I'm really excited about this week's Talent Talk Cafe line up. We have two guests joining us and have dedicated both Chats to Sourcing... both with a bit of a twist!

Check out our complete February line-up HERE and join us two times a week! Every Tuesday and Thursday at 3pm ET / 12pm PT! Watch for the March line-up and a couple of cool surprise guests!

Sourcing Excellence on Talent Talk Cafe with Glen Cathey and Julia Stone!

Glen Cathey is the BooleanBlackBelt! Join Glen on Tues 2/17 for Just-in-Time Recruiting

Here's what's on Glen's mind -

Goals of Lean/JIT recruiting:
To produce the right candidate(s), and the right time, at the right quantity and quality. Prevent/reduce over-production, reduce the need for pre-production (creating candidate inventory ahead of need), and correction (scrapping candidates and reworking search and recruiting efforts)

Lean Principles to be discussed:
Lean principle: Pull
According to the Lean principle of "Pull," the creation of a product or delivery of a service should be initiated by customer demand or requests. Everything should be "built to order" and in the exact quantities demanded. Pipelining ahead of need is not ideal or required.

Lean principle: Perfection
The Lean principle of Perfection states that everything in your business should be organized and managed to prevent mistakes and defects (poorly qualified/matched candidates, poorly qualified job orders…) that add to waste and slow responsiveness. Lean thinking reasons that a forecast is a guess and thus cannot and never will be perfect. Trying to forecast a specific future manager/client need, no matter how educated the forecast is, leaves room for error. Managing based on a guess always leads to waste (unused inventory) and risks shortages (if we underestimate demand).

Lean principle: Value
The Lean principle of Value states that every activity in a business should be scrutinized for how it adds value to the final product or service provided to the customer. Tasks that do not add value can be considered "waste" and need to be reduced or eliminated. A lot of activities previously thought to be essential in a business turn out to be non-value adding when evaluated from the perspective of the customer (client AND candidate!).

Still hungry for some lean, just-in-time learning! Here's a few recommendations from Glen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/2008/12/lean-sourcing-and-recruitin...
http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/2008/12/lean-recruiting-no-forecast...

Glen brings a unique focus to sourcing and is developing some great content and an outlook on the next generation of sourcing. Connect up with Glen on his site - BooleanBlackbelt to give your brain a charge and also on Twitter @booleanblackblt!

Julia Stone on Thurs 2/19
Sourcing Techniques to Find More Open Jobs Rather Than Candidates

Here's what Julia's thinking about - Are you finding yourself with extra time on your hands? Now that the economy has taken a turn for the worse, let's take a look at how it has affected sourcing. We'll look at some alternatives to traditional sourcing. We'll look at honing your sourcing techniques to apply them to things like finding more jobs, putting together blueprints of target organizations and a few others that will help feed your prospect pipeline.

Julia is in my book as one of the best connections I made in 2008! She's witty, smart and a Recruiter I would hire in a heartbeat. Julia won the SourceCon sourcing challenge in 2008 and is a wicked poker player - not surprising given the thinking I've seen from her in biz! Meet up with Julia right here on RecruitingBlogs.com and check out her business at BizWerks.com.

Look for the Chat screen on any page on RecruitingBlogs.com and join the conversation!