Why talent scouts are more than just sourcing machines
While hiring for our Talent Scout team at Productboard, I’ve seen a lot of hesitancy towards the role when approaching candidates or even talking to them during interviews. But having someone taking care of the sourcing function can have an incredible impact on the overall performance of your Talent team.
In this article, I will focus on why I think every recruiting team should have at least one talent scout (or sourcer, or whatever you want to call this chameleon) — and why talent scouting is more than just a stepping-stone to another role in recruitment.
Talent scouting is its own career path
I’ve noticed that many people see the talent scout role as a way to get into hiring and become a recruiter in the future. And don’t get me wrong, it’s an excellent way to find out more about how recruiting works, including collaboration with hiring managers and all the different markets your team can be hiring in. It’s how I started my career, and I’m incredibly grateful for such an opportunity. But the purpose of this article is to show that there’s more to sourcing than that.
Having been in the recruitment world for a bit now, I can see the endless value and possibilities the talent scout role can bring. The role itself has its own career ladder. You can grow from junior to senior. You can end up on a management path. Alternatively, as you learn so much from different areas of recruiting, you might transition into an employer branding team or become an analyst or project-focused recruiter.
It’s also why we’ve decided to call the role talent scout and not talent sourcer. These two names can be confusing, so I’ll outline here all the reasons behind our decision, and why you should have a TS on your team, too!
Our scouts are not ONLY sourcers
Yes, sourcing is a huge part of our job, but it’s not only about that — volume is never the primary metric we’re looking at. Sometimes our TS approaches only 15 people per week, for example. But we want to make sure that those people are high-quality candidates, and we approach them with a relevant message and a role.
We also spend a lot of our time personalizing the messages for the prospective candidates we approach. It is important that we create (in collaboration with others) enough high-quality content to share with candidates, so they can make an informed decision before jumping on the call with a recruiter.
Sourcing is not only about pushing longlists so that we can put them into the right spreadsheets and report to the leadership that we’ve done well. It’s about relationships and building communities. It’s about talent and market mapping, reporting, and enabling your team to be a trusted partner for hiring managers and the business.
We help build better processes
The role itself should also be about projects and finding the inefficiencies within the recruiting process. In our team, we also think a lot about how to scale the processes we already have and make them more accessible to other teams.
For example, our amazing talent scouts Eliška and Barča have created a great guide on how to have productive kick-off meetings with hiring managers to make sure that we’re calibrated across the board. This also helps with asynchronous communication and ensures that all sides have visibility into what’s happening because we have everything documented thanks to the guide.
This is something that’s not only relevant only for talent scouts but for the recruiters on the team as well. The impact of that can later be seen while onboarding new teammates and collaborating with the employer branding team.
We collaborate on projects outside of the Talent team
On that subject, collaboration with our employer branding or community teams is another part of the TS role. If you’re wondering how to streamline the processes around community management in regards to hiring, look no further than your TS team. Let’s face it, the events we help organize and partner on are one of the best hiring sources.
These events are a great way for everyone to get to know the culture and people they’d be working with. Our talent scouts look after the people who go to our meetups and connect those who are interested with the right recruiter or hiring manager.
And yes, the talent scout is also responsible for the sourcing part. But imagine everything the TS has to think about while doing the sourcing — all the technologies they need to know, all the little things that help them distinguish the best profiles from the rest.
That’s why I always like to say that the role of a talent scout is more like a pipeline specialist and recruiting advisor rather than just a sourcing machine. If you need more reasons why you should pamper your sourcer with enough appreciation, let me know! ☀️
