Obtaining Upper Management Buy-in for Sourcing

Business Problem

The Business Problem session group boiled down our problem statement into three key areas to approach. Here were our group’s conclusions:

1) How To Get Funding

• Figure out what tools you want and how much they cost
• Define your strategy and create a plan, then price the whole plan (tools, staff, services, vendors, and so on)
• Take that price and compare it to what it would cost to pay externally for the same services, or for the same number of hires
• Find a competitor or other company that’s implemented a similar plan
• Prove it works:

• Deliver some initial results under a zero budget
• Measure those results and share them with management to prove cost benefits if you were able to obtain full budget
• Figure out the cost of open positions, or “cost-not-to-hire” which can be estimated by adding up the revenue lost each day those positions go unfilled

• Know what the business wants. Identify what motivates your business leadership. They could be motivated by a number of reasons so paint your picture according to what is most important to them. For example:

• Is it reduction of cost?
• It is reduction of time to fill?
• Is it pain of positions going unfilled?
• Is it to increase the quality of hire?
• Is it secrecy or confidentiality?
• Are there any other critical projects like for example a new product line or something that would cause your company to seek an entirely new kind of talent the organization has never worked with before?

The group agreed that the most powerful metric to present to an organization’s leadership would be the cost not to hire for a position. It was suggested that to figure out this cost one would take the productive output of an average day in this role, and extrapolate that out to a full year’s worth of productive days (approximately 260 working days per year). Other metrics the group concluded have strong value when proving your case to management include:

• Reduction in cost per hire
• Improved 6 month performance evaluation
• Increased time to perform (ramp-up time)
• Reduction in cost per source (job boards, purchased research, etc.)
• Increase in quality of hire

The above is by no means a conclusive list, and we certainly did not have enough time to go into detail on how to obtain or calculate those metrics, but I hope this sparks some conversation on the blog about these metrics. I would particularly be interested to hear from some of the people who have championed the above inside of their organizations.

To follow through on the goal of the session the group moved on to establish a few principles that will contribute towards helping a sourcing team remain a going concern within the organization. The conclusion was that the most important aspect to maintaining sustainability is to “tell someone.” Spreading of the gospel leads to executive sponsorship, which in turn aids in survival.

2) Ensuring Sourcing Sustainability 

• Identify a couple of business champions who will help you spread the work on the good work you and your sourcing team do. These should be your champions who will defend your case in the event of a leadership change, or other major environmental changes.
• Cultivate relationships with hiring managers. They can be your number one advocates. If your leadership changes make sure your hiring managers remember you and go to bat for you, or at least ask the new leadership to keep the sourcing team going. Happy hiring managers may even volunteer to help fund some of the things you do.

To conclude our afternoon session the group wrote down a few guidelines on what makes a good sourcer, and some suggestions on where to find them. Like with the other summaries, this is by no means a complete list. My hope is that this will spark some conversation around defining the sourcer’s role.

3) What makes a good sourcer? 

• There are two kinds of sourcers: - Phone and Internet
• Sometimes you can find a rare individual who has mastered both research techniques, but often you will need to have one of each.
• Common traits for both types of sourcers:
  • Curiosity, insatiable appetite for information
  • Tenacity, not taking no for an answer, not giving up
  • Creativity, finding solutions around problems
  • Process driven, can replicate results
  • Flexibility, can adapt easily

• Where do you find good sourcers?

o       Phone sourcers:

o       Customer service

o       Collections

o       Brokers

o       Telemarketing

o       Executive search firms

o       Researchers:

o       Librarians

o       Skip tracers

o       Private investigator researchers

o       Executive search firms

o       Graduates who spent lots of time researching

Comments

[Shally]

Luigi posted a great comment to this over on my ERE blog - check it out:

http://www.ere.net/blogs/CyberSleuthing/DEFAULT.ASP?LISTINGID={ED9E9C13-EE56-4780-8AD2-D9BD1E3421D1}

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