Yogesh Kumar Global Talent Sourcing & Employment Branding Specialist

Sourcing. In my world, it consists of countless innovations as well as renovations. We are presented with innumerable opportunities to do new things every time we perform a search on the Web. One might find the number of resources, techniques, strategies, and approaches to sourcing to be insurmountable to achieving a certain level of success. However, a sourcing professional does not need to be an expert in everything. One main skill is required to become a successful sourcer: I call it curiosity.

Curiosity is the first thing I would look for in a person if I were to hire him/her onto a sourcing team. A successful sourcer is one who is ALWAYS curious to know new things.

I am not necessarily referring to “new things” in the context of technology, concepts, and so forth, but the things of which one is not aware. Anything I don’t know is new for me, and I am always curious to learn.

As such, I want to share a few things I do each day in my curious pursuit of knowledge while sitting in my “sourcing shop” and playing with various resources. I hope they will provide NEW THINGS for many of you.

Search Engines. Search Engines are great resources, but how do we use them? Do you need to run every role you are recruiting for through a comprehensive Web search?

There are multiple answers to this question, but what it boils down to is that you should “Never miss a source.” You can assume many things, however you can’t be 100% sure if the info you are searching on the Web will be available.

If you look at every source you feel will not get potential results, you find they actually take you towards curiosity which is good and the first need/skill to get into the sourcing game.

In some training sessions I conducted I had the opportunity to learn from my peers how curiosity led them to great success and cracked many challenges they faced. Instead of getting used to those challenges they became determined to crack them. Success was only possible if they searched for something new, a new solution or a new way.

I remember a few great questions asked by my peers during the training sessions that led me to talk to them personally and learn how curiosity became a real reason for success as they sourced.

Here are few facts I got to know from them.

I asked one of my peers about the role curiosity plays in being a sourcer. He wanted to talk about a lot of things. However, overall, he talked about his curiosity to understand the “industry structure” of the competitors he sourced and attracted the talent from for his current employer.

It was certainly impressive that he is always curious to know the structure of his competitors, management of competitors, business practices, locations, people and much more. (You know research doesn’t have any limits.)

He has done lots of research on finding out information about his competitors using Web tools and it helps him by saving tremendous amounts of time to close a position.

He has gained great intelligence from his curiosity. By doing research on his competitors, he now knows the structure, management, hierarchy, and much more about them. For example, if he has to kill a position of “Quality Manager” who is Black Belt certified by his/her current organization only, he would not just hit the Web tools to find the candidate which has keywords like “black belt,” etc. Rather, he would recall instantly the work he has already done, and identify and target the specific organization and person for it. He would play this strategy in various aspects of sourcing and take highly efficient steps with the help of the intelligence he has gained. It actually saves him a tremendous amount of time.

Now I will talk about myself and share one of the smallest stories about curiosity which had the biggest impact. I am also going to share the world’s smallest Boolean string which will bring in resumes (only resumes) without any keywords.

I have always been curious to find talent through search engines, especially Google since it has immense opportunities for learning Boolean scripts. I edit the strings, make a few new ones, and try to play with keywords to bring the most relevant results.

But I have always been curious about how I can implement something in my strings so that it only shows me resumes and I don’t have to exclude too many words like “jobs”, “sample”, “books”, “templates”, “apply”, “send”, and hundreds of more.

Even I wanted to see a string which is as short as “one keyword” & “one Boolean operator”. I know I am talking about something thought to be impossible and that’s what I heard as a feedback from many of my peers, LinkedIn connections, and other sourcing professionals across the globe.

Is it really possible to just put a keyword and a Boolean operator, and nothing else in your string, and it will show only resumes? Yes, we have not added any skills, locations, company, OR anything else.

Just one keyword & one Boolean operator.

I am assuming that now you are most curious to know if it is really possible…

Please go ahead and type one of the following “world’s shortest Boolean string” to see only resumes without any keywords and without excluding even a single keyword.

Here we go:

Inurl:resume.docx

Inurl:resume.doc

Inurl:resume.pdf

Inurl:resume.rtf

I call them “magical strings.”

Yogesh Kumar is a Sourcing & Social Media Employment Branding professional with about 6 years of total work experience. He has worked with Aon Hewitt for the last 4+ years, supporting the organization with Global Sourcing initiatives and Social Media branding for India.