitely source your ats that those people are much more likely to respond to you. Internal mobility, always a great idea, but never a better idea than in Covid times. And a time where we're hiring externally is challenging. Why not give those people that are next in line and they may not have tick all the boxes from a skills or experience perspective, but invest in your employees, try to source from within your own company or start those conversations with your hiring managers or your leaders and say who can we promote and this role, even if it's a little bit of a jump for them and see if we can backfill from their prior role. I would rather backfill a lower position and move everyone up. Great for morale, etc. Boomerangs these people have already worked for you. They've left. I've been a boomerang myself, so the grass is not always greener. Moving back to a company where you already worked, already know the players, already know the culture already under that is much less scary than going someplace brand new. So maybe you go back into LinkedIn and say when it comes to past companies, plug in your company name in that field and see what comes up. Yes, you're going to have to cross reference with HRIs or your HR people and see if they're rehirable, et cetera. But that's another angle that they may be like, oh heck no, Stacey, forget it. I would never come back there as a reason I left. But you don't know until you ask and they might know someone, et cetera, et cetera. And my last tip here, and this is my favorite one, so I actually saved it for last, is referral, sourcing and you know, hat tip to Glenn Cathy. He's the one I think shared this way back when at LinkedIn and I just was like, yes, I've done this, but I love how you put it. He's like, don't ask people who they know, tell them who they know. And so I would say out of the 20 people I know who've changed jobs during COVID times, maybe 18, I think of them left to go work for a boss they'd worked for in the past or a team member that they've worked with in the past, they already knew someone. So if people are willing to make a move because they already know some of the players and there's a safe place and that person can vouch for the team or the culture or the manager. She's cool, you'll like her, trust me. Whatever. That's a less scary thing. Those people are more likely to make a move. Let's target those people. Well, how do we do that? Go into LinkedIn, connect with your hiring team members or other employees or your people in your network and if you can, but ideally people on the team and source those people's first level connections. Again, on LinkedIn, you can do connections of plug in the hiring manager or the hiring team member's name and source and be like, hey, Johnny, these three people in your network, they're your first level connections, people you've worked with in the past. They look perfect for this role. What do you think? Oh, my gosh, thumbs up, thumbs down. I send everybody two or three names and you can drive referrals that way. Be very careful, however, that this does not drive down diversity. So we need to be mindful that this can be somewhat of an, you know, we still have to, you know, keep our diversity sourcing up. But this is something that if they've worked with those people or gone to school with them in the past, it can be a very nice little safe bridge for them to cross to make a change right now. And I highly recommend it.

The comments and questions are coming fast and furious. That and great advice. Jitendra Pradhan saying, great tips. Thank you. Love the boomerang trick to approach. Our good friend Jeremy Roberts, former editor and sourcecon, said, first of all, people are still talking about sourcing passive crawl data. Very seldom have they exhausted the ATS, the CRM, internal employees, LinkedIn job boards. Passive crawl data is the last option if you want to connect with people likely to engage. I think he's saying hallelujah and saying also his favorite is tell them who they know at your point, from Glen Cathy's article, many, many years ago, then get permission. He's saying, when I sell life insurance. I looked up neighbors when I was going to someone's home for a sale, asked if they knew them, then asked if I could use them as a reference when I called.

There you go.

I assume means it works, Jeremy. So nice job. Didn't know you sold insurance, Jeremy. That's good to know. Actually, I'm gonna ask you one more.

Question that would tell us who we know in common with people. You know, wish there was only someone.

Would create that, you know, there was.

Something that Would tell us. I'm like, yes, absolutely. Say, hey, I see you work. You know, I always use my old boss, Julie Hilton. Hi Julie. If you're watching, you know, hey, I see you know Julie, she was my Boss for like 5 years. I love her. How do you know Julie? And start that conversation and you know, get a, get a heads up from Julie before you reach out and say, hey, what's the scoop on this person? And she'll be like, oh, I love her. Julie says, hi.

I heard Microsoft have a product that does that. I can't remember its name. It'll come back to come back to me. Stacy, I'm going to ask you about a sixth source. It just got me thinking because it's been mentioned to me by some people. I want to know if it works for you, right, or you've seen it work. Which is so you're, you're silver medalists, right? From the past. So people you have reject are people rejected you, right, because maybe six months ago they were working for, they got an offer with or they were working for a hot tech company and you are considered old school legacy. Maybe they, their view of the world has changed. Six months later. Have you seen that work for sourcers for talking about you using the existing pools in front?

Have you tried it and find former applicants, former interviewees and of course you're tagging all your super medalists, right? So of course you're searching for that too. So yeah, even if that's another kind of good point too that you just bring up, a lot of times we're hesitant as sourcers to reach out to people that have made a move in the last three, four, six, nine months. Because we think of that one year rule that no one will make a move in less than a year. But in Covid times that's not necessarily the case. People might say, you know what, everybody's getting kind of tied up in this Covid thing. A short gap this year isn't going to look that bad. Or secondly, they're like, you know what, I made a bad call. This is not a smart decision in a pandemic to work for a company that's unstable or this startup or whatever. I'm okay with making a move to higher ground. So don't assume that just because we're again, those are the old norms. The new norm is that just because that they've been there less than a year, they might still be willing to talk to you. And in this climate, I think everyone knows somebody that might be open to look or has been impacted. So just even having these conversations is going to drum up, you know, referrals or interest, hopefully targeted ones. Again, we don't want more candidates and more leads. We want better leads and more qualified leads. So if we can kind of hone in or home in on that, you know, that's, that's really our job right now.

So I'm going to ask Niall to bring that up on screen. Just a quick summary of those five points. For those of you watching. You can see them, but I'm going to call them out. For those of you listening on the podcast, Stacy's five avenues to search from people who follow you, think about your LinkedIn company, etc, people in your ATS. So your silver medalists, gold medalists, your past applicants, interviewees, etc, internal hires. We had John Ackerman from Oracle on a few weeks ago. Talk about internal hiring. It's a big theme. We know everywhere your boomerangs again. We're seeing Stacy herself being a boomerang. Hey, in social talent, we did boomerang. James Coffee, one of our former employees, rejoined us this year in the middle of COVID It was awesome to get him back. So hallelujah to that. On my list, 19 out of 21 and referrals big time. You know, ask, don't ask people who they know. Tell them who they know. That's copyright Stacy slash Glencathy.

That's awesome.

So love that, love that stuff.

Sourcing. We have to source referrals. Drive referrals. Don't just please, who do you know? Here's the hot list and a sign in the bathroom or the hallway or whatever, you know, like definitely source your referrals. Don't just ask. Exactly.

And we got. I'm going to throw a couple of questions from the comments, if you don't mind. Stacy, quick shout out and say hello to Aaron Sullivan. Hey, Aaron, good to have you on the show. I'm glad you're glad you're here live with us. We've got a question back here. I don't know if this is something that you have experience of, if you can comment upon, but we have a question in here from David Jamarillo and he's wondering a question for you, Stacy. How can recruiters minimize the constant ghosting of candidates and hiring managers during this time? Seems like it's getting worse right now. So first of all, do you agree with that? Have you seen that? Do you have any advice on that?

Yeah, I think people are ghosting us for a number of reasons. Number one, they may be getting overwhelmed by recruiters if they're in a certain industry or a certain space or they've been impacted or they're on one of these layoff lists or what have you. So, yes, it's happening. It happened to me. People apologized and said, I'm sorry, I'm not really responding and I may not get back to you ever, but I'll, you know, they are aware of this. But secondly, I would say that people right now, if they're not responding to you or they're responding and then they kind of drop off and I'm not justifying the behavior. I think it's as important in candidates as it is in recruiters. And we were the original ghosters, I think, and they're just following our lead. So don't tell anyone. Mea culpa right here. Like we need to own that. You know, what goes around comes around. And I think we started this but not to justify it. It's not appropriate. We should at least tell people, no, thanks. But yeah, but the reason why I think people are ghosting is because a lot of times, at least for me personally, when I kind of drop off, I mean, I'm guilty of this with some of my emails for setting up this call, I kind of dropped off and got quiet and ghosted a few people in the process of scheduling because I was like, you know, I'm not sure I need to check my calendar. I'm not really sure if the timing is going to be right. You know, I've got some other factors involved. So people are kind of debating and once they debate and they're thinking about it and will school be opening? Let me wait till next week and I'll respond then once I know what the update. And once people start thinking about it and they don't have a yes or no answer for you, that's when it gets buried under their email or they feel bad like, gosh, that was already two weeks ago. I'll archive it. You know what the best thing to do is? That's when you have to do your follow ups, even if you're doing a little bit more. Very gentle follow ups. Say, hey, I know it's been a couple weeks. I understand everyone's really swamped right now. We've got a lot of things on our plate. Things are slipping through the cracks. I just wanted to follow up and let you know I haven't forgotten about you and I'm still open to having a conversation whenever you're ready. No pressure and let them know that it's not a now or never. Even though as sourcers it's always like now or never. But we want to be proactive and think about kind of long term. So if they're not ready right now, or if they're still kind of on the fence, that isn't a no. If it was a no, they might have told you no. The fact that they're hesitating or ghosting you might be the sign that they're thinking about it. So it's on you to follow up, to make sure that it doesn't just slip through the crack. That's what be my advice.

We got Peter Geoghegan commenting. I think about something earlier, but I think it's relevant to this. He's saying it's always better to ask the question than to assume the answer will be no when dealing with previously rejected candidates or candidates who rejected you. But also people who didn't show for an interview, don't assume that means they don't want to work for you and apply the same logic to that going, who knows what might have happened? Maybe someone with their kids, they got busy.

Yeah, I mean, I put this slide in my talk from last month when I was talking about some of these things and I was like, you know, people are going to mess up, they're going to be late, they're going to no show to a meeting. Hiring managers are going to let you down. You're going to let people down. This is Covid times, man. We're in survival mode. And normally if somebody no shows to an interview, I'm like, you're dead to me. Like, it's, you know, I'll never work with you again. You're blacklisted in my ats. There's a black, you know, Mark X on your name. Like nowadays I'm cutting everybody a little slack, including myself. It's just we're all messing up a little bit and it's okay and, and I'm not. We have to learn to let some stuff go right now because it's not normal times and everything is upside down.

So one of the things that we've seen, Stacey. Right. Slightly off topic is that, you know, sorcerers are sometimes finding it hard to motivate themselves. Right. So I think early days of COVID it was kind of like, what are we sourcing for? All our wrecks got closed or postponed or put on hold, etc. And there's been like one of the articles, comments upon the fact that lots of companies are pipelining talent at the moment. Right. And pipelining maybe doesn't have the same motivation as trying to fill an active role. Right. What are your thoughts, first of all, on how do you motivate yourself as a sourcer? If you are facing a situation where your rec load is way down, what should you be doing to keep motivated, keep busy and then maybe what are your thoughts about using the time to pipeline?

Yeah, I think that's great. Again, I had like five or six, five or six tips in my talk from last month around this very subject. It's funny you bring it up like, what do we do if we're less busy? What do we do if we are? Everything is on hold. You know, it makes us nervous as recruiters to say, gosh, you know, if they're not hiring, do they need me? I've lived through a couple of these kind of recessions and such in the past, and the first thing that I did was show my value and hustle and get busy quick. And so what did I do? I raised my hand and I said, hey, I'm slow right now. Can I help out on this team? University recruiting, they're scrambling how to hire virtually for college recruiting. Like, can I be a resource to help go through all the droves of now, you know, paper and online resumes that used to be face to face, job fairs and what have you, you know, can I help out on the retail team? That's. That's scrambling. And I was out there, I was driving in town to town in Texas, going to Best Buys and trying to source, you know, salespeople to come work at our store and like, literally like whatever you can do to be busy and at pitch in, not only are you showing your value to somebody that they'll keep, you're showing that you're proactive and you care and you're a team player here and that you want to be productive. You don't want to just sit there and be bored. As a recruiter, I hate being bored more than anything. You're also adding new kind of feathers in your cap. Right? I can now do college recruiting. I can now do retail recruiting. I can now do field recruiting. I can do more things now. I'm more, you know, marketable as a professional than I used to be. Professional development is another big thing. Use this time to study, upskill, learn, go do online training. You know, this is the perfect format to Johnny's classes or, you know, social talents modules. I should say not. Johnny's classes are the perfect way to learn right now. Right. Because it's all online and it's perfect. You know, YouTube, Quora, whatever. Read a book, what else? I think another thing that is really important and you were just bringing it up. Hold on, what was it? Oh, pipelining. Duh. Right. So yeah, for sure. If you have a really hard time finding data scientists or whatever it is that you traditionally struggle and you know that if and when things reopen, these are the three or four Eric teams that will likely be hiring. Go for it. Start pipelining in the locations and for the skills. I'm not telling you to post a job and do something shady. Be transparent about it. Start pipelining the resumes. If you want to reach out and start some conversations and say, hey, just wanted to let you know we're probably going to be doing some hiring in the fall. I wanted to see if that was something you wanted it like, just be honest and it can't hurt you. And for sure pipelines Use tags in your ats. This is a great time and I know I sound like the biggest nerd ever, but this is a great time to clean up your ats. I love cleaning up my ats. If I have a few minutes like these are amazing people. I'll source up a batch and they're all missing contact info and their LinkedIn is old. I just go through and make a folder or put a common tag on them and just update all those people so that when the position's ready, I've got their contact info, their most recent LinkedIn and they're in a folder locked and loaded, ready to go. Why not? I'm a house cleaner. When I'm stressed, I clean. In college I would always vacuum my whole dorm room during finals instead of studying in Covid times. I'm like cleaning my ATS because I'm so you don't want to be the person who's not busy right now on the team. So find ways to be productive. Talk to your boss, say, where can I help? Don't just assume like, oh, I was busy, I cleaned out my email. No, that doesn't count. So find ways to be to add value right now and if they do happen to do some downsizing, maybe you'll be one of the ones that they keep. And if not, upskill, upskill, upskill and make yourself that much more valuable for your next employer. Use this downtime however you can.

I have a question related to some of your comments there. Stacy from Alexa Run who's watching on YouTube live and she's asked or he's asked for any tips you have on sourcing entry level candidates on LinkedIn, you mentioned college graduates, you mentioned some retail roles. So I guess generally have you experience or tips for hiring entry level or sourcing entry level candidates? Because not everyone thinks about sourcing entry level candidates. They think there's lots of them, it's going to be easy. What do you think?

I think sourcing for entry level is harder than sourcing for more niche and senior positions. I personally, I get a little panicked when I have to find either admin assistants or more junior candidates. And how, you know, sometimes it's more about, you know, because a lot of these folks kind of look the same on paper and that to me is scary when I say on paper online, right? It's scary to me when everyone kind of looks the same. Am I going to have to talk to 50 people and find the right one? I don't have time for that. So it is challenging. I like to look for some indicators of these hypo folks. So if they're entry level, high potential, right? So maybe I look for little signs that they were in a lot of extracurriculars or maybe they had a high GPA or maybe they excelled in a certain sport and they were really involved in it or you know, maybe they traveled abroad and took a year off and got some really amazing life experiences. Like, I don't know. And some of these things are, you know, I'm thinking with my diversity hat on that they may not be, you know, that it may hinder that. And so I want to be kind of mindful of that too. But entry level is definitely harder to source. You can, you know, only look for the indicators that you can. But sometimes as you're reading through a profile, they all just kind of look cookie cutter. But then you might see one that's like, wow, this person like is clearly, you can feel their passion and enthusiasm and their go getterness through the, through the, through the resume sometimes. So I apologize, I don't have a great answer to that. It really depends on the role, you know and you know, in recruiting I like to look for certain indicators of junior recruiters and what their background. I think retail is a good one. And I always look, you know, people who waited tables in college, those people tend to be good enterprise Rent a Car ends up being a really good feeder into the recruiting industry. I personally came from that. And a lot of great recruiters I know actually work for enterprise. So it really depends on the role in sales. I know a lot of people talk about liberal arts majors in college tend to do really well in sales roles based on their numbers and random things. So it really just say across the board, how do I source entry level? It's a little tricky, but if you want to reach out to me personally on LinkedIn with some specifics, I'm happy to try to give you some tips on that. I apologize.

Well, if I can suggest from one of the tips you gave earlier on for Alexa and it comes actually if it's nicely with a recent comment from Nina, because Kapler in Avanade who said it's always about networking. Call it future opportunity. You said earlier on, you know, contact people and tell them who they know. You know, you can in that entry level role where, as you said, everyone looks the same, asking maybe some of your current employees or colleagues who they know. And you can add a diversity slant through that by asking some of the colleagues you know who are engaged more in diverse networks and groups to go, hey, how do you know? How do you know? Because you, I believe, have a more diverse network than others in our organization and therefore, you know, you know our business, you know these roles. Who would you recommend from your network? I think you can combine a lot of what you already recommended to all levels of hiring. I don't think it's, I don't think you were giving the advice just for professional hiring. I think you were saying this is just general good advice. I think it applies to Alex's situation as well.

Good. Okay, good. I was like, oh gosh, how do I answer that one?

Well, you know, we're at time, Stacy. We're near the end of the show, which means end of the showtime means it's time for me to find out your one piece of advice. And before we get that from you, just want to remind everybody that you can follow and subscribe to our future shows. Find our previous shows on socialtalent.com the shortlist. And you'll also find links, I hope, and think, to our podcast of the show as well, which is available on itunes, on Spotify and tons of other places as well. So Stacy, in closing for those recruiters sourcers listening here, what is the advice that either you have been given over the years that you think is the best to pass on, or you would just like to pass on from your experience that you think will hopefully help our audience and listeners in their careers?

All right. Well, it may not be very sourcing related, but I will tell you. Shout out to Charlie Pichatello if you're listening. He was my boss at Gateway computers back in 2002. 3. And I am revealing a little bit about my own personality. I don't know if I'm turning red, but I will never forget this advice he gave me. And I refer back to it often. And sometimes I kick myself because I did not follow this advice. And in a social media world, in a place where right now there's a lot of stress and frustration in the world, I think of this advice often. And here's the advice. Stacy, you said, first off, I'm disappointed in you. I won't talk about that part. Whenever you're feeling. Whenever you're feeling frustrated or upset, step away from the keyboard and pick up the phone. That was the best advice I've ever gotten in my career. Because sometimes I'm like, what do you mean you can't send that? That's your job. And I'm just working efficiently. Sometimes that can come off the wrong way. There's a lot of sub tweeting and things that have. Sometimes I feel like in this world a lot of problems would be solved if we really picked up the phone. It's a lot easier to kind of keep a relationship going. Even with hiring managers and such. It's easy to point fingers through email and online. It's better just to pick up the phone, have that conversation, and you'll come to a resolution rather than kind of making things a little worse than before you emailed. So that would be. That would be the best advice I've ever gotten, and I still use it every day.

Stacy, of all the tips we've got in season one and now in season two of the show, I think that's the most broadest life advice that we've heard. I think that applies to your personal situation with your relationships with your partner, your family, your colleagues. I know of an incident with two of my colleagues recently who were having a Slack messaging and it was all getting crazy. And one contacted me going, what's going on? I said, just phone the other person. They did. And it's fine because you call you okay. And it's fine then because we can be keyboard warriors on social media, in Slack and email, on text messages.

Actually, here's what was happening. Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. Right. In Covid times especially, we need to give people the benefit and just pick up the phone and not just at people. So that's my advice.

So, Stacy, we need to talk more and less of the keyboard wire stuff, even between us. Right. That's a commitment I'm going to make to you. Stacy, thank you so much. Being on the show, it's been so insightful and helpful, but the comments keep coming in. Everyone's really happy with the advice. It's been so helpful. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you. To the viewers and listeners who've tuned in live or are watching the rerun broadcast or listening to our podcast, we always welcome your comments. You've been so engaged today. We welcome you back next week because next week we've got another fabulous guest who's a good friend of both myself and Stacy. I believe he's currently living in Stacy's home city of San Diego as well. And that's Brian Adams, CEO and founder, Ph Creative. He's on the show before in season one and he's back next week on the 12th of August at 4pm UK Ireland time. That's going to be 8am Pacific time and that's going to be 11am on the east coast of the US and well find your time in some other part of the world Right now talking about employer branding, why we can't stop talking about it, going back to that theme and giving us new insights further on in the pandemic situation about the importance of plural branding. I'm going to challenge Brian on some of these points and talk to him about his insights working with some of the biggest companies in the world. So stay tuned next week for that. Or you can, of course, subscribe@SocialTown.com the shortlist. It's been a pleasure. I love August. It's my favorite month of the year because it's my birthday next Monday. So by the time we speak and you listen to me, next week I'll be a year older. That's the magic of birthdays. In five days you become over a year older. So join me, the older, wiser Johnny Campbell on next week's show. Until then, we'll talk soon. Sam.