I appreciate this might be a controversial topic, especially as someone who has already written 2 blogs on tools. The inspiration came from a question I raised a few weeks back in Tris Revell’s great facebook group Growth Hacking Recruiters.
A fairly simple question to some of the most technical recruiters and sourcers around, you would imagine somebody has played with the API……. It seems not, I was instead recommended tools galore. It begs the question of why run to the tool? How many tools have linkedin banned? Do we suddenly think that the tech world is going to welcome our email hunters? (If you’re interested adding .patch to any commit will find you an email address)
I understand it saves time, but if you aren’t looking into how these tools work then you are limiting your sourcing capabilities. Also why wouldn’t you want to future proof yourself? It is inevitable that social networks and code repositories will find a way to block all these email hunters and web scrapers.
I’ll mention something else that was inspiration for this rant a recent sourcing meet up in Ireland had a round table called “95% of Sourcing will be automated within 5 years”.
For my official response “NO IT FUCKING WON’T”.
Did they miss that Dux Soup, Linkedhelper and dozens of other automation tools have been banned?
Sure as CRMs get better it will be easier to automate some of the sourcing processes. On the flip side, talent is going to get bombarded with more and more emails from your competitors. so this means content and personalisation will be king. If you feel that personalisation is only 5% of sourcing well enjoy becoming irrelevant.
Anyway rant over happy Tuesday.
Benji Talks Sourcing 