An onboarding assignment at IDG Recruitment

After finishing my 3 year long assignment with Toca Boca in December last year I was thinking about what kind of assignments I wanted to focus on in 2023. I decided I wanted to do shorter assignment, with a variety of clients, acting more as an advisor rather than being a temporary replacement for an employee.

Things worked out in my favour and my first such assignment was with IDG Recruitment. And as I also wanted to get going with my blogging again, I thought I should be writing a recap about my assignments when done. So here goes.

I’ve been in touch with Maria Widegren for a few years. I think she even tried to recruit me once 🙂 Back in November, when I announced I was available for new assignments, she got in touch again. She had a couple of new recruiters coming in and wanted to give them the best start possible. She wanted me to come in and act as a mentor for them. I loved the idea and said yes, of course. Being able to combine my sourcing and training experience into one assignment sounded like great fun. And it has been lots of fun.

During a 2 month period I’ve been coming in twice a week to support Moa and Johanna with their assignments. We have mixed lectures, workshops, discussion with hands on advice on their daily tasks. I wasn’t limited to helping only Moa & Johanna, but also got the chance to help the whole team when needed.

We covered the following topics:

Reverse Sourcing

The very first thing I did was give the whole team my talk on “reverse sourcing”, showing them the limitations of using Linkedin only. Initially I thought that this topic might not be the right one for someone just starting out as a tech recruiter, but then I thought it was perfect. 

I have come across so many recruiters who have only been trained in sourcing on Linkedin, and now are stuck and struggle to “un-learn” what that have been told for so long. It’s all about having the right sourcing mindset from the start.

Linkedin Recruiter

Funnily enough Linkedin Recruiter was one of our topics, considering I started off by saying that it isn’t all that great. But, I believe that not using Linkedin is just as stupid as not using it. So if you do have access to Linkedin Recruiter you should make the most of it, just don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Sourcingskolan Boolean

The whole team, not only Moa and Johanna, got the opportunity to join my sourcing workshop “Sourcingskolan Boolean” where they learnt the basics of how to google. Now they can X-ray all day long 🙂

Github

I do believe that in order to become a great tech recruiter, you got to know as much as possible about Github. I gave them a quick run through, or actually quite thorough. I think it’s important to understand what Github is, what it used for, and what kind of information is available to you. Simply looking at what tech people have repos in isn’t enough (but it’s a good start).

Scraping

Scraping is also highly useful to know how to do. It makes going through your search results that much easier, and you can keep better track of what you have already looked at. Another essential skill for a tech recruiter to have in my opinion.

Storytelling

The final thing I did before I finished the assignment was to run my full day workshop “Storytelling för rekryterare” for the whole team. My definition of sourcing is “finding, engaging and attracting”. Finding is the easy part, it’s getting the attention of the people that’s the difficult bit. Storytelling is another essential skill that will help you engage and attract the right people.

The sourcing mindset

I think the most important aspect of my time with IDG has been giving them a sourcing mindset. Knowing, from the start, that sourcing is more, so much more, than starting at Linkedin Recruiter all day.

Giving them the basic techniques that I hope they can then apply to other scenarios in the future. Being inventive, not just nodding and saying ok. Understanding tools, how to use them, when to use and and when NOT to use them. Knowing how to do things manually, but also how to automate when needed.

This was my first assignment being part of a company’s onboarding, but I truly hope it wasn’t the last.