The netPolarity Blog

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending SourceCon for the first time. Unlike most attendees, however, I was neither a sourcer nor a recruiter. I attended as support for netPolarity Sourcing Manager and MARS Head Instructor Mark Tortorici, who was speaking at SourceCon.

As the marketing manager for netPolarity and its training arm, MARS, I came to SourceCon to meet my target audience in person. That’s a given. Above all, however, my mission was to connect Mark to those who seek his expertise, in a meaningful way — beyond the exchanging of cards, beyond adding contacts on LinkedIn.

Not being a sourcer or a recruiter, it was a challenge explaining to other attendees exactly what I was doing there. To keep introductions short, I introduced myself to people as the lead groupie for Mark the Tortorici.

It was an appropriate title, I thought. This was, after all, the conference to meet and learn from rockstars of the sourcing world.  Meeting The Lance Haun of ERE, Amybeth Hale, a Jim Stroud and Glen Cathey sighting within the first hour, I was star-struck from the beginning.

“OMG, OMG, OMG…I think that’s Lance Haun, should we go introduce ourselves to him?” This band of groupies consists of me and my multiple personalities. “Is it really Glen Cathey? And Jim Stroud! We’ve only seen him in pictures!” some other Lisa said. “OMG, OMG, OMG, it’s @researchgoddess!”

Star speaker after star speaker, Donna Quintal, Bryan Chaney, Shannon Van Curen, Jackye Clayton, John Vlastelica, Jeff Weidner, Sarang Brahme and of course, Mark the Tortorici…this conference was gnarly and I mean that in the most intense, the most righteous of ways.

Luckily, SourceCon was held at the Georgia Aquarium, so as overwhelmed as I was with all the star power around me, this mermaid was well within her element with fish friends swimming close by to calm me down.

I even met a fellow mermaid, Julia Stone, aka @BizWerkerJulia. Together, we stared at the giant aquarium, geeked out on fish, launched the Occupy SourceCon movement and demanded better internet connectivity. Surely, Ronnie Bratcher can relate.

Hats off to the Marketing Team at Dice Employers Network for a job well done sponsoring SourceCon with Rockstar Sourcing Moves…and for making my SourceCon mission such a breeze to accomplish. I could not have come up with a better stage for Mark the Tortorici, or a funner party to not just meet — but most importantly — bond with my target audience, the sourcing community, all while Mark rocks on stage. I’m a big fan, Dice marketing studs!

You know who else I was an instant fan of? The organizers of SourceCon After Dark: Ronnie Bratcher, Chris Havrilla and Eric Jaquith. Check out Bratcher’s post on the origins of SourceCon AD.

While SourceCon presentations were all awesome, conference speakers rarely give out their real secret sauce in the form of a slide. The most eye-opening information presented in conferences usually happen in more intimate settings like mini sessions where the environment is more interactive, relaxed and alcohol is present. SourceCon AD was the perfect venue for hardcore extra-curricular sourcing.

The most enjoyable part of SourceCon AD was hanging out with sourcers and recruiters, finding out about their biggest sourcing puzzles and guiding them over to The Tortorici. As great as Mark is onstage, he shines even brighter in small group settings, with a connected laptop and an ultra-challenging req to conquer.

Next SourceCon is this Fall, and it will be held in Seattle. In the weeks that have passed since the last one, I’ve come to know more of the good people I met in Atlanta and I look forward to seeing them again in the fall, maybe stay an extra day or two for a swim in Puget Sound with Julia Stone, a bike ride with Ronnie Bratcher, and in a city where it rains plenty, a mushroom foraging trip with Suzy Tonini is in order.

Did you miss Mark at SourceCon? You can view his SourceCon presentation here, and yes, for more Tortorici goodness, may I recommend a recording of his SourceCon follow-up webinar via ERE and sponsored by Jobvite: “New Sourcing Tools and Trends for 2013.”

More Tortorici and you want it now? Attend one or both of our webinars this week: From Boolean Basics to Advanced String Creation (tomorrow, March 19, 11am PST) and Secrets of Social Media (Thursday, March 21 at 11 am PST). You can sign up for both and save. Use this link to register.

Namaste,
Lisa

Sometimes it happens. You come across a candidate profile/resume that is so perfect for the job, that you will believe ANYTHING the candidate tells you. The combination of this hope/desire/need to fill the job coupled with the difficulty or desperation of the situation can sometimes cloud your vision.

Of course we want to find candidates that are a fit for the job. Of course we want them to be “The One”. 

But we should use our wiser powers of judgment and logic to figure out if the person is a right fit for the job.

We do this by asking what the candidate does vs. what skills they have. *

There is no shortage of candidates out there. Sometimes it can feel like you are trying to dodge bullets with the number of candidates who tell that you can do the job. Whether you source or recruit, the qualification of candidates should be dealt with throughout the hiring process.
For sourcing, you have to establish what the candidate is doing and how they are doing it. In other words, if you need a candidate that has:

“Ruby development experience for a PHP web application with UI experience”

Here is a Google search for this req. The focus should be on ruby development with front end web technologies like HTML, JavaScript libraries, and PHP.
Also, putting “Ruby by itself can be a loaded term, because many engineers just add that to their resume since it’s a hot technology. So instead, we add some other words to describe the use of Ruby in action.

(inurl:resume OR intitle:resume) (“ruby gem” OR “developed ruby” OR “in ruby” OR “ruby developer” OR “ruby application” OR “ruby framework”) php html (javascript OR “java script” OR jquery OR mootools OR dojo OR extjs OR “ext-js”) (ui OR gui OR “user interface” OR “front end” OR frontend)

So let’s say you find a candidate that has this in their resume:

“Programming Languages: C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic, XML, HTML, Javascript, CSS, Perl, Shell, Cobol, ADA, Erlang, Lisp, Haskell & Ruby”

Does that mean we have a match? Well, no. We have to qualify the candidate, if you even want to go that far into the process. Most candidates will put the technologies they are the most familiar with at the beginning of a list.

What we would like to see on the candidate’s experience is:

“Developed a web application framework in Ruby and PHP with front end components written in Jquery, HTML5, and PHP”
This is much better of course, because we can see the development experience in the languages that we want.
Now in either case with these resumes, you still have to qualify what the candidate is doing, what type of company and software they are developing, and how many years’ experience they have doing it.

If you decide to pursue either candidate, then you have to ask them the right questions about their experience:
“What have you written with the Ruby language?”
“What did the application do?”
“How many people or users did the application support?”
“Is the company still using the application?”
“Was this a research/school project?”
“How many lines of code can be attributed to you alone?”

Asking the right questions of the candidate is necessary. The candidates who are a better fit will be able to talk in depth about their work based on the questions you ask. The wrong candidates will not/cannot do that. The more you follow this path of detective work, the better you be at sourcing/recruiting.
I will be presenting at Sourcecon in Atlanta. I highly recommend that you attend if you are at all interested in learning about the secrets of sourcing from the experts.

I also conduct trainings for those who wish to learn how they can improve their sourcing skills and their technical understanding of job reqs. You can contact me for more info about training for sourcers & recruiters: markt (at) netpolarity (dot) com

- Mark

#sourcing #training #sourcecon #netpolarity

This may sound like a crazy statement, but it’s something we hear all the time from clients. Corporations want System Administrators who can handle large production environments and who can support 1000’s of servers that run distributed applications used by millions of users.

If you do a general search for a Unix Sys Admin, you could get someone who fits this description. But you could also get someone who is a Sys Admin for a 100 person company. In that case, they are probably administering 10 servers at the most. And that’s if the company has a customer application or hosted service.

So how do we get the high caliber Sys Admins who work in high volume production environments? First take a look at candidate profiles that have this experience. When you see candidates that are administering servers in a production environment, then that is something you should search for. When you come across a candidate who is supporting servers for a distributed application (like a social network, an e-commerce site, a banking site, or a search engine), then you should get more just like that.

First, let’s capture some resumes for a search in Google:

(inurl:resume OR intitle:resume)

Everyone knows how that works. Next we want to capture the job titles. Now there could be many job titles that will work for this position. It could be “linux administrator” or “systems administrator” OR “unix administration” OR “sys admin” or any combination of those words.

Since Google only allows 32 words per search string, we want to figure out a way to shorten the string. You can use embedded parenthesis in Google only.

(inurl:resume OR intitle:resume) “(linux OR unix OR systems OR system OR sys) (administrator OR administration OR admin)”

This search only works in Google. All of the job titles that we are trying to capture will be 2-words. The first word of the job title could be anything in the green part of this string, and the second word of the job title could be anything in the blue part of this string. By using this embedded parenthesis search, we cut down on the amount of words we have to use in the string. In this case the quotes are on the outside of the sets of parenthesis.

Now we add in the scripting languages and operating systems that this person must have. In this case, it would be a Unix or Linux operating system and someone who is strong in Perl.

(inurl:resume OR intitle:resume) “(linux OR unix OR systems OR system OR sys) (administrator OR administration OR admin)” (unix OR linux) perl

Finally, we need to capture the production environment that we are looking for. Like I said before, we’re looking for systems guys who support distributed applications, or production servers, or search engines, or server farms for a telecomm company.

(inurl:resume OR intitle:resume) “(linux OR unix OR systems OR system OR sys) (administrator OR administration OR admin)” (unix OR linux) perl (production OR 24×7 OR “24 x 7″ OR operations) (distributed OR cluster OR redundant OR “large scale” OR “search engine” OR “server farm”)

Click here to see the results of this string.

Now these last sets of words can be interchanged or combined with each other. You just have to ask yourself some questions when you look at a resume with this experience on it:

1. Where are they working?

2. What are they supporting? Is it an application? A web service? A search engine?

3. How many servers do they support? Is this a 24 x 7 or 99.999% uptime environment?

4. What is the systems environment like? Is it all windows? Is it linux?

I will be attending the next Sourcecon event in Atlanta. I highly recommend that you attend if you are at all interested in learning about the secrets of sourcing from the experts.

I also conduct trainings for those who wish to learn how they can improve their sourcing skills and their technical understanding of job reqs. You can contact me for more info about training for sourcers & recruiters: markt (at) netpolarity (dot) com

- Mark

#sourcing #training #sourcecon #netpolarity

Mark Tortorici is a seasoned staffing industry professional with over 14 years of experience in sourcing, recruiting, and training. As netPolarity’s Sourcing and Training Manager since June 2009, Mark is in charge of managing the sourcing team, devising new sourcing strategies, training recruiters and sourcers and training corporate staffing organizations. You can connect with Mark on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Sourcer and Recruiter Training is something that is always essential. Whether you are completely new to the business or a seasoned veteran, there is always something new to be learned.

When I started training in 1997, there were very few choices available to recruiters. Heck, there were very few search engines that were actually worth anything. Some people forget what the world was like before Google or use one of Microsoft’s various search engines that were playing catch up with the rest of the industry. Back then, I used Alta Vista (R.I.P. – because even though it’s still up on the Yahoo! Servers, it doesn’t search the same way anymore) and AlltheWeb (FastSearch). I also used Netscape religiously and was very disillusioned when they were forced out of the browser market.

How things have changed since then! Now we have multiple search engines that are very powerful. We have not only Google, but Google Custom Search Engines. We have Mozilla Firefox (rising from the ashes of the Netscape project), Opera, Chrome, and other open-source browsers. And we also have all kinds of yahoos (not the company!) training people in the wonderful world of sourcing.

There are many choices out there when it comes to training. Just like anything else in the free-market world, you have different flavors of quality. You have your McDonald’s type trainings: Classes that are delivered in a flash with little or no amount of retention and by people who do not know how to train. Just like large fast-food chains, you see these people everywhere and by sheer numbers & marketing, you begin to think, “This might be a good idea after all”.

The main issue: Just because someone is a good sourcer that does not make them a good teacher. I’ve watched many trainers out there and a lot of times the feedback is that the training was either too fast, or not applicable to the audience. When training people, you have to appeal to both ends of the spectrum. You have to get things going with basics that everyone can relate to, and then you have to push the boundaries of material by incorporating some very cool advanced searching.

As humans, we really learn when we are reading, visualizing, and doing. Just lecturing will not get the point across. Lecture-based training has a VERY low retention rate.

(Source)

You have to be able to connect with your audience or students and make sure that not one of them is left behind. You have to use examples that everyone can understand right away and some that are advanced enough that the students may not get them right away, but with understanding & time they will.

Even if you don’t know who I am, you probably could have guessed from this posting that I am a Sourcing & Recruiting Trainer. Teaching is something that I have been doing since I was in high school, whether it was teaching people how to play the piano, how to factor differential equations, how to break down the IC manufacturing process, or how to find elusive candidates that nobody else can. I am proud of the countless people that I have trained in staffing and always am open to training more. My belief is that if I can do this, then ANYONE can.

I will be speaking at the upcoming Sourcecon in October, so please come see my presentation. You will NOT be disappointed. Make sure you sign up to go if you have not already done so. There will be many speakers and sourcing experts in the industry there (including me). You can contact me for more info about the event or about training for your sourcers & recruiters: markt (at) netpolarity (dot) com