Have you ever noticed how your professional activity forms certain habits? And how this affects your life?
I want to share with you the habits I’ve formed thanks to sourcing. They definitely help me in my work, and sometimes even in life;)
Perhaps this is a really useful and No.1 habit :) Well... can you imagine your life without Google?
It helps us find information, contacts of candidates and candidates themselves.
It also helps write to the candidate at the right time and with the right offer.
A Real-life example:
Marina found a new candidate, but she wasn’t sure if he was relevant (according to his profile).
I said: “Write to him and clarify”.
And she answered: “No, I checked his Instagram, he is on vacation now. I won’t disturb him. I will put a reminder on my calendar and write to him in a week”.
I also know hiring managers who, before the interview, not only look at the CV but also look through the candidate's Facebook profile in advance to see how he/she lives. It's cool when a candidate comes for a technical interview and they also talk about his/her hobby, as they prepared in advance.
Do you do that too?
PEELING OF A LINK
Yes, yes, it is peeling :) And there is even a separate method - Peel back method. This method is that we work with the URL and gradually peel off the parts of the link. Let me give you an example:
We take the link https://dou.ua/users/elena-volk/
And we just remove the last part to the next “/”, so we get https://dou.ua/users/
And then we can see a list of all the participants on DOU:
I’ve developed this habit quite recently, but I can already see how useful it is.
A real-life example:
Lately I googled everything related to Clojure and found a link https://clojurians-log.clojureverse.org/clojure-ukraine/2017-03-20.html
Of course, I could just find this guy as a potential candidate on LinkedIn and that's it. And to be honest, when I found this link for the first time, the end was like this :)
But when I found it for the second time, I went a little further and just shortened the link to https://clojurians-log.clojureverse.org/clojure-ukraine/
And it turned out to be very useful material;)
Now, thanks to this habit, I often shorten links in this way. Of course, in most cases, I get a 404 error :) But sometimes there are useful things as in the examples above.
LOOK INTO CODE
I am sure that many programmers have this habit, and suddenly something is wrong – they immediately open the code :) This skill is very useful in sourcing too!
This is how we can find emails on GitHub and how I discovered a way to find the last name of the candidate on Upwork. More details can be found in the article.
The bottom line is that simply by opening the code of the candidate's profile page and typing his/her name into the search, you can immediately see his/her last name.
BE CURIOUS
The most important habit that was formed in my childhood :) I'm just interested in everything, and all other discoveries follow from this.
A real-life example:
I read an article about a new tool which finds candidates’ e-mails. Of course, I downloaded it and tried it right away.
When I downloaded it, Google Chrome showed me all similar applications and I downloaded and tried them as well. As a result, I found two good free tools that I shared in Ukrainian Sourcing Community.
In this case, it is important for me to stop on time :)
What about other good habits sourcers should have?
P.S. For those who would like to develop these habits too, I recommend going trying this game for recruiters by Jan Tegze https://www.sourcing.games
P.P.S. And if you want to find out more about sourcing and learn how to source like a pro, we invite you to our sourcing courses.