Sourcing Tools Strategies "What's Effective & What's Not"

Here are the common "you find us" sourcing tools, listed in order from least effective to most effective:
1. Job fairs
2. Ads in newspapers
3. Job boards
4. Billboards or "we're hiring" banners
5. College hires at on-campus career events
6. "Walk in" applications at physical locations
7. Corporate career sites (a passive approach where you hope that candidates surfing the web will find your site and have the interest and patience to follow through and apply)
8. Employment branding (an excellent approach that causes everyone — the best as well as the rest — to want to work at your firm, which results in your firm's getting on "best place to work" lists or having best practices talked about in business, functional, and industry publications)
key "we find you" sourcing tools are listed below, from least effective to most effective:
1. Cold calls. Recruiters identify the best through periodic calls.
2. Mystery shopping. Recruiters identify the best by buying products or asking questions of other firm's employees (which works best in public-facing jobs).
3. Credit lists. Recruiters find people who precisely fit your target demographics based on their job title, income, location, and diversity.
4. Public records. Similar to credit lists, public records searches can identify specific individuals who fit a very narrowly defined demographic.
5. Mentor recruiting. With this method, your recruiters seek out top performers and ask whether they have mentored others at your targeted firms. You then use the mentor relationship to recruit the "mentees." (A variation tries to get top performing "mentees" at your firm to draw away their mentors from other firms.)
6. Intern to hire or temp to hire. Although interns or temps may have been initially recruited using a "broad net" approach, converting them to permanent hires requires a "we find you" relationship building process to assess them and eventually sell them on a permanent position.
7. Technical contests. Skills and problem-solving contests, generally online (e.g. TopCoder), attract and identify those with the best solutions.
8. Scholarship awards. Top prospects are identified based on their scholarship applications.
9. Professional association lists. Recruiters mine these lists to identify potential candidates based on where they work and their seniority in the field.
10. Internet name generation. Using this approach, recruiters find individuals who write and speak by using "Google type" Boolean strings, Internet searches based what they write and say.
11. Hire to learn or hurt. Target the best employees working at competitors based on their ability to bring a targeted skill to your firm.
12. Name generation firms. Pay researchers at vendor firms to identify the names of target candidates based on titles and firms they work at.
13. Boomerangs. Using this approach, recruiters proactively seek out top former employees in an effort to get them to return to your firm.
14. Event recruiting. Send employees to identify speakers (as well as those who ask questions and make comments) at seminars and professional events.
15. Benchmark recruiting. Find the best people while researching best practices at competitor firms.
16. "Magnet" strategy. Hire the well-known in order to attract other top people, even in other job families. (Hire Tiger Woods and the rest will come...)
17. Referrals. Proactively ask top employees, former employees, and friends of the firm to find and refer others like themselves.
18. Most wanted lists. Senior managers identify the best in the industry at the beginning of the year. Recruiters and managers then sell them on switching firms throughout the year.
19. Social Networking. LinkedIn, Ryze, MySpace, Facebook
20. Recruiting 101. Good old fashion networking, pick up the phone and collaborate. Know you’re audience and be credible quickly. Most importantly know your business.