QUESTION: Quick question regarding outsourcing. I get it when it comes to offloading certain sourcing tasks to contractors via Upwork. I understand getting a list back with names and email addresses. The part I do not understand is how a contractor is expected to supply phone numbers with a candidate name and email addresses when 95% of the sales and sales engineers that I source work out of a home office and usually do not post numbers with their LinkedIn profiles. Your thoughts and comments are appreciated.  – Scott

ANSWER: A good researcher, will only use LinkedIn for maybe 10% or 15% of their research. To be perfectly honest, I do not know how they do what they do nor am I am expert at research. I do not care because I do not want to be a researcher. The process of doing the research, by the way, not the result, wants me to stick needles in my eyes. It is painful work full of pulley and strings and all that other stuff.  

For example, I am huge on technology, but I do not know what is in the box on my desktop and how the microprocessor works and how it interfaces with the RAM on the computer and how all that information is delivered in microseconds to my PC. Same thing, I do not know how researchers do it. I do have clients with sales and sales engineer candidates that do get phone numbers. Do they get it on 100%? Probably not, but they do get a bunch from a variety of sources.  

There is a great company, Moore eSSentials [MooreEssentials.com] run by two very knowledgeable people, Tricia Tamkin and Jason Thibeault, that has a fantastic two-day program on research. However, I do not suggest that you attend their program because I do not want any of my clients doing their own research. However, if you are a firm and you have somebody or you want to have a researcher on board that is full time supporting multiple people, that might be a good idea. I have had multiple coaching clients that have sent people to their program.   

Again, I shudder saying this because I do not want solo recruiters attending this training or doing their own research. However, I watched how they did stuff and how they pulled up contact information. I had to take notes on it because it was goopy and there are all these forward slash, forward slash, forward slash, but there are ways to do it. That is a really good question.