Prior to the Holidays I gave the intro to this series were we will cover a sourcing methodology. Now keep in mind this is a “Readers Digest” version, which means it is going to be short and sweet. So we will began were all good sourcing strategies and methodologies must start – Research. The idea is to gather as much data as we can to create a Persona of the ideal candidate. Things we need will be; Salary ranges, education background, work background, source of candidate and anything else we think that might help.

Research falls into 2 upper categories, Internal and external. We will start with internal research. Internal research will typically be done in 2 methods; 1-data gathering from your ATS and CRMs, 2-interviews of hiring managers (HMs) and people who have or are currently in the roles (CR) and have been successful. The information you want is what we talk about earlier, Work and education backgrounds of successful candidates, source of candidate and starting and current salaries. Now most of this can be found via our ATS and CRM, however the reason for talking to HMs and CRs is to get their take on everything, what they thought worked well and what worked bad. Once we have this data it is time to move on to external research.

External research is done to ensure whatever data we got from internal research still is applicable, for example salary. Now external research has two sub categories, Industry and competitive. So lets start with industry research. What we mean here is getting the industry specific with regards to the areas mentioned at the beginning; salary, education background, work background, etc. These will tend to be general so you might get a salary range, or a generalized idea what kind of degree and or school people who are java developers have. Some tools you can use are; Talisman, Rethinklabs, Paysa, Salaryinfo to name a few. Now comes the Competitive intel park of the external research. This is were you get the same info as you did with the industry, but you get it from specific companies who are competitors to you, so the info will be more specific for you. Tools you can use for this are; Owler, SEC, Bloomberg, Talismatic, Insightly, rethinlabs, paysa, LInkedin, Crowded to name a few.

Once you have all that info you can put together your Persona and enhance your JD. An example might be that after all that research you find out that the persona of the ideal candidate is; a person with a CS degree from a top 30 school and program, who worked at Amazon for at least 2 years, has a certification or 2, and is currently a Software Engineer 1, and making a bout 100k. Now you have a bench mark you can adjust your JD and now look at creating and or enhancing your search terms.

Well there you have it step 1 in the Sourcing Methodology. Next week step 2 Sourcing.