It’s over – the World’s Greatest Sourcer Competition is finally complete!
After much tallying, reading, and rereading more than 700 entries from hiring pros worldwide, we’re excited to announce this year’s winners, Michael Stanley and Ralitsa Burneva.
The race for first place came to a close finish. Michael, a sourcing analyst at Texas-based HR and administration resources company Insperity, led the charge with a score of 206 points. Ralitsa followed with 202 points. She's a Hewlett-Packard talent acquisition consultant from Bulgaria. An honorable mention goes to Maisha Cannon, scoring 197 points.
WGS competitors battled an array of challenges, ranging from phone sourcing, rewriting job descriptions, uncovering hard-to-find candidates, and building custom search engines. (Here's a full spread of how contenders fared.) Sound familiar? It’s all in a day’s work, right?
To give you an idea of what set apart these trailblazers from other challengers, check out these posts they wrote as part of the the Hat Tip challenge.
Utilizing Excel to Automate Common Searches by Michael Stanley
I would like to give credit to Megan Calimbas from Insperity for introducing me to an Excel function to automate simple, but effective searches to identify candidate contact information.
While this Excel feature can be modified and used with any Excel spreadsheet that includes First Name, Last Name, and Company I will explain it using a commonly utilized Facebook user ID scraper. Get UID by Autoclick simulates a Facebook graph and will export results to an Excel file which you could use to email potential candidates using the Facebook email address, or you can further manipulate the spreadsheet to obtain additional information which we will do below.
STEPS:
- Create your search in Get UID by Autoclick, and click “Search Facebook”
- Name your list and click “Get UID”, and then click “Download” to export to an Excel spreadsheet
The exported Excel spreadsheet will look like this:
From here you could use Mail Merge to create personalized emails to send to each of the @facebook.com addresses.
In this example, we will automate a simple “First Name Last Name” “Company Name” Google search in an effort to uncover additional means of identifying contact information.
Here's how to do that:
In cell J2 enter the following: =CONCATENATE(CHAR(34),B2,CHAR(34)," ",CHAR(34),G2,CHAR(34))
- CHAR(34) will create open quotation mark “
- B2 will reference the name cell
- CHAR(34) will close your quotes
- ,” “, will create a space
- CHAR(34) will open your quotes
- G2 will reference the Company Name
- CHAR(34) closes your quotes
In cell K2 enter the following: =HYPERLINK("https://www.google.com/search?q="&SUBSTITUTE(J2," ","+"),"Search Google for "&J2)
- J2 references the data in the cell we created previously
- Drag and copy your formulas from J2 and K2 to each row in their respective column.
You have now created an automated format to search for additional contact information for each potential candidate.
Sourcing on Facebook (and for Gender Diversity) Just Became Easier! by Ralitsa Burneva
I learnt about this great Facebook sourcing tool from my colleague Aileen Lalor who is working as a Cloud Sourcer at HP.
It is a Google Chrome extension called UIDextractor V7.0 2015 Super Engine - you can find it here.
Once you install it you can source all over Facebook filtering profiles by:
- Current/Past Job (employer or title)
- Current/Past Location
- Gender (particularly relevant for diversity sourcing!)
- Education (Institution or Field)
- Languages (super cool as you can't do that on LinkedIn!)
- Last visited
- People who have Liked a particular thing/page
- Name
If you choose multiple search terms it would search only for all of them together (i.e. works only as an AND operator) so in case you need to search for alternatives - you would have to do it several times.
There is a free version of the tool which produces up to 100 results and a paid one.
As part of another challenge, Michael and Ralitsa revamped a job description for a content marketing role.
That’s what you’re up against, folks. The bar has been set for WGS 2016!
Congratulations to Michael, the grand prize winner of this year’s World’s Greatest Sourcer title, this glorious trophy, $2,500, and bottomless bragging rights. Of course, Ralitsa doesn’t leave empty-handed, taking away her fair share of bragging rights and these 10 hiring must-reads!
Interested in signing up for next year’s World’s Greatest Sourcer challenge? Save your spot here!
