This video interview features Evan Herman, a full-cycle recruiter and consultant, who discusses various aspects of choosing the right sourcing tool and implementation in talent acquisition.

• • • Evan’s Background and Services: He is known for his expertise in recruiting and consulting. His service, named “Tap Intro” (Talent Acquisition Partner), aids companies in selecting and implementing the right tools.

  
  

  • • Process and Automation: Evan highlights the necessity of having a process that can be automated, especially under budget constraints.

  
  

  • • Tool Selection and Implementation Challenges:
      • • • Evan talks about two of the more common sourcing tools on the market, SeekOut and HireEZ.

        
        

        • The importance of evaluating existing tools and human resources for effective tool adoption.

  
  

  • • Tech Portfolio Concept: Evan advocates for viewing tools as a ‘tech portfolio’ rather than a ‘tech stack’, stressing the interrelation of various tools.

  
  

  • • Vendor Selection and Team Involvement:
      • • He emphasizes assessing current tools before looking for new ones and involving the recruitment team in the tool selection and trial processes.

  
  

  • • Implementation Strategies:
      • • Evan discusses the importance of training teams for new tools and establishing a partnership with vendors that extends beyond transactional interactions.

  
  

  • • Process Optimization: He talks about the significance of documenting successful processes and the role of Talent Operations in optimizing and maintaining these processes.

  
  

  • • Contact Information: Evan can be reached via LinkedIn or email (evan.herman@hermanomics.com).

  
  

  • Closing Thoughts: The interview concludes with a focus on rethinking technology purchases to prioritize processes as the key outcome, along with appreciation for Evan’s contributions to the discussion.

How do you find and purchase the right Sourcing Tool for your recruiting and talent acquisition team?

I talked with Evan Herman of Hermanomics, about the different tools on the market today, and what sourcing is.

Full Transcript on How to Choose a Sourcing Tool

[00:00:00] Jonathan Duarte: Alright, welcome everyone, we got a special guest today, Evan Herman from Hermanomics.

[00:00:05] Jonathan Duarte: Evan’s been in the space and we’ve known each other, I don’t know how long it’s been, Evan, what at least seven or eight years, longer than that maybe, eight years ago?

[00:00:15] Evan Herman: Eight years, 2015, going back when the Talent Acquisition Tech, pre HR Tech in Vegas, 2015.

[00:00:23] Jonathan Duarte: All right. All right. All right. So we’re gonna talk today about Evan’s been doing a lot of consulting for TA teams and HR teams in the space of skills in the space of sourcing tools and overall implementations.

[00:00:38] Jonathan Duarte: And he’s got a rich background in everything from high volume to sourcing especially in the financial industry. Anything else I missed there, Evan?

[00:00:49] Evan Herman: Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I also have a background like everyone else, I got my start on the agency side back home in Chicago. All right.

[00:00:57] Jonathan Duarte: All right what we want to talk about today is one of the topics, I know that is true to you is sourcing. That’s been an area that I think A lot of people talk about, there’s even SourceCon out there, but, if we’ve got HR directors and HR managers on who may not go to SourceCon and may not know about sourcing entirely why don’t you tell me, how would you define sourcing and possibly different sources?

[00:01:26] Jonathan Duarte: Bye. Use cases or the differences between sourcing and different types of companies and what that whole landscape looks like.

[00:01:36] Evan Herman: Sure. Yeah. It’s a common question, even amongst my fellow sourcers there’s, you ask a different per 10 different people, you’ll get 10 different answers. Yeah, before getting into that, I think it’s first and foremost.

[00:01:48] Evan Herman: foremost, I think one thing we will all agree on as you put together a team HR and talent acquisition leaders, sourcers, no matter how you define them, we are not junior recruiters. Okay. I, we all, everyone that calls themselves a sourcer, we can all agree on that. They’re, you’re sourcing. Partner, an equal partner with your so called full life cycle recruiters.

[00:02:15] Jonathan Duarte: Got it. So that differentiation there is that a Sourcer is a unique special talent within a recruiting team. And not all recruiters are Sourcers and not all Sourcers, Sourcers have a specialty within the whole TA side of things.

[00:02:33] Evan Herman: Yes, exactly. No matter how you define it, which I’ll get into at long last momentarily Sourcers are specialists.

[00:02:41] Evan Herman: They focus on filling pipelines and ultimately filling the seats, whereas recruiters work the rack, which includes A lot of the work in the ATS system, the HR, the admin work. And then sourcers are just focused on people, pipelines, seats, etc. And, they’re a different skill set.

[00:03:06] Evan Herman: They’re both equal. They’re both important. But neither is above the other. They’re equal partners. They jointly work with the hiring manager and the line of business to fill seats, fill recs.

[00:03:20] Jonathan Duarte: And specifically in that, what are the types of roles that like, when would a team need a sourcer and know what are the problems that are happening in the company that a sourcer solves, even if it’s a contract sourcer, a fractional sourcer or somebody picks up the skills to actually be a sourcer?

[00:03:40] Jonathan Duarte: What, how does that differentiate for types of different roles you might be hiring for? Sure,

[00:03:45] Evan Herman: it basically a sourcer probably makes sense, whether an internal partner or an external partner, when you’re not seeing the quantity or quality of candidates needed by your hiring managers.

[00:04:02] Jonathan Duarte: Got it, alright.

[00:04:03] Jonathan Duarte: So it’s a combination of quality and the numbers. If you’re only getting, 10 people and they’re not qualified, you probably need to build a pipeline and that’s where you bring in a sourcer,

[00:04:14] Evan Herman: right? Exactly. We’re posting alone. You can have the best job posting, the best job description, the best advertisements that, you hope go viral.

[00:04:25] Evan Herman: If you’re just not seeing the quality of candidates and the amount, then you want someone that specializes in driving candidates to you, not reacting to it.

[00:04:39] Jonathan Duarte: And that also leads into passive candidates and hard to find candidates. So if you’re looking for an AI person at the moment that’s got a PhD in AI.

[00:04:50] Jonathan Duarte: You’re probably not going to find that person on a post on Indeed. You have to go find those individuals, especially when they have specific industry or experience. That’s where a sourcer needs to go in, right?

[00:05:04] Evan Herman: Excellent. Yeah. And you bring in an excellent segue back to the original question of, you sourcer?

[00:05:10] Evan Herman: So now that we defined at least what sourcing is separate from so called full life cycle recruiters, it Now you gotta break down sourcing. In my personal opinion, when you ask me, a sourcer Is someone is someone that actually sells. They speak with candidates. They actually sell a passive candidate on interviewing with you, or at least engaging with you and your recruiting team.

[00:05:38] Evan Herman: But then there’s other types of people that think sourcing is more just pure finding people. And that’s fine. But I. Prefer to call those sourcing researchers or just researchers for sure. And that’s, it’s a different skill set. It’s an important fire to sourcing. Just in my view, it’s not synonymous because when you go into say a supply chain, something isn’t sourced till you actually bring it in house to the company till they actually get the product.

[00:06:08] Evan Herman: So to me in recruiting, when you source someone, you actually get them in play, engaging with you, talking about a job.

[00:06:15] Jonathan Duarte: Got it. And so I think that’s clear. Let me see if I’ve got it on my side. One of the, when you’re talking about sourcing, one of the key differentiations is if your pipeline is not big enough, there is and depending on the volume, whatnot, you need to research individuals and go find them.

[00:06:34] Jonathan Duarte: And if you don’t have that many reqs, so correct me if I’m wrong here, if you don’t have that many reqs, maybe your sourcer is taking on that role of resourcing, researching too. If you’ve got lots of reqs. You probably need a specialist in that position to do the go out and find them and then hand them to Evan.

[00:06:56] Jonathan Duarte: Evan would then bring them, to the table, get them on the phone, understand what their needs are, build a relationship with the candidate, and then move that candidate into the recruiting process. Sound about right? Exactly. Got it. All right. All right. Great. So we talked about what are three different, we had talked about in the green room, three different types of use cases for sourcing.

[00:07:21] Jonathan Duarte: Cause we talked about, there’s a staffing has sourcing, there is corporate recruiting has sourcing, there’s like RPO sourcing, there’s different types of sourcing. So name a couple of those. And what are the different use cases that are most commonly HR would deal with?

[00:07:38] Evan Herman: Yeah you always need to segregate recruiting sourcing recruiters and sourcing staffers.

[00:07:44] Evan Herman: Staffing and recruiting are related, but different games entirely. And staffing deals With basically everything it tends to be more high volume, but it’s basically look, we just need someone minimally qualified as quickly as possible. More or less, you hire them straight on their resume. Assuming everything else is in order, you’re hiring them.

[00:08:09] Evan Herman: If they’re minimally qualified and interested and they’re open to the compensation, they could fill the seat. That staffing is all about filling seats, nothing more, with minimally qualified people as quickly as possible. Recruiting is more about getting the right people, ideally as quickly as possible, but not necessarily as quickly as possible.

[00:08:29] Evan Herman: It’s more important to get the right people and the best people, not just the minimally qualified people.

[00:08:36] Jonathan Duarte: Got it. All right. All right. And then so when we talk about those different kind of use cases, the staffing sourcer and then in corporate, if they’re looking for, say, an engineer. Versus a director of account management or something like that in sales side.

[00:08:52] Jonathan Duarte: And just as some examples, what’s the, what kind of tools are companies using? And also maybe you could present this in ideally the, the size of the company or industry, because I would gather, Finance probably has some sourcing tools and things like that are more important than, say an engineering company.

[00:09:13] Jonathan Duarte: What kind of tools have you seen out there? What are the kind of most common ones that, show up at HR Tech or, people are going to hear about? And how do they differentiate between those types of tools? And the type of company that should be looking at, buying them.

[00:09:31] Jonathan Duarte: There’s a lot in there,

[00:09:31] Evan Herman: by the way. Yeah, there’s, yeah, there’s a lot, so it’d be tough to narrow it down. But first of all, you hit the nail on the head of a real problem. Tool selection is no different than recruiting in the sense you’re matching a solution with a problem. And if you are, if, so if you have a staffing problem and you’re using a recruiting solution, which occurs a lot, you’re going to have problems and you’re not going to be getting the results you were looking for when making your purchase.

[00:10:03] Evan Herman: But yeah, and the On the sourcing side, the biggest players there are some unicorns out there. One, one of them is called Seekout and another large, it’s most often compared to another large player called HireEZ. And those basically for purposes of people not familiar with them, they are your Boolean wizards, your auto search the internet, basically with the click of a button, or the enter of a couple words, and off you go.

[00:10:31] Evan Herman: You’re Your research god, your research wizard, and able to navigate the large universe and filter it out with relative ease. And those are, you if that’s a need of yours to filter it down, Get more out of maybe a short staff team. Like you don’t have a full blown sourcing team. You’re always at least going to want to be looking at those two tools, but there’s also emerging ones that are coming up

[00:10:57] Jonathan Duarte: Before you jump in that one.

[00:10:58] Jonathan Duarte: So and those are often used for passive candidates and they may and then let me break this down. Are those just looking at public information and social sites, or are they looking at, when you say, you put in your criteria, say I’m looking for a Java engineer or AI engineer, and add a bunch of criteria for the Boolean search where do, where are these systems looking?

[00:11:26] Jonathan Duarte: Are they looking in your own ATS? Are they looking in job boards that you maybe have a membership with, or are they just trying to surf the web and try to find it from there?

[00:11:37] Evan Herman: If you ask their sales rep, it absolutely will search your ATS. If you ask a lot of recruiters you might get a slightly different answer depending on which ATS they have.

[00:11:47] Jonathan Duarte: All right. So I know we’re joking about that, but because you’re joking, I know there’s a lot of pain and suffering that’s happened and companies are doing it. And that’s why we joke about it because, so identify that real quick. Cause you, my goal is to educate. HR and talent leaders about this stuff.

[00:12:05] Jonathan Duarte: And everyone’s got a great sales deck about how they use AI. And they, and the only thing they really have in AI is they learned how to spell it and they changed the font, right? So we, it’s AI washing, right? So now tell me about sourcing in that use case, why do you. Why do you say that?

[00:12:22] Jonathan Duarte: Or what should somebody be looking for? When I asked if I was an HR leader, they said, yeah, we need a sourcing tool. And then we talked to a bunch of people and we find out it doesn’t even look in our own ATS.

[00:12:35] Evan Herman: And yeah, that’s another field, another class of tools. And that’s where, why separate so called talent rediscovery tools exist.

[00:12:44] Evan Herman: And two of those are Hired Score and Eightfold. That have been the main two players in that. If you’re looking like, hey, let’s stop, first going external and reinventing the wheel on every search. Let’s make sure we’re leveraging what we already have. Yeah, you definitely would want to at least be familiarizing yourself with Hire, Score, and Eightfold.

[00:13:07] Jonathan Duarte: So then let me throw another one at you too, and I hadn’t even thought about this before, but you just brought up is there’s a lot of talk now about soft skills and internal retention hiring. What are the tools out there now? And I’ve even talked to. ML guys that are actually building these things and done phenomenal work with this stuff.

[00:13:29] Jonathan Duarte: But I’m, I, you know the tools. So what’s actually out there and what’s coming or what’s the most important thing to think about if you’re trying to do retention hires or someone’s an engineer but is not moving forward and maybe it’s not even from a sourcing. We’re getting outside of the sourcing realm a little bit, but it is still sourcing within your company to find candidates.

[00:13:52] Jonathan Duarte: Do you, have you seen many tools like that now that are out there

[00:13:55] Evan Herman: in the market? Yeah, they’re now you’re veering more into like HR stuff because you’re talking about HR existing employees and not, as you get into existing employees, the town acquisition tool space is large enough. It gets exponentially bigger and like off the cuff there’s too many options and I’d probably mix them up.

[00:14:17] Evan Herman: to mention anything specific. But yeah, there are a lot of those and they, they all have a different special sauce and different pitch and it, the buyers get confusing. And that’s why you should want to look at somebody that is in essence is a headhunter for you, but for tools instead of people to navigate that universe for you.

[00:14:39] Evan Herman: And we’re going

[00:14:39] Jonathan Duarte: to, we’ll talk about that in another one, because I think it may be another segment. We got to talk about the process of choosing vendors and, what else goes into them. We’ll wrap this one up in just a couple minutes. Cause I want to ask, three things about, so we talked about some sourcing tools.

[00:14:54] Jonathan Duarte: We talked about corporate versus staffing. We talked about sourcing your own ATS versus sourcing. Public sites. And so the public site stuff, I wanted to ask a couple of questions on that one. So say you have a SeekOut or HireEZ. What do they do? What sites do they go out to?

[00:15:13] Evan Herman: Yeah, a lot of it is just scraping the sites that, and searching them LinkedIn Indeed just public sites just anything that’s publicly available, almost by definition, and just doing it to you on your behalf at scale and making it filterable in a digestible format. But yeah, more or less they’re just pulling from public data. But in my experience the shortcoming of Almost all the tools out there not just HireEZ and SeqOut is like the, particularly for tech professionals or anything like with like academics or people that might have a portfolio is their personal sites.

[00:15:52] Evan Herman: And they often miss out on those. They often have their resume right there. If they could find their algorithm to, to better find personal sites and deliver it to people, I think. They’ll find a lot more buyers and find a lot more happy buyers if they find a way to deliver that. That’s the void in the market.

[00:16:10] Evan Herman: Yeah.

[00:16:11] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah. So it’s basically almost being able to use a much broader, instead of just, everyone’s on LinkedIn, everyone’s on Indeed or whatnot. It’s what are all those web pages of electrical engineers who have 15 different, years of experience in manufacturing or something like that.

[00:16:32] Jonathan Duarte: And they just happen to have a bunch of content on their own site. And they don’t, but they’re not in the job board because they’re not passively looking or actively looking for anything. So that’s the gap, you’d say?

[00:16:45] Evan Herman: Yeah, exactly. It’s getting, those non mainstream sites. In other words, there’s only one of them.

[00:16:52] Evan Herman: And those unique webpages that are full of actually the, It’s about quality, not quantity. And, as I bring up mass search in the market and delivering to you in a digestible format I’d be remiss in not also bringing up a tool called Findem.

[00:17:08] Jonathan Duarte: Okay. That’s the same. Wait, what’s, find them do?

[00:17:11] Evan Herman: So they’re it’s a funny thing in the sourcing tool, they are more of a talent and intelligent tools that’s available for sourcers, whereas say, HireEZ and seek out. were developed as sourcing tools that often as a result of that, deliver great talent intelligence to you. So it’s like different approach with the same goals.

[00:17:33] Evan Herman: They’re serving the same people just with different routes. So Findem’s more a talent intelligence tool first. That’s their background and delivers sourcing via intelligence. Whereas SeekOut and HireEZ by sourcing people for you are also delivering talent intelligence to you.

[00:17:54] Evan Herman: They’re sourcing tools first.

[00:17:56] Jonathan Duarte: All right. All right. So let’s wrap this one up. Cause I know we’re going to do at least one more of these to talk about the another topic. So what’s the best way for people to reach you, Evan?

[00:18:07] Evan Herman: Yeah. First and foremost, the best way is LinkedIn. I’m Evan Herman on LinkedIn. My business is HRManomics.com Twitter I’m Hermanomics on Twitter, same spelling. Or just email me at evan.herman@hrmanomics.com.

[00:18:25] Jonathan Duarte: Awesome. All right. Thanks so much for your time, Evan. Looking forward to our next one.

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