The netPolarity Blog

“I have a list of technical user groups and post my open positions, but I don’t get much of a reply.”

Hilarious, right? I take it back. If this is you, you probably don’t think it’s all that funny because you’re probably dealing with a very unhappy and unsympathetic hiring manager.

We’re here to help. Join us on Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 11am PST for an information-packed webinar on Sourcing Technical User Groups. (Click here to register.)

Everyone thinks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn when we say “social media,” completely forgetting that user groups have not only been around a lot longer than these communities, but that they are more useful than ever to recruiters, especially when sourcing for very specialized skillsets.
While recruiters still use these online communities in their search efforts, many don’t go beyond hope and pray — post requirements and pray for replies — with disappointing results.

In this webinar, netPolarity Sourcing Manager and MARS Head Instructor Mark Tortorici will shed light on technical user groups, and forums and show attendees how to actively mine these online communities using advanced sourcing tricks to make the most out of them, exponentially expanding your talent pool for passive and hard-to-reach candidates. We will focus on technology-specific user groups, diversity-related groups, and other technical groups & forums like Github and Stackoverflow.

Of course, in true Mark Tortorici fashion, we will also go through search string examples that you can immediately put to use after the webinar.

On our previous post, we shared with you the things we look for when hiring raw recruiting talent.

On the other side of the netPolarity equation — our flagship — is sourcing.

“Sourcers are of a different breed and it’s not as easy to spot one just looking at a resume or even interviewing,” netPolarity founder and President David Chuang said. “We use a different set of criteria when we look for sourcers.”

What do we look for in a resume? People who come from some type of technical background – IT, software development, QA – are great candidates to become Sourcing Analysts at netPolarity. Programming as a hobby? That works, too.

“Our sourcers process huge amounts of information,” David said. “We can teach a person advanced search methodologies, but he or she needs to be the type of person that enjoys sorting through massive piles of data all day long,” David said. “Not everyone can do that.”

“Sourcers tend to be more left-brained,” netPolarity President David Chuang said. “We look for analytical people,” David said. “It’s a little harder to spot a good sourcer than it is to identify a recruiter because the trait we are looking for isn’t always evident in a resume.”

If we must put a name to that specific trait we look for: geekiness. Recruiters are naturally curious about people, sourcers tend to be extra curious about technology and information. They get excited about the latest gadgets, the most recent software updates and they can’t help but tweak things.

“We look for that troubleshooting mentality,” David said. “They tend to be the do-it-yourself type. They are the types that will jailbreak their iPhones or spend a sleepless night working on a personal project.”

Exhibit A: Sourcing Analyst Chris Schwacofer’s Macho Man Randy Savage costume, which he worked on for weeks leading up to Halloween. He sewed the entire costume himself.

“Not everyone gets their sense of humor,” David added. “Their unique personalities definitely make netPolarity a more interesting place.”

This is quite true about the sourcing analysts we currently have at netPolarity. Exhibit B.

“I guess you can say they are the opposite of a recruiter. Sourcers deal with information, recruiters deal with people.”

netPolarity’s service delivery infrastructure, however, is still team-based so we can’t quite do away with interpersonal skills. They still have to partner with recruiters and their account executives.

“Forming teams with the right mix of personalities isn’t easy, but when done right, you get incredible results,” David said. “We’ve been doing this for years; we have it down to a science.”

Did you read this post and think, “that’s me!”? Send us an email and attach your resume!

As the point-person fielding questions about MARS, I am often asked about how our training program came to be. How did it get this awesome?

The simple answer: it is the result of many years of turning entry-level talent into high-caliber professional sourcers and recruiters. MARS is the heart of netPolarity, the organ that pumps life into the organization.

It is no secret that the best place to start in staffing is netPolarity, and many who aspire to enter the world of talent acquisition come to work for us because of our training. Because a large percentage of the people we hire have no experience in staffing, recognizing raw talent is critical to our hiring process.

“We can teach people complex and advanced search methodologies, but we can’t change who they are in terms of their personality,” David said. “We can give you the skills, but recruiting is not for everyone. That said, we’ll look at resumes, but we are more interested in who you are as a person.”

So how do we spot raw recruiting talent?

Let’s start with the resume:

College Degree
While it’s not a must, we do like to see candidates with four-year degrees.

“What a degree tells me is that the candidate has the ability to finish something they started.” David said.

Leadership Roles
Whether it’s for an amateur or children’s sports team, or a social cause for the community, we look for candidates with leadership experience.

“Natural-born leaders are hard to find,” David said. “Leaders have very strong personalities.”

People-centric Experience
Recruiting is a people-centric occupation, so when evaluating resumes to spot raw talent, we look for experience indicating previous exposure to environments where they’ve had to deal with challenging people.

“In the past we have hired people from retail, former teachers, people from finance” David said. “In the interviews, I really like hearing stories about how they dealt with difficult people,” David said. “We are looking for people who have naturally high sales aptitude,” David said.

Career Progression
We look for people who are goal-oriented. I can tell you firsthand that this is a critical trait to have. If you are not goal-oriented, you would not enjoy working as a recruiter and would definitely not be successful at netPolarity.

In a resume, career progression would be a good indicator of a goal-oriented candidate.

“We are a metrics-focused company,” David said. “To be successful here, a person needs to be goal-oriented and productivity-focused. We have aggressive placement quotas, goals they need to hit. If someone does not have the drive, they simply won’t make it.”

“We train our people to be high-performance and we keep them performing at their peak by setting goals.”

The Interview
So you made it to the interview. What is David looking for then?

Articulation Skills
“We are looking for people who are highly articulate,” David said. “Basic overall composure, eye contact, confidence,” David said. “Handshake is a big thing for me,” David said. “I can tell right away by how sure that person is of himself from their handshake. Sweaty palms are always a tell-tale sign that person is not going to do well in the interview.”

Just as with any interview, we expect candidates to do their due diligence.

“Have they seen our website? What do they think about it? It’s easy to tell when someone is not being honest,” David said.

Can you dance on your feet?
For the most part, the interview is pretty conversational. David says he likes to throw in unexpected questions so I am not going to give the playbook away here.

“My goal during these interviews is to take them out of their comfort zone,” David said. “I like to ask questions that get them to talk about themselves and their values as a person.”

“I’m looking for a person’s ability to dance on their feet,” David said. “As a recruiter, you’ll be dealing with clients and candidates so you’ll be dancing on your feet all day long,” David said.

Do you have the ideal recruiter personality?
David looks for what he calls “recruiter personality:” outgoing, inquisitive, talkative. “They are naturally curious,” David said. “They are always asking open-ended questions, they are always trying to figure out what you’re about, where your pain points are because that’s what they’re going to try to fill.”

“Recruiters are innately self-driven, independent, entrepreneurial” David added. “It is not uncommon for recruiters eventually go independent and open their own businesses.” David said. “It is that strong recruiter personality that drives them to do that.”

Hunter or Gatherer?
Hunters make good recruiters, and it is those innate hunting instincts we try to spot when we are evaluating new talent.

“In the agency environment, recruiting is a direct revenue generator, not a support function,” David said, comparing agency versus corporate recruiting environments. “If we don’t meet our numbers, we don’t eat. We get paid based on what and how much we produce.”

“Our recruiting environment is a bit more hardcore. Oftentimes, we have no access to the hiring manager and the skill sets we look for are very difficult to find,” David said. “It’s a different, more intense kind of stress, but a hunter enjoys that challenge,” David said.

“We hire people who like to chase,” David said. “We hire people who don’t take no as a challenge rather than a rejection.”

David Chuang is the president and founder of netPolarity.

As we train more and more sourcers and recruiters under the MARS training program, we realized that the need for a certification was imminent. In an ever-competitive recruiting market, certification would not only give us a way to stand behind the students who have completed required coursework, it would also give them a way to distinguish themselves as highly-trained recruiting professionals.

There are three types of MARS Certification: MARS-Elite, MARS-ProS and MARS-TechPro. The certification type indicates the type of courses and tests passed to achieve the certification.

MARS-Elite
MARS-Elite is the top training certification one can achieve under our program.

To qualify for this certification, a candidate must meet one of the requirements below and successfully pass the final test.

• Any individual that attends and successfully passes netPolarity’s 4-week Sourcer/Recruiter Training Program OR a customized Corporate Sourcer/Recruiter Training Program
• Any individual that attends and successfully passes a corporate Sourcer/Recruiter Training Program (must include Advanced Sourcing Modules, Technology Modules, and Recruiting Modules)
• Passing the final test

What can you expect from a MARS-Elite-certified staffing professional?

• MARS-Elite professionals have the ability to source, find and rch ANY candidate no matter how unique or difficult the search may be.
• MARS-Elite professionals understand every major technical discipline & job function in the corporate world, and can comprehend emerging new technologies.
• MARS-Elite professionals have a complete understanding of the recruiting process, have the ability to cold call, have negotiating abilities, know how to close candidates, and have a comprehensive knowledge of legal, HR and compliance issues that may arise during the hiring process.
• MARS-Elite individuals are historically rated as top performers in their field and in the industry.

MARS-TechPro
MARS-TechPro is our certification for technical staffing professionals.

What can you expect from a MARS-TechPro-certified staffing professional?

• MARS-Pro professionals have the ability to source, find and rch ANY candidate no matter how unique or difficult the search may be.
• The MARS-TechPro certified professional understands major technical disciplines and job functions in the corporate world with a focus on specific technologies.

There are two ways one can attain the MARS-TechPro certification:

Option 1:

• Attend our 1-day Advanced Sourcing Class
• Attend two (2) Technical Booster sessions
• Pass the MARS Technical Sourcing test.

Option 2:

• Attend the Boolean Basics to Advanced String Creation webinar
• Attend the People/Email Sourcing webinar
• Attend the Social Media Sourcing webinar
• Attend the Xtreme Passive Sourcing webinar *or* Diversity International Sourcing webinar
• Attend two (2) Technical Booster sessions
• Pass the MARS Technical Sourcing test.

MARS-Pro
MARS-Pro is our certification for non-technical staffing professionals.

What can you expect from a MARS-Pro-certified staffing professional?

• MARS-Pro staffing professionals have the ability to source, find and rch ANY candidate no matter how unique or difficult the search may be.
• The MARS-Pro-certified professional understands Sales, Marketing, Professional Services, Financial Services, Supply Chain, Human Resources, Accounting, Project Management and their corresponding job functions in the corporate world, including a focus in specific verticals from the Pro-S Booster sessions.
• Potential employers can expect MARS-Pro graduates to be rated as top performers in their field and industry.

Hiring managers are sometimes under-appreciated people. They have the stress of meeting headcount for a company, doing it within budget, and if they are involved in the development of a company’s product, their team still has to produce on time. Sometimes the stress of these things combined can affect the communication between the hiring manager and the staffing organization.

If this is an issue for your organization, you may want to register and attend our upcoming webinar: How to Manage Your Hiring Manager, which we are presenting for FREE via TLNT-ERE.

In this session, we will talk about the things that every recruiter, staffing manager, HR professional or sourcer can do to make the most of the little time that they have with the hiring manager, including a checklist of what they should be walking away with from a req meeting. We will talk about how to write the best job descriptions, how to ask the right questions from the hiring manager, and the best ways to target profiles.

We will also talk about what to do when you hit road blocks. There may be times when you have to pitch a different candidate profile to a hiring manager. We will talk about when and how this can be successfully done. And we will also discuss how to deal with a candidate pool that is well out of your budget range.

Again, this webinar is free. Register via ERE by clicking here. We look forward to “seeing” you at this webinar!

We have an upcoming class, Advanced Sourcing with Mark Tortorici, which is happening this Saturday.

For those of you who are attending, here are some tips to help you prepare and get the most out of the class.

Get plenty of rest. Many who have taken our Advanced Sourcing sessions have told us that the class is pretty intense. It is jam-packed with information and sourcing wizardry; best absorbed with a full night’s sleep.

Bring your requisitions. This will be a hands-on-laptop class with plenty of opportunities for practice. Take advantage and bring your most difficult reqs, and yes, even live ones that need sourcing. We’d love it if you walked away from our class with some candidates to call when you get back to work on Monday!

Come with questions. MARS classes are small, by design, to ensure that attendees get plenty of individual attention from Mark.

Our location. The class will be held at netPolarity headquarters: 900 East Campbell Avenue in beautiful Campbell, CA. We are directly across the street from the Pruneyard and within walking distance of the Hamilton and Campbell VTA lightrail stations. Click here for Google Maps directions.

Be there on time. Doors open for check-in at 8:30. Class will start promptly at 9am and will end at around 5pm. We will break for lunch.

We are looking forward to seeing you on Saturday, and I am personally excited to meet each one of you. Please do not hesitate to contact me via email or phone (408.385.8924) for any questions.

Namaste.

As those of you who have signed up for our MARS mailing list already know, we have two upcoming classes in April.

First up is a full-day class on Saturday, April 7: Advanced Sourcing with Mark Tortorici. The class will be held here at netPolarity Headquarters in Campbell.

If you are looking to supercharge your sourcing skills, this class is going to do that and more. even experienced sourcers and recruiters will find Mark’s Advanced Sourcing class eye-opening and invaluable. In this class, Mark will go through cutting-edge sourcing tricks, techniques and the latest sourcing tools that will give your recruiting and sourcing skills an instant boost.

If you are out of the area and cannot attend the class onsite, we are offering a 75-minute webinar on Tuesday, April 10: Secrets of Social Media Sourcing, also by Mark Tortorici.

This session is geared for advanced sourcers who want to learn about social media searches and complex Boolean strings that very few are using. Mark will teach you how to create complex Boolean queries to manipulate front-facing social network profiles that will give you a very high yield of targeted candidates.

For more information on the above classes or to register by phone, please feel free to contact me directly at 408.385.8924 or lisaa at netpolarity.com.

I received an email a couple of weeks ago from a recruiter inquiring about our upcoming January 14th class: Comprehensive Sourcing Wizardry with Mark Tortorici. He said he was interested in attending the training, but that he was a contract recruiter and did not have the benefit of having his employer pay for the session.

I have discounts to offer (ask me about it), but this marketing gal has since been mulling over how to effectively respond to such inquiries. In this particular case, the recruiter sees the value in the training but not quite at the point of making the investment for himself.

The answer came to me just this last weekend, when I decided to purchase training of a different kind for myself.

But first, a story.

I recently fell in love with ocean. Just like most love affairs, this was unplanned. It all started one cold morning in October when I gave in to a long-standing invitation to join a friend to try open water swimming.

One dip was all it took and I was instantly hooked. Not a weekend has gone by since that October morning that I have not gone out to swim in the cold waters of the Pacific.

My friend invited me to train with his group, but I declined. While I shared their love for the open water and see the value in training, I didn’t think I could afford it. Training meant several hundred dollars for instruction and club membership, plus the transportation cost to get to San Francisco where the group meets every weekend. For a fraction of that cost, I figured that I can just hang out with other open water swimmers, watch what they do and perhaps get a few tips. I could just go to nearby Santa Cruz and practice in the relatively flat Cowells Beach.

And that’s exactly what I did. I’ve become a pretty confident ocean swimmer in the last couple of months, even taking my invisible fins beyond Cowells and on to the more exciting shores of of Davenport and Pigeon Point. I felt a sense of Zen whenever I was in the water and I was convinced. I’m a mermaid.

That’s what I thought, until last weekend, when the water showed me just what training was for.

It was a nice, calm Sunday afternoon when I jumped off a boat not too far from Angel Island for a quick swim while the guys fished. I meant to stay close to the boat and to just swim around it, but just a couple of strokes in, I noticed that the boat was moving away. Fast. I soon realized that I was swimming in a fast-moving current. Not to recount every second of that horrifying incident, but I was able to swim out of it, on to shore and back to the boat, to everyone’s relief.

It was a crushing realization that I wasn’t quite the mermaid I thought I was. There was nothing Zen about that experience at all.

It was a scary ordeal, but I am way too much in love with the ocean to stop swimming in it, and no, this mermaid-wannabe isn’t going back to swimming in a pool. But I also realized that if I am to pursue my dreams of becoming a mermaid, I have to commit to training, regardless of cost.

My mind was set.  I signed up to train with a world-class swimmer with hundreds of Alcatraz and Golden Gate crossings, plus the Magellan and Bering Straits under his belt (or swim trunks). It’s way more than I intended to spend on my new interest. But I figured…investing in training could very well open up a whole new horizon to my ocean swimming endeavors.

To tie that in with the upcoming sourcing class…the all-day session costs money, yes. But you will be training with an industry-renowned instructor who has produced many of staffing’s best and brightest, many of whom have gone on to be superstars in organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Apple, LinkedIn, NetApp, VMware, and Facebook. You are also invited to bring in your most difficult — preferably live — reqs for “practice,” so filling one of those as a result of the class could easily make up for the cost you pay up front.

This Christmas, I gave myself the gift of training and I hope that you will, too. The boost the class will bring to your sourcing skills could do more than just open up your career to an ocean of possibilities, it will give you the confidence to swim gleefully in it, too.

Lisa Amorao is not just an aspiring mermaid, she is also netPolarity’s marketing manager, blog admin and lead Twitter skipper. Lisa’s staffing industry experience spans more than 12 years, with roles in recruiting and account management leading up to her marketing career.

You can connect with Lisa on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter: @netPolarity.

While presenting MARS during last week’s SourceCon Wrap-Up and Networking Event, one of our guests asked what makes MARS training different from other, more established training programs such as AIRS.

I can rattle off lots of things that make our program different, but I’m not sure it’s fair for me to subject AIRS to a side-by-side comparison with MARS.

For one, AIRS is a certification program by a certification company. MARS is powered by netPolarity, a leading supplier of contingent talent to Fortune 500 companies nationwide. While we are known in the industry for the intensive training program we put our sourcers and recruiters through, training is NOT our main business. Training is the component of our business that allows us to quickly scale our organization to meet rapidly growing demand for our services, and MARS was born out of demand from our corporate clients who want to implement the same training program for their internal staffing teams.

How do you add a dozen requisition-ready recruiters and sourcers to your team to support new business? This is a challenge we regularly face here at netPolarity. We learned early on that the most cost-effective way to scale is through training. We hire entry-level recruiters and sourcers with little to no staffing experience, put them through MARS and they come out of bootcamp as Super Sourcers and Recruiters.

While that might seem like an exaggeration, I’m not kidding. We need our trainees to come out of MARS with super skills because this is what our staffing environment demands. We are a staffing agency that specialize in filling VMS requisitions. Those familiar with VMS would know that these reqs are not the easiest to work with. While there are staffing agencies who stay away from VMS business because those reqs have a reputation of being “unfillable,” we specialize in filling them. In fact, we are uniquely VMS-centric and have built our business around it. We’ve streamlined our processes to overcome the challenges that VMS present. We put our trainees through extensive technology training so that they can work on highly technical orders without the benefit of having direct hiring manager contact. We teach them complex and advanced sourcing techniques so that our sourcing analysts can fish for candidates where our competition isn’t looking. We teach them enhanced interviewing techniques to validate skills. Oh. And we teach them how to do all of the above in lightning speeds to beat competition without compromising quality.

netPolarity is not for the faint of heart, but it is where Super Sourcers and Recruiters are made. In fact, many successful staffing professionals in technology organizations such as Google, Facebook, eBay and NetApp started their careers as entry-level hires at netPolarity.

Another big difference between MARS and AIRS is that our instructors are full-time super sourcers by day, instructors by night. Again, it’s all about the environment. Our instructors oversee a weekly req load of about 500-600 reqs with a weekly incoming rate of 100 new reqs. If you can dream up a req, they probably have not only seen it, they have successfully filled many just like it. I doubt you can get more “real-world” than that.

In summary, the main difference between AIRS and MARS is that AIRS is a certification program and MARS is a sourcer and recruiter training program. Two completely different things, in my opinion.

Joining the team in June 2011, Lisa Amorao is netPolarity’s new marketing manager, blog admin and lead Twitter skipper. Lisa’s staffing industry experience spans more than 12 years, with roles in recruiting and account management leading up to her marketing career.

You can connect with Lisa on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter: @netPolarity.

We have been quite busy here at netPolarity, as evidenced by the lack of blog posts.

As some of you may already be aware, we quietly launched our newest service offering: MARS (Master Accreditation in Recruiting and Sourcing), our training program for professional recruiters and sourcers. Previously available only by special client request, MARS brings to the rest of the talent acquisition community netPolarity’s training program which has been known to be one of the most intensive in the staffing industry.

“We’ve spent years developing the program, using real-world metrics to fine-tune, test, and validate the effectiveness of our sourcing methodologies.” netPolarity President David Chuang said. “Bringing MARS to market was driven purely by demand from our clients. As domain experts in recruiting and sourcing, it makes perfect sense that we have clients coming to us to bring our staffing expertise into their internal teams. Making this training program widely available was not only the logical next step, it solidifies netPolarity’s position as a leader in the staffing industry.”

Despite the quiet launch, MARS has gained early traction among the recruiting and sourcing community, many of whom have gone through MARS Training Headmaster Mark Tortorici’s training at companies such as Google, eBay, Facebook and Apple.

“The tech industry is experiencing a critical shortage of technical staffing professionals,” Tortorici said. “We are in a unique position to not only train new professionals and bring them into the field to help fill that void, but also to improve and enhance the skills of any sourcer or recruiter who wants to take their understanding to the next level,” he added. “I am proud to see that our past and future efforts in the field of recruiter and sourcer training make us an integral part of the staffing community.”

As part of this launch, we opened our doors to the recruiting and sourcing community and hosted SourceCon Wrap-Up and Networking event here at netPolarity headquarters last week. During the event, our training headmaster presented Sourcing Strategies That Work and delighted our guests with out-of-this-world sourcing tips.

We felt the event was such a success that we already have plans to do more of them. To get up-to-date information on our events calendar as well as invitations to exclusive events, please subscribe to the MARS powered by netPolarity events mailing list.

In the meantime, we invite our readers to send us your most pressing sourcing questions and Mark will answer them in the form of a blog post. You can by posting the question as a comment below or as a post on our Facebook wall. If you’re really shy, you can send me an email and I’ll make sure Mark gets it.