“Do what you love, love what you do, and deliver more than you promise.” ~ Harvey Mackay, American Businessman/Speaker/Author

If you'd like to be interviewed in the "Spectacular Sourcer Spotlight" contact me at: maureen at namesourcer.com

The following questions are ones I am consistently ASKed by potential new customers -many of them are the same questions your customers will ask you. I’ve included my answers; you’ll want to answer in your own words. I feel the questions and answers are helpful because they serve as one model of a successful names sourcing business.

What types of jobs do you commonly work? I work across most industries, you'd be hard pressed to ask me about one I haven't.

Do you have any favorite spaces you prefer to work in? Yes
What are they and why do you prefer them? I like to work in what’s easy for me – that would be sales and marketing and I'd do that stuff all day long if I could but what I really enjoy most are the jobs that take me into places like Xerox Parc in Palo Alto where they're doing Star Trek-like technology and where I can get lost in learning about some of the fascinating stuff they're doing. I also enjoy doing civil engineering work and have seen a real up-tick in it the last year or so. Pharma, IT and the Final Four are challenges for me but I seem to get through these somehow, some way - they just take me a little more time. I am fortunate that I have a couple sourcers who excel in these areas so if I'm not inclined to do these I have others who are. The high tech stuff I enjoy as well but, again, these jobs take me a little longer. I cut my teeth on high tech in the heyday nineties in Silicon Valley. The name (TechTrak) stuck.

Names Sourcing
For names sourcing, how do you charge, by the name or by the hour? By the name
How much? $45

Do you feel your pricing is on the:
low end high end about right Low end for some of my work/about right on other I think jobs should be priced according to difficulty and scope – I think about changing my pricing to reflect that but this model is working in the meantime.

Do you intend to raise or lower or keep your rates steady in 2007?
I intend to introduce some fine tuning into the pricing, as I just discussed.

When you names source, do you work mostly on the internet or on the phone? Both
What percentages of activity do you assign to each (phone or internet), on average? Internet 20% Phone 80%

What's your typical turnaround, for say,
a 50 name names sourcing job, average penetration difficulty, several targets?
3 - 5 days
a 50 name names sourcing job, difficult penetration difficulty, several targets?
5 - 10 days

What does your typical end-product look like? What information does it include to the customer?
Company Name
City, State
Telephone
Name Title Extension number or direct dial of potential candidate (if I can get them).
All names are listed, one under the other, under the company/state/telephone number and reporting structures are shown as indentations. I deliver in a Word document, Times New Roman print, 10 point, usually.

Is everything you send phone-verified, in other words, is everyone you send where you say they are? YES

Do you have a guarantee? YES
What is it? I do the job, I send the job, when you're happy I bill the job.
Is there a time period attached? Yes, I guarantee names are there for 15 days after delivery, if the customer delays calling them beyond that, it’s at his own peril. Things can change FAST in our business.

Profiling
Do you do profiling? YES
How do you charge, by the profile or by the hour? By the profile
How much? $45 for a completed profile - it doesn't matter if the subject is interested in the new opportunity or not, if the subject has taken the time to answer the profile questions, this alone expresses some interest, regardless what the profiled "says".

Each profile is delivered to the customer and is expected to go into the pipelines of the customer - if the customer creates a relationship with the profiled it is entirely possible for the profiled to become a future hire. Results are up to the customer at this point and one reason metrics are so hard to track in sourcing!

How long does it take you to get 50 profiles completed? 2-3 weeks You gotta’ make alotta’ calls in the process.

What's your typical profile (what questions does it contain) look like? Here’s one I just completed: a 100 profile job – it required the identification of about twice that number of names to generate 100 profiles.
There were three people working on the profiling effort – it took about a month to profile all 100. Before the profiling could take place, it took about ten days to first name generate all 200 names that were to be profiled.
Candidate Profile
Contact Information
Candidate Name:
Current Employer:
Current Title:
Work Phone:
Home Phone:
E-mail Address:
Degrees: PhD or Doctorate Masters Bachelors Other
What is the degree in (i.e. CS, ME, EE, etc.)?
How many total years of hands on experience do you have?
What systems and tools have you used in the past?
What is your strongest technical ability?
What’s exciting to you about the work you do?
We understand the need for confidential in the workplace, but could you describe in general terms the type of project you’re currently working on?
What are your primary duties, for example: testing boards or circuits, or developing code for a graphic driver?
Profiler remarks:
Initial Interest in this opportunity:
A. Looking/Very interested/Wants to be contacted immediately/May send resume.
B. Not actually looking but is interested in being contacted by spokesperson.
C. Not interested in present opportunity/may have future interest
D. Not interested.

Remember, I’m offering them the job opportunity – I’m the first call they receive on the company’s behalf. Some will say, at first, “No, not interested,” but basically I beg them to share their info with me so they can go into a pipeline and be kept aware of future opps – this makes sense to many of them and they concur that that is exactly what they’d like to do. A profiling job (depending on the industry) can have up to 80% success ratios. A multitude of things impacts this, one is the skill of the profiler in being able to elicit information from and draw a person out.

Recruiting
Do you do full cycle recruiting? NO Thank goodness.

Are there any other verticals (other than recruiting) your activities service? Not at the present time but I’d like to see my names sourcing used for generating leads in sales and marketing and also in competitive intelligence work. I am very interested in being a catalyst in mergers and acquisitions work – I’d love to be on the front end of identifying and “warming up” the decision makers of companies that are interested in being acquired by others.

Of all the above named activities, which ONE would you prefer to do all the time? Names source, hands down, but then there’s that M&A activity thing I just mentioned -I know that space well.
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Do something today you don't think you can do.

Maureen Sharib
Telephone Name Sourcer/MagicMethod Trainer
513 899 9628
TechTrak.com, Inc.
NameSourcer blog.
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