What else can a sourcer do?

I read about Puzzle from Researchzilla and agreed with their assessment on how niche this website is. This had me thinking (for whatever reason) how closely related Recruitment Research and Competitive Intelligence is. Would a good sourcer make a good CI professional. Chances to reason that they would.

For those unfamiliar with the term, here is a definition on CI from Researchzilla.

Competitive intelligence is the legal, ethical and systematic method of gathering meaningful and often hard-to-obtain data and, through analysis, transforming it into intelligence that is actionable. Strong companies have long used intelligence to guard against competitive threats and to identify opportunities. CI enables senior managers in companies of all sizes to make informed decisions about everything from marketing, R&D, and investing tactics to long-term business strategies. Effective CI is a continuous process involving the legal and ethical collection of information, analysis that doesn’t avoid unwelcome conclusions, and controlled dissemination of actionable intelligence to decision makers. (from Clew, LLC)

Puzzle magazine also made me realize how important niche sites are for finding talent. If I were sourcing CI professionals for a position, I may look for them in big companies or certain associations, but might overlook those CI sites (like Puzzle) because the pool of talent is so much smaller (and I am only going by an assumption when I say that.) That would be a bad idea!

Why?

For one, I should leave no stone unturned when looking for talent and second, my competition is least likely to look at the small stuff as (so many) sourcers only want to look through big piles of data (the web) vs dig for buried treasures on sites that may not be spidered by the major search engines (Deep web) and perodicals that might not even have an web presence, as weird as that may seem. (Its called “going to the library people!)

Just a thought…

One of the advantages of working for such a HUGE company like Microsoft is that I have the luxury and the intimidation of planning my career over the next few years. (Not today!)Throughout my career, if I was not recruiting or sourcing, I was recruiting and sourcing some more. My rank and title (and pay) might have showed progression, but the basic duties were the same. As hokey as it sounds, glad to be involved with an organization that encourages my potential enough to require that I outline a career progression strategy and then, actually go out of their way to make it happen. Wow. So many organizations give lip service to do this, but glad Microsoft does not. Sometimes, you just have to reflect and appreciate the little things.