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SOSU 2020
July 24, 2020

5 Insightful Talks from SOSUV 2020 – Sourcing Trends & Tips

Ola Swiatkowska
Ola Swiatkowska Associate Recruiter

Have you ever been to a SOSU event? I recently participated in one with my colleague from LevelUp Ventures, Reggie. I had no clue what I’m getting myself into, as this was the first SOSU I have ever attended, and I must say it was… eventful. SOSU virtual conference happened between the 6th and 9th of July 2020. For those who don’t know, it is one of the best-known sourcing summits in Europe where you can attend talks presented by top recruitment professionals, and network with other people in the industry.

Each day kicked off with new speakers, intriguing topics, and a new list of tools and tricks to try. There were so many fascinating webinars to attend, that it became impossible to see all of them at once. 

As I was taking my time this week to go through other talks I didn’t get to see, I thought I will share with you the top 5 presentations I liked the most. Each had many valuable tips to offer, provided new insights, and made me want to put in place new strategies at my work. Here are my top 5 SOSUv talks that I found helpful and inspiring, enjoy.

1. Jan Tegze – Technology and Recruitment 

If you’ve been a recruiter or a sourcer for longer than 5 minutes, you definitely heard of Jan Tegze. You might know him as the author of Sourcing Games or the recruitment gem “Full Stack Recruiter”. 

In his presentation, Jan shared his favourite tools, and tips that will help any sourcer find the right candidate and their contact details. He talks about how modern recruiters don’t only need to find a candidate, but they also should have an understanding of many areas.

Nowadays, the top recruiters have influencing skills, know the basics of coding and growth hacking.

My key takeaways from his session were to use VPN when sourcing for candidates from other countries and use postal code and area range on Linkedin. Also, he mentioned to include keywords with spelling errors and/or in other languages. The benefits of those are not only that you can find more candidates, but you also get a chance to talk to the talent that doesn’t get approached very often.

Here are some other tips I found useful:

  • Install an alternative browser where you can store all plugins for extra security;
  • Use various search engines for your Xray search;
  • Sourcing in the incognito mode;
  • Use a plagiarism checker to find other social networking accounts of the candidate you want to find.

These tricks might sound obvious to some, but they are usually the most effective and can improve your search.

2. Morgane Conrad – How to Bring your Sourcing Back on Track?

I joined Morgane’s talk from pure curiosity. I knew she was from France, and that she rocks a killer red lipstick, but had no clue how great her presentation will turn out. Morgane has hacked her sourcing process to the point I have never seen before. She has created a hard copy of her mind.

She defined a process for every type of search she ever had to do and put it in the form of a checklist in her Trello board. Impressive, right?

If you wonder what this board includes, it’s things like step by step on scraping data, sourcing on Github, finding resumes, and many more. Morgane shared her tool on her personal Twitter. What are you still doing here? Find her account and check the board today 🙂

Few things about Morgane, she currently works as Talent Acquisition Manager at GitBook and is a self-proclaimed Trello-Sourcing-Checklist combinator. SOSUv was her first summit to speak on, but after such a successful talk I bet it’s not the last time you’ll hear of her. 

3. Mike ‘Batman’ Cohen – Email Best Practices

Yes, Batman, you read it right. Mike Cohen is a well-known name within the recruitment industry and a founder of Wayne Technologies (get the reference now?). As he describes himself, he is a recruiter with a big personality who is not quiet with his opinions, and he is not afraid to share them.

Mike’s presentation was all about email campaigns and reaching out to candidates, all based on data, and not only relying on his opinions. During his talk, he gave tips on how to get a higher response rate for your emails by sharing findings from case studies. 

His main points for creating killer cold emails are:

  • Understand your audience, talk to them and learn what is important to them, then include it in the subject line
  • Try adding their current company name in the email title
  • Follow simple rules such as length of the title (37 characters max)
  • Avoid spam words
  • Use humour, colour memes and gifs in emails

My key takeaway was: try different things, test, and see what works for you and what your audience responds to. 

As a person struggling with being catchy and creative in my reach outs, I found this talk refreshing. It provides real, practical advice for making my emails work.  

4. Anna Stenbeck – Recruiters and Business Managers: how to move the relationship into a strategic partnership

I have to be honest, I had no clue who Anna was before this talk, but the topic was something that really caught my attention, and I wanted to know more. Anna is a talent consultant, adviser, author, and speaker. She is an advocate for strategic partnerships and works within employer branding, diversity in recruitment, and operations. The presentation started strong with Anna, her lovely dog, tons of radiating energy, and a promise of no mentioning of chrome extensions – perfect.

When talking about strategic partnerships, Anna spoke about managing expectations of clients. Become more of consultants than order takers, and bring even larger value. How, you ask? Well according to her, you need to start with yourself and position yourself in a team. Get your story straight, understand what your narrative is and how you build it. Next, you need to pull the partners in, activate them, and engage them into your process. You can’t be the only one to this tango. The third step is to push the clients, challenge hiring managers, advise them, and require them to be part of the conversation. 

There’s more to Ana’s presentation, so if you do get a chance to watch recordings from SOSUv, be sure to check her talk. 

5. Eva Baluchova – Copywriting for recruiters

Eva as some of you might know used to be a part of LevelUp Ventures, although I never got a chance to work with her myself. She’s become some sort of a legend in here and is referenced very often, and it’s for one simple reason. She is great at what she does, brings results and values like no other. 

In her talk, Eva discussed how necessary it is for recruiters to improve their skills, especially during these crazy times when many recruiters are losing their jobs. According to her, learning how to be a better copywriter can make a huge impact on your career, and bring it to the new level. 

To become a better content writer, she recommends setting the objectives. Try to understand who is your target audience, and how to persuade them.

Her tips are: build trust and empathy, relate to your reader, and make your text rewarding and entertaining.Your audience is human, so address them in this way. Show emotions, and provide them with a positive experience. 

Eva has loads of great tips on how to upgrade your work, connect with her on Linkedin. Be sure to check her posts often for more awesome ideas. 

This is all folks, I hope you enjoyed my few cents on SOSU virtual conference. Overall, my experience was great. I got to learn from top recruiters in the industry, network with other attendees and connect with them on Linkedin. Also, I got a feeling of how other companies are dealing with recruitment freeze that’s happening. Will I attend another one in the future? Hell yes! I want to meet all these wonderful people in person, and this time, get a real coffee with them. I am looking forward to new insights and challenging my colleagues to a good debate on recruitment topics. See you soon SOSU. 

Cover image by Stories by Freepik & Sourcing Summit

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