What’s it all about, blogger?

I’ll be up front – I want to learn more about my industry and craft. Judging by the number of in-person and on-line attendees at recruiting and sourcing events and webinars, a lot of other people want to learn more, too. I’m not new to conversing and collaborating on line – I administer an online forum dedicated to rare and unusual automobiles, for instance, and have started a handful of industry specific blogs to support my company’s business. This blog that you are reading now, is something different for me. It’s going to be largely about me. Not because I’m a narcissist, and not because I think I am so gosh-darned interesting that my putting text here fulfils a gaping hole in the world of blogs. Instead, as I embark upon the personal blogging waters, I want to be transparent in intent, mission, etc.

Some background is in order, I think. I am, in the parlance of my employer’s HR database, a “Sourcing SME”, or Subject Matter Expert. What does that mean? In the context of the company I work for, my expertise and thoughts on the subject of sourcing – finding talent for open jobs – are ahead of the curve, well-developed, and informed by being a long-time practitioner and manager of sourcing and recruiting. I do a lot of reading on sourcing and talent acquisition, and I’m following the blogs and tweets of published practitioners and SME’s in the sourcing space.

In the past 12 months, I’ve attended the OnRec conference in Chicago, Sourcecon in San Diego, and last week, the Social Recruiting Summit at Best Buy headquarters in suburban Minneapolis. At OnRec I was privileged to listen to Don Ramer’s overview of the Recruiting Genome project, and that talk, along with some overviews from the talent acquisition leaders presenting from a variety of companies, opened my eyes to the delta between what I am charged with knowing, and what I needed to know . SourceCon, which crammed 4 days worth of sourcing best practices and live how-to labs (courtesy of the wonderful folks at Arbita) crammed into two days. I’ve begun to digest and distill many current best practices into my definition of the sourcing function. The Social Recruiting Summit had a similar positive impact – thanks to those sponsors and presenters as well.

What have I learned? That there exists a significant gap between my expertise, and the expertise of recognized though leaders in sourcing. I want to close that gap. And I suspect there are others like me. It is my sincere hope that putting this blog up will help me, and my peers, overcome those gaps, to develop an inclusive view of a wide range of sourcing practices, tips and techniques. I hope that people who read this blog will chime in with their knowledge, experiences and opinions. We can all benefit from collaborative sharing, through transparent conversation, in the spirit of “a rising tide lifts all boats”.

I’ve concluded that the practices of sourcing professionals will continue to evolve, and that evolution will accelerate, since social media – including blogs – have enabled collaborative discussions the like of which we’ve not seen before. In the coming days and weeks, I’ll be blogging on different pieces of the sourcing landscape – technology, techniques, training, industry news, etc. I hope you’ll find the information I share – and the discussions that ensue – to be enlightening. If so, we call all learn more, together.

Join me?