Going From Good to Great in Sourcing

Establishing a single point of contact intake — rather than having sourcers reporting to business units, they would all report to sourcing managers and essentially be centralized.

• Aligning regional and functional sourcing. Some people would need to work in specific regions, some with specific functions.
• Making the sourcing role a pay-for-performance role.
• Role clarity — the perception was that sourcing was an administrative role.

. Going from good to great is never easy — change is hard. When things are going well, why change?

sourcing team began exploring new ways of approaching their function:

• They divided their sourcing roles into two specializations: a Sourcing and Market Research Specialist, with focus on geographic alignment, and a Talent Acquisition Sourcer who would focus on building functional talent pipelines.
• They set about creating job description templates in order to create more continuity for their opportunities from a candidate perspective.
• They created a “Tools Team” which reviews new technology resources and provides feedback and analysis to the rest of the team on what’s hot and what’s not.
• They partnered their U.S.-based sourcing team with their India-based sourcing team to create more team unity and establish better lines of communication.
• Establishing a req load of six reqs per sourcer — this proved to be a difficult conversation that Recruiter had to have with recruiters, but she wanted them to understand the extra time that would be needed to effectively source and identify the right talent.

Additionally, Recruiter emphasized the need to share successes throughout the team. This is something that many of us need to establish within our own organizations — teams that celebrate each other’s success develop more unity and a desire to help each other achieve success, both individually and as a team.

Recruiter shared the need for measuring metrics in order to show that this change would take their team from good to great. They began measuring “time to find,” which, coupled with the new job description templates, helps them to prepare for often-worked on positions and set expactations for their hiring managers. On a quarterly basis, both sourcers and recruiters fill out surveys on how their working relationships are. This helps them pinpoint challenge areas and ensure that communication between sourcer and recruiter is open and beneficial. Team accountability is noticeable through what Recruiter described as “pro roles,” which are small teams that the ADP sourcers get to choose for themselves and through which team members educate one another on various internal and external topics. Teammates are essentially responsible for each other’s continuing education.

Bringing the session back to the TCU stadium implosion…with TCU, who by the way won the Rose Bowl this year, the decision to destroy a perfectly functional stadium was not an easy one, but it needed to be done to make the enhancements they wanted to make it great. Recruiter shared how, though at times a painful process, the changes needed to be made with ADP’s sourcing team in order to not settle for status quo. And they’ve quite obviously paid off — through quadrupled productivity, more team cohesion, proof in the process through improved metrics, and satisfied, happy hiring managers.