Sourcing Challenge – Answers, Results, and Thoughts

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hard-to-find

The latest Sourcing Contest got lots of attention. More than a thousand people read the post; it has been one of the top reads on my blog in the last couple of weeks. More than a dozen people reached out to me privately or posted in online discussions, twitter (etc.) that they are:

  1. extremely busy right now
  2. don’t have access to what they must have via the company firewall
  3. hurricanes happening in the area
  4. (etc.)

So lots of potential winners just didn’t have the time. Hmm…

Lately, a Talent Sourcer’s role is being expanded to interviewing candidates, scheduling company interviews, employer branding (seriously?); perhaps negotiating and closing offers will be next? I do hope that, with all the added responsibilities, Sourcers will keep healthy in the “searching” and “understanding how search works” department. I hope Sourcing is not Dead!

I appreciate several contestants posting their answers and refining them in the responses. Kudos for trying it out! It wasn’t easy. Alas, the answers to this contest did not leave us with a grand prize winner. Nobody has gone all the way to answer the hardest questions (#4 and #13).

The Challenge itself and these two blog posts on the topic –

– are an excellent exercise for someone who wants to understand how to search the web and what can and cannot be found. The posts do shed some light on the answers to the most difficult questions. (OK, they just have the answers.)

Here are several honorable mentions. Ninh Tran has dug out a few links that were pointing to correct answers. Aaron Lintz has brought up the “/topics” pages as the ones that generate resume preview images for Google to index. Katie Gechijian has added some interesting thoughts (and a potential idea for another contest!).

Given every answer a serious consideration, as well as formally counting the points, we are announcing Vidhya as the winner. Congratulations! She was also the winner of a past fun contest. Vidhya, please contact me to get the reward.

Best of luck searching to all!

 

 

Comments 1

  1. Congratulations to Vidhya! Thank you for the honorable mention and the fun contest! I know Katie and I enjoyed the contest very much while we were doing other boring things. I highly recommend these challenges to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the art of sourcing.

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