The truth is, the most skilled senior sourcer in your team was once a junior. That’s right; they used to mix tools and send automated outreach campaigns with a blank {First Name} section, just like your newly-arrived junior sourcer currently does. And look at them now!
Everyone needs a helping and supportive hand to grow; this role lies on the Team Lead’s shoulders. In this article, you can find full guidance on how to manage Junior Sourcers and help them grow within your company. This guide is useful for Team Leads who were just promoted to this role and experienced managers who can find something new here.
Contents
Core Leadership Values the Successful Sourcing Team Lead Must Have
Before we go to “How?”, let’s look at “Who?”. Who is a good Sourcing Leader, and what personal and professional skills are necessary to effectively lead a team of newcomers?
The beginning of everything is the Core Leadership Values, which might be closely connected to both your personal values and your company’s values. If you don’t know how to identify your core values, ask yourself questions like, “What kind of culture do you want to work for?” or “What qualities do you think to build a strong and healthy relationship?”
So, what are the values that would help Team Lead manage juniors:
Respect for people’s borders, their qualities, abilities, or achievements, and regard for the rights, wishes, and feelings of others. People who feel respected and valued are more satisfied with their job and motivated for personal development.
To be short, respect people the same as you would like to be respected by others.
Empathy (don’t mix it with Sympathy), understanding what others are feeling because you have experienced it yourself or can put yourself in their shoes. People are more likely to follow someone when they can identify with them.
Positive Attitude to the processes and passion for what you do. It is not about you have to put a smile on your face and making a vision of a happy leader but about keeping a positive mindset even when challenges or problems arise at work.
Also, core values are Honesty and Transparency. Why is it important, you may ask? For example, by being honest in constructive feedback, you will see how your colleague is growing professionally. Honesty and transparency are closely related, so when your team knows they can rely on the things you say and promise, it leads to their trust and respect in you.
Trust in people. If you want your team to trust you, trust them first!
Other skills like Confidence, Adaptability, Resilience, and Planning are skills that we can learn and develop. When you’re thinking about adding new skills to your toolbelt, keep in mind that each skill should be continuously improved, so never stop improving yourself as every skill brings you close to effective leadership.
Get Started: Define Sourcer’s Personality Type
Throughout history, psychologists learned different things about each individual to facilitate people’s communication at work and not only. For example, you can rely on Carl Jung’s work, who stated that personalities could be categorized by several criteria, including:
- Extrovert/Introvert
- Rational/Emotional
Based on this, Jung identified four personality types that differ in their way of thinking, reacting, and communicating:
- Controller
- Promoter
- Analyst
- Supporter
These personality types are all in every person to a certain degree, but most strongly prefer one or two types.
Here are the tips for communicating with different personality types:
Why is it so important? A better understanding of each other leads to an effective way of consuming information! When you as a Controller adapt your communication to the Supporter (or address tasks and give feedback), your message will be more effective.
Build a Clear Onboarding Process
Onboarding is a topic that requires a separate discussion, so here I will explain why it is important to set up onboarding processes from the management (human) point of view.
Remember the feeling of your first working day in the new company? What is the first question raised in your mind? The answer is obvious, What should I start with? Plus, add huge stress and confusion here. So, to reduce tension, it is highly recommended to have your onboarding checklist and plan ready. Knowing what is expected from sourcers during the first two to three weeks gives them confidence and motivation to explore the company and its processes faster.
The checklist helps you ensure that you have everything in place and that your new colleague has access to all the apps and tools you all use in the company.
Here is the sample of the onboarding checklist at MatcHR:
(The full checklist you can find in the Matchr Employee Handbook.)
An onboarding plan virtually creates space for bonding between the new employees and team, helps them get acclimated to their new position, to quickly understand their role, the employer’s expectations, and the company’s culture.
The important aspects of the onboarding plan are to make it:
- Accessible and structured. Here at MatcHR, we use Coda.io, where we share intro videos about the culture and working processes, tutorials on using different tools, recruitment/sourcing articles, etc.
- Assigned Mentor/Team Lead, who will stay in touch with the sourcer during onboarding and answer all urgent questions via Zoom, Slack, WhatsApp, etc. Focusing and investing time in your newbies is important to building a confident sourcer.
- Control the results of the Onboarding and collect feedback. Ideally, it would be great to set up 30 min call by the end of every working day to discuss the impression, provide support and answer the questions.
Recommended post: How we created a great onboarding experience
Develop Strong Communications
Effective communication is key if you want to establish strong relationships. It is not a secret that everyone struggles with communicating effectively from time to time. But improving communication can lead to stronger teams and stronger results.
Here are easy ways to start building productive communication between you and your newbies:
- Describe the responsibilities clearly and be structured in your expectations and tasks. Follow up if needed.
- Make time for your juniors and be available to answer questions. make sure you set up a weekly scheduled 1:1 call with a clear agenda and have your Messenger ready for urgent questions.
- Provide explanations and details every time they are needed.
- No micromanagement! Why? It puts extra stress on sourcers and may destroy the initiatives. We aim to activate sourcer curiosity, let them ask questions, and allow them to learn from their own mistakes.
- Be supportive and empathetic.
Recommended post: 9 Free Productivity Tools for Sourcers
Create a Plan for Developing Sourcer’s Skills
First of all, you as a leader will help your junior create a 30/60/90 days plan to obtain their first skills in sourcing techniques or strategies and prepare them for a career in sourcing. 30/60/90 days plan mostly consists of the KPI; as soon as we reach the plan, we slowly move to the more global changes – development (growing) plan.
Here is an example of a 30/60/90 days plan:
We can divide junior sourcer development into three stages:
- Sourcer beginner (with basic skills) who seeks out candidates for the specific role, helps the recruiter and learns.
- Strategic sourcer who creates a continuous pipeline of potential candidates for various roles within the company. A strategic sourcer is confident enough to provide data, sourcing strategy, and market observations; plus, he/she can set metrics to measure results and sourcing outcomes.
- Smart sourcer, an expert who, based on market data, strategy, and personal analysis, can identify potential candidate types that are the perfect fit for the company; able to find the best approach to candidates, attract and engage them; confident enough to address the necessary information to the customer.
As soon as a junior sourcer becomes more confident and aware of all aspects of the industry, it’s time to focus on the short-term development plan that helps define areas where sourcer wants to develop and grow as a professional. As a team lead, you should help sourcer with a direction and think about how you and others can help with this.
A short-term development plan should be analyzed monthly to check how close sourcer is to his/her aim.
Motivate Junior Sourcers to Grow
Sourcing could be a lifetime career with many opportunities to grow from junior sourcer to talent sourcing manager, where you work closely with customers, build sourcing strategies, do market mapping and implement the latest tools and techniques to find the best talents across the world.
Being motivated to do your work can help you achieve greater output, and here we’re not just talking about the salary and benefits. Try to motivate juniors to grow by:
- Giving them (trust them) new responsibilities and tasks to increase their investment in the company.
- Asking questions instead of offering answers.
- Helping them feel that their voices are heard and appreciated.
- Leading by example. Show them how you love your profession and energize them with growth opportunities.
- Letting them make mistakes with no fear.
- Mentoring and coaching; conducting shadowing sessions on different topics.
- Providing the latest updates and learnings in the industry.
- Giving them access to the necessary sourcing tools.
Recommended post: 24 Google Chrome Extensions for Recruiters & Sourcers
Provide Your Team Members with Feedback
Many of us are nervous about giving feedback, especially when it has to be negative. But what you have to understand is that feedback is essential for professional growth!
Providing feedback is the most effective way of developing and activating your juniors. Plus, it is a way of building trust based on transparency and honesty.
Help your juniors recognize their strengths and potential weaknesses, and you all will see that everyone’s performance will improve.
To provide constructive feedback:
- Be specific.
- Stick to facts, examples, and lessons learned.
- Highlight positives. Try even to find positives in the negatives.
- Address feedback privately.
- Ask for feedback as well.
Wrapping up: Grow, Communicate, and Motivate
Teams are composed of people with different abilities and tempos at different stages of their growth. There is no ideal leadership style for everyone. So we advise you to develop yourself first, train your managing skills and vision, learn how to analyze and adapt communication with every person individually, and plan the growing path according to their needs and motivation.
Being able to recognize the strengths of individuals and allow them to be responsible not only increases employees’ confidence in themselves and their leaders but also increases their performance. If you can help junior team members become better at what they do, you’ll be a team lead who people aspire to work with, and you’ll also make a great contribution to your organization.
