Practitioners of art, science and information retrieval, sourcers must be able to “see people where other people see code”, speaker Glen Cathey, vice-president of recruiting at US professional staffing and solutions company Kforce, told the 120 attendees.

Cathey compared sourcing to playing golf, saying: “Your goal as sourcers is to make as many holes in one as you can. Why take 20 swings when you can take one?” To make those ’hole in one’ placements, sourcers must learn different levels of talent mining and sharpen their use of electronic candidate sourcing techniques, he said.

Among others, the speaker line-up also included event chairman Eric Jaquith, lead recruiter, Jaquith & Company, and Shally Steckerl, chief cybersleuth and executive vice-president of recruitment marketing technology, media, training and workforce development and consulting services firm Arbita.

Jaquith said in his opening address that he now found sourcing “more rewarding” than other elements of recruitment. “We enjoy the hunt, the journalism gene of searching for a deeper truth,” he told the audience.

With a nod to the conference’s setting at the International Spy Museum, Steckerl compared the practice of providing “competitive recruitment intelligence” to spying, as he took the audience through myriad techniques and websites that could help sourcers find potentially off-the-radar talent. He acknowledged that of the searches he was commissioned to undertake, “80% are pretty mainstream… but 15% of the jobs are where you have to go real deep, so you have to try all of these different things”.

Among the attendees at SourceCon was Conni La Douceur, founder and chief sourcing strategist, ExecuQuest, of Baltimore.

Asked to characterise the current state of play of the sourcing profession, La Douceur told Recruiter: “Individuals searching for talent to fill critical needs are overwhelmed with the technological tools at their disposal and the current hype. The challenge is in knowing how to find the on-target talent quickly, or suffer through hours of tedious digging and clicking… Recruitment’s value proposition is ’hire the best talent’, not the most available talent.”

The next SourceCon event will be held on 8 and 9 February 2011 in New York City.