Excellence in Sourcing & learning from Facebook & Co with Scarlet Bahr

Thomas Kohler:
Today’s guest is Scarlet Bahr.

So in regards of the talent intelligence, as in sourcing, I always found this the most interesting. How did you saw a talent intelligence function operate and what real life problems did they solve?

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah. So there’s a lot of different applications of talent intelligence. So I think, again, you have to understand kind of what’s the needs? Like what are you trying to solve for? And often it’s kind of a lack of candidates or maybe where to even kind of down to more granular questions like where should we open this role, what job titles should we have, how should we advertise it, et cetera, et cetera. So also things like salary and things like that, also very helpful to have a good grasp of. So where I’ve seen talent intelligence work really well is, first of all, kind of when you have evergreen pipelines or particular skill sets or industries that you know you’re always going to be interested in as a business, mapping out the market in terms of, okay, where exactly does this, all of this talent exist? Where does it not exist right now? But it might exist in kind of two years time. So, for example, you know, keeping track of different places where they might be nurturing talent on your behalf, for example, and then making that data and understanding super accessible.

Thomas Kohler:
Could that also be, let’s say in that case, what you did, talent is maybe not with certain technologies in a certain region, but there are some companies going to work with certain technologies. And the assumption is then maybe in two to four years time, there is a certain amount of candidates that most probably have a certain knowledge and expertise, because the assumption is that over the time, they will work on certain or with working with certain technologies in a certain company on a certain challenge, that then this gets a relevant candidate with the relevant experience that you could utilize in a certain team you will need to hire. Is that the case?

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah. So, for example, I guess for a solid example that I think might help this make sense, if you have a technology that, you know, that is of particular interest in a business and it’s not super common in the market, and you can essentially, through different methods, like simply Googling or also having things set up like RSS feeds, having an understanding of who in the market is hiring that talent as well. So, for example, if you have a company which all of a sudden is hiring for this specific tool or technology, you know, keeping an eye on them, essentially, and watching their more junior, you know, they’re more junior staff and also the people that they’re bringing into the business to know that, okay, so maybe in. Maybe not right now, but maybe in a year or a year and a half’s time, we have a really great pool there. And not losing that information and not losing that knowledge is more challenging than it sounds because, you know, recruitment moves really fast, and retaining knowledge for a year or more is not as straightforward, especially when, you know, we’re living in environments typically where tools change. Like maybe you’re using notion and then you’re using something else. So keeping track of that and knowing that, knowing where your pools are and where they are developing can be really powerful. And also you can use things like you can pull kind of all of the knowledge that people gain through speaking with candidates.

So, for instance, if you’re speaking with a candidate and you hear about, you know, a company that, for instance, isn’t. Isn’t paying bonuses or whatever, the case is, understanding how that can affect the talent force kind of internally, knowing which are the kind of, you know, which are the ideal kind of ideal candidates or prospects within that company that would be of most interest to you, and using that knowledge to the. To the best of. Of your ability.

Thomas Kohler:
So you’re basically then starting with monitoring of companies, and then you look into the company on the team members, and then maybe you already have some conversations with them, early conversations, just that there is a face to it, and you have already a contact. Right. And then just monitoring it. And then you have a list in terms of, let’s say, a database where you know. Okay, in a certain period of time, I will reach out with way more specific intent. To poach them or to hire them.

Scarlet Bahr:
Exactly.

Thomas Kohler:
Scarlet is a real sourcing heavyweight and did sourcing for technology roles at Facebook for four years. I moved to Luno and now is doing sourcing at Prosunio. And we really talked about how to spend time effectively as a source, what excellence in sourcing looks like, and also how to really feel that complex roles where it seems and feels impossible to just fill the role.

Scarlet, great to meet you. I remember we had, or I organized a dinner in London and then you got recommended to me as a person I really need to talk to. And now we are sitting here doing a podcast.

Scarlet Bahr:
Yes, great to meet you. I’m sad I couldn’t come to the dinner still, but next time.

Thomas Kohler:
Next time, definitely. But maybe we started with a short introduction about yourself.

Scarlet Bahr:
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So I am Scarlet. I’m currently a senior sourcing partner at Personio, where I’m working mainly on our business roles. So anything from kind of finance, legal people all the way through to kind of sales marketing partnerships, pretty much anything that comes under the business remit, I will get involved with. Previous to that, I’ve been in recruitment in general since about 2014, so pretty much a decade now, which is scary to think about. I started my time in agency and went on to a gaming company called Playtech, who create some of the back end software that a lot of the gaming companies use. And then I started, I guess, my sourcing focused career at Meta or Facebook as it was at the time. They changed their name about a week after I left, and I still haven’t got used to calling them meta and. Yeah, so that is really where I kind of learnt my sourcing craft, I would say learnt a lot about what great sourcing looks like. Went through a lot of changes with them because they were in kind of a hypergrowth stage in London while I was there, went through a lot of reorgs and learned to roll with the punches a little bit while I was at. Was at Facebook, and learnt to adapt to change very quickly. And then I eventually left Facebook after about four years to join Luno, which was a crypto company where I. Where I built a sourcing team. So I tried to kind of take everything I’d learn and apply that into a very, very different environment, which was definitely a bit of a baptism of fire, but I learned a lot and I had a great time doing it until, unfortunately, during the time of the great redundancies that we saw across recruiting, I had to leave Luno and that’s how I found myself at personio.

Thomas Kohler:
Nice. Yeah, and I think also when we had this first call, we talked a lot about operational excellence in sourcing, and you saw definitely different environments. And maybe we can dive a bit into what different sourcing orcs you saw, for instance. Maybe we can start with original aspect. Do you think it makes sense or what are the differences between a central versus regional structure?

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah, absolutely. So I suppose there’s a few different sourcing structures that you can build or that kind of typically exists. I’ve seen a lot of them, I’ve been part of a lot of different structures and I think the, the main difference would be to first of all figure out what the aim of your sourcing team is. Right? Is it to fill as many roles as quickly as possible? Is it all about volume? Or is it to really find the best candidate for the role? Do you want to build a best in class sourcing function where you’re really finding the right talent? And I think different models have different advantages, but essentially adores essence is decentralized and centralized sourcing. So, and that typically can refer to sources either being kind of deployed in the recruiting teams themselves. So reporting to the recruiting manager and kind of working within the kind of whatever verticals you have set up. So whether that’s kind of business and tech, or whether that’s regional kind of setups, or you have a centralized sourcing model where all of the sources are part of one team together and then they’re kind of more of a dotted line into the recruiting teams. You can also have a hybrid of those, which I think is kind of more of what I’m in at the moment, where you have decentralized sourcing teams, but are kind of centralized in pockets.

So you have kind of business and tech, for example, and you have sources deployed in those specific areas, but within kind of small centralized sourcing teams. So there’s still, you get kind of some of the benefits of each of those models. But really I think the benefit of a decentralized model where sources are directly working in the recruitment teams is that you would get, you would have the sources working a lot closer with the, with the teams themselves. So they tend to kind of have a better relationship with recruiters. A lot of the time they feel kind of more part of the overall team and you can gain a lot of knowledge that way. I think a potential drawback of that is that you really need, or maybe a drawback or a positive is that you need a really, really strong leader in those instances that understand sourcing really well and kind of what greater sourcing looks like. Because if you’re a source of reporting directly into a recruiting manager, it’s really important that they understand kind of how to.

Thomas Kohler:
What do you think should, what should be the attributes of a really good sourcing leader? Because I saw this position sometimes in companies, but more towards global businesses that have, I would say, at least 5 to 10k of headcount.

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah. So I’m probably potentially a bit biased here, but I think sourcing leaders are really, really powerful to help build great sourcing culture, to help kind of sources understand all of the opportunities that are available to them, kind of within the role itself and develop them as well as great sources rather than just kind of mini recruiters. I think for it to be a great sourcing leader, you have to have a really deep understanding of sourcing itself. Where can you add value? Because it’s not always just simply kind of through the active sourcing. There’s a lot of areas where sources can add value, whether that’s through kind of talent, intelligence, or also kind of understanding how to scale past yourself as a singular sourcer. And how can you kind of help the recruiting team pass just the candidates you find? So kind of being able to impart some of that knowledge is super helpful. But also, I think there’s a lot of complexities when it comes to sourcing that haven’t been figured out yet because there’s not a lot of sourcing functions. Kind of is still, I would say, new ish in recruiting to have a really great sourcing function.

So there’s things like how do you kind of assign roles to sources? How do you manage capacity? What kind of KPI’s should sources be working towards? Because, you know, for instance, how do you, how do you recognize what a great hire is? And how do you reward quality as well as quantity, which is often what sources are focused on really, really great quality hires. So I think there’s a lot of complexities to leading sources, which is why I think sourcing managers are really, really beneficial and super useful. And I think they can take a good sourcing function and make it a great one when you have someone that really understands those complexities.

Thomas Kohler:
In case you like my show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it.

So in regards of the talent intelligence as insourcing, I always found this the most interesting. How did you see a talent intelligence function operate and what real life problems did they solve?

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah, so there’s a lot of different applications of talent intelligence. So I think, again, you have to understand kind of what’s the needs, like what are you trying to solve for? And often it’s kind of a lack of candidacy or maybe where to even kind of down to more granular questions like where should we open this role, what job title should we have, you know, how should we advertise it, etc. Etc. So also things like salary and things like that, also very helpful to have a, have a good grasp of. So where I’ve seen talent intelligence work really well is first of all, kind of when you have evergreen pipelines or particular skill sets or industries that you know you’re always going to be interested in as a business, mapping out the market in terms of, okay, where exactly does this, all of this talent exist? Where does it not exist right now, but it might exist in kind of two years time. So, for example, you know, keeping track of different places where they might be nurturing talent on your behalf, for example, and then making that data and understanding super excessive.

Thomas Kohler:
Could that also be, let’s say in that case, what you did talent is maybe not with certain technologies in a certain region, but there are some companies to work with certain technologies. And the assumption is then maybe in two to four years time, there is a. A certain amount of candidates that most probably have a certain knowledge and expertise, because the assumption is that over the time, they will work on certain, or with working with certain technologies in a certain company on a certain challenge, that then this gets a relevant candidate with the relevant experience that you could utilize in a certain team, you will need to hire a. Is that the case?

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah. So, for example, I guess for a solid example that I think might help this make sense, if you have a technology that, you know, that is of particular interest in a business and it’s not super common in the market, you can essentially, through different methods, like simply googling or also having things set up like RSS feeds, having an understanding of who in the market is hiring that talent as well. So, for example, if you have a company which all of a sudden is hiring for this specific tool or technology, keeping an eye on them, essentially, and watching their more junior staff and also the people that they’re bringing into the business to know that, okay, so maybe not right now, but maybe in a year or a year and a half’s time, we have a really great pool there. And not losing that information and not losing that knowledge is more challenging than it sounds because, you know, recruitment moves really fast, and retaining knowledge for a year or more is not as straightforward, especially when, you know, we’re living in environments typically where tools change. Like maybe you’re using notion and then you’re using something else. So keeping track of that and knowing that, knowing where your pools are and where they are developing can be really powerful. Also, you can use things like you can pull kind of all of the knowledge that people gain through speaking with candidates. So, for instance, if you’re speaking with a candidate and you hear about, you know, a company that, for instance, isn’t paying bonuses or whatever, the case is, understanding how that can affect the talent force kind of internally knowing which are the kind of, you know, which are the ideal kind of ideal candidates or prospects within that company that would be of most interest to you and using that knowledge to the best of your abilities.

Thomas Kohler:
So you’re basically then starting with monitoring of companies, and then you look into the company on the team members, and then maybe you already have some conversations with them, early conversations, just that there is a face to it and you have already a contact. Right. And then just monitoring it. And then you have a list in terms of, let’s say, a database where, you know, okay, in a certain period of time, I will reach out with way more specific intent to poach them or to hire them.

Scarlet Bahr:
Exactly. So, you know, we, there’s, there’s typically, for instance, kind of, in different companies, there might be specific industries that are of, you know, you know, of more interest to you because they’re more relevant to your, you know, to the roles that you’re trying to hire or the specific kind of skill sets, whether that’s kind of SaaS or, you know, experience working with cryptocurrencies or, you know, blockchain, whatever, whatever the case is, whatever the specific kind of talent that you’re looking for, having an understanding of where they sit and what’s happening within that kind of market and within those companies and knowing. So having, whether that’s kind of a slack channel or I actually think slack channel is maybe the worst place to do this. So maybe that’s a bad example because I think it’s, you know, it’s hard to retain information there or even, you know, a chart on notion where you can tag specific companies with. So if any recruiter speaks to a candidate from X Company and they find something out that’s potentially useful for, you know, future, future negotiations or future reach outs, they can just input the information there, tag that company, and then everyone in the team has access to that knowledge to use their future. And then if you hear something, you know, say they’re making redundancies or whatever the case is, you can go and have a look and have a look at all of the knowledge that your team has gained on that company and, you know, your kind of top, top prospects within that company in one place.

Thomas Kohler:
And that’s also important that you’re then retained in the business. Right. I saw that you’re around four years at, you were around four years at Facebook. Right. Do this when you stay a certain extent of time because I think you built the relationship with the candidates personally and not Facebook has it with the candidate. Of course. Legally, maybe, yes. But on a personal level, no. So that’s also, I think, valuable that you are retained and you’re kept motivated and happy in a certain role that you can even utilize all the assets you build. Right?

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah, I mean, I guess that is true. And it’s always been true with recruitment, right. That you’re always going to build personal relationships with candidates. I think the benefit of making those notes or making those findings kind of available for everyone in the team is that essentially it, in theory, takes away some of that, some of that risk in terms of people leaving with that knowledge and not having it kind of accessible anywhere. So by building this kind of, I guess, this culture of kind of talent, intelligence sharing, you actually mitigate some of that risk of somebody leaving and taking away all of that information with them and not having it retained in the business. So as much as obviously I would like to be retained wherever I am, I actually think that it serves the opposite. So, making sure that you build this culture within the whole team, recruiters and sources, and anyone who actively speaking with candidates or anyone who’s actively kind of working in the market and has kind of an understanding of what’s happening in the market, making sure that that’s documented somewhere and that’s easily accessible to everyone, takes away a lot of that risk.

Thomas Kohler:
Hiring for highly complex roles. You did it. How did you do it? What is different to, I would say, regular roles? So when you give us a bit more context and walk us through hiring for highly complex roles, that would be super interesting.

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah. So I think this is actually my favorite thing about sourcing, right? Looking at a role and thinking that potentially it’s impossible and finding the exact perfect candidate is my dream situation. I’ve worked on complex roles for the majority of my career. The place that I really kind of first found my niche was working all the way back in my agency days, working with national air traffic services or some really, really niche, kind of aeronautical kind of technologies, where I’d be tracking down people that wrote ebooks in order to ask them if they knew anyone about different pieces of technology and that kind of thing. That’s the type of thing that gets me really excited about sourcing. And at Facebook, we had a lot of those really complex roles, often with language requirements and extensive travel requirements also. So things like you needed partner facing engineers who also had telecommunications experience that would be working extensively throughout kind of rural parts of Africa, but would also have to speak French, for example, or German because they were working with kind of our european telecommunications partners. Really super complex roles that required both technical skills and also partner facing skills, which is a challenge within itself even when you take away all of the other requirements.

So I think my typical approach, and I think most people would have heard this before, is to obviously go and look for that exact person, right? So you start with, maybe there’s only 20 in the world, right? But you start there and you try and kind of, even if it’s just building a relationship with those people. So that rather than going straight for the kill, as you might do with other roles where you’re just reaching, saying, hey, I have this role, do you want to chat about it? Having a bit of a softer approach and just talking to them in general, maybe about their career aspirations, looking at other places they’ve worked and who they may have worked with and trying to get some referrals from them also and understand digging in and really understanding their skillset and where they learnt it. And then you have an opening in terms of finding out who else might have learned those things as well alongside them. But yeah, a lot of it is about playing about a lot with booleans and really, really having to have a good understanding of how your booleans are performing. And rather than getting lost in the sourcing, having a really good kind of clear understanding of where your quality candidates are coming from and how you’re finding them is really powerful in that situation because it means that you can then replicate or then you can have some understanding rather than just sourcing. And it’s really easy to get lost in sourcing and build on your searches.

Thomas Kohler:
I think that’s also a critical point also in terms of expectations towards the business next role versus, let’s say, a regular role, how can you manage the expectations in terms of how many hires can you do in terms of this complexity? And also what might be the time to hire, what expectations you set, how do you utilize data or how do you report? This would be also interesting on how to deal with that.

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah, I think everything as a saucer is about super, super clear communication. Like if you think you’ve communicated something enough, just do it one more time, basically is my motto. So I liked nobody to be in any doubt about what I expect from the search. And then as I go along, exactly how it’s going versus expectations. And then also at the end, I also think it’s really important to summarise that and document that, how the search went somewhere. So the next time you’re not starting from scratch. So for me, I think it’s before you start the search, I always like to present a little bit kind of about the market, what candidates exist where they are, can we reach them? Kind of what’s the average tenure of those people and how many of them might be, might be ready for a move, etcetera. If you can have that information, that’s always really, really helpful.

Also, understanding of diversity within the market is always helpful. If you can gain an understanding there to see what the possibilities are and say, for example, if the market is like 15% diverse, only then you know that you maybe have to put more of a, more of a focus there in your searching. So, yeah, so it’s about super clear communication and being really upfront and understanding the data in order to communicate that elsewhere. I think I’ve actually shared with you a, a sheet that is an old example of a sheet that I used to keep on a weekly basis. And here you can see that I’ve used historical information and in some places, pure guesses, because we don’t always have historical information. Right on. Exactly how many pre screens, how many team leads, how many, I actually can’t remember the terminology that I used to use. So how many pre screens, how many business screens, how many for loops, as we called them, would lead to, to a certain filling the role, having an accepted offer.

And I would track as I go along in any searches exactly where I am against those numbers, against those predicted numbers, and make sure that I’m on track. Because as a source, you have to be quite tight on your timings and make sure that you’re not, say, for example, doing kind of 100 reach outs for a role that actually you might only need to do 24. Having an understanding of that data can help you advise the hiring team on exactly how long it might take and also what the candidates might look like, what the market looks like in general. But it also helps you understand how much time it’s going to take you so that you know how many other roles you can work on at the same time and helps you manage your capacity as well.

Thomas Kohler:
Definitely.

In case you have any feedback or anything you want to share with me, please send me an email on thomas@pplwise.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. And in case you really enjoy the show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it.

And first, you mentioned also you can get lost in sourcing. So give us some tips on how to spend your time effectively as a sourcer.

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah, so I think it all starts again with that, with that understanding of your own capacity. I’m a big believer in managing my life, my working life, through kind of screens. I think screens are always going to be really, the bottleneck as a source, you can spend unlimited time sourcing, really. You know, you can spend all week sourcing, but really your bottleneck is always going to be the amount of candidates that you can screen in a week. So I always like to linchpin everything I’m doing around how many screens is that going to take me? Because then I know if I am working on four roles, each of them are going to take, you know, 20 screens. I know exactly how many weeks it’s going to take me to fill those roles. Obviously, then you can start having conversations about, you know, maybe if they want the role filled quicker, maybe you need recruiter support or, you know, another sources jump in and do some of those screens or whatever the case is.

Thomas Kohler:
Let’s say a regular role that gets the attention of a source is usually already a bit more hard to fill or specific role usually. Right. So for that type of roles, how many screens do you, on average maybe calculate in order to make it higher? You said, let’s say roughly 20. And how much time and reach outs do you plan in order to get to that 20 screens? And, yeah, that would be interesting.

Scarlet Bahr:
Yeah. So I would always, always have a look at historical data, if it exists. So I would always try and have a look at what’s been done previously to help me with those numbers because often, actually, you will find it quite different across roles. It won’t always be the same. Say, if you’re working on some of those technical partner facing roles, it would be very, very different to, for example, some of the sales, pure sales roles I’m working on now. So I think it’s really important to always let historical data guide you where you have it. I understand that that’s not always the case, but that would be my first protocol. Do we have an understanding of what’s happened in the past or if I’ve done it in the past? Great, I can use that.

So I would look at things like reach out response rates, how many were positive, how many were neutral, how many screens came from a certain amount of reach outs in the past, if that data was available. If not, look at general response rates to have an understanding of how many I might need to do. But I think it’s also really important to understand that even when you do all that research, none of it is ever going to be set in stone. So it’s about staying, really, really staying on top of that. So say if you had estimated, okay, I need to do 50 reach outs, to do 20 screens to, you know, then have however many team lead interviews. If you’re. If you start doing it and two weeks later you look back and the numbers aren’t adding up, then it’s about looking in and understanding. Okay, so, like, where are candidates falling out? Or am I getting really poor response rates? Is it my reach out? Is it the fact that actually I’m reaching out to the wrong people? Like, I’m speaking to people, but parts of my screen because I’m reaching out to the wrong type of talent.

So not only can that those numbers and having an understanding or an estimation of what your pipeline should look like help you educate the hiring manager and also manage your own capacity, but it also helps you flag when things are going, when things are maybe not going right, or when you have an area that you need to go back and have a look at and refine. So all of that together, I think is super helpful for any sorcerer. And that’s why I think kind of having that estimation at the beginning is super important before you start working on anymore.

Thomas Kohler:
Definitely. I think that would also be a final word, because a word. We are at the end of the time already, so, Scarlet, thank you so much. We could talk for another half an hour and maybe we can do another episode around it. I really, really got a lot out of it. And thank you so much for your time.

Scarlet Bahr:
Thank you so much. Yeah, I really enjoyed it, and that went super quick.

Thomas Kohler:
Definitely. Thanks.

Scarlet Bahr:
Alright, take care. Bye.