My Sourcing Story : Q&A With Klara Hermesz, BMC Software

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We are staring a new section where we profiled people who work in sourcing across Europe.  This week we spoke to Klara Hermesz  who currently work for BMC software about a wide range of subjects. Klara has attended #SOSUMED in the past and will be back this year. She can be reached here.

Q1. What problems are you currently solving in your role?

Wow, I get this question quite a lot these days 🙂 I have been with BMC since April, so almost 2 months in the job now. I am basically building out Sourcing as a separate function since we have 360 Recruiters and we need to help reduce their workload. Plus there is a need for having Sourcing as a Specialist function. I think these days what companies really miss with not having a dedicated Sourcing function is the amount of information and valuable data that a Sourcer acquires during the in-depth searches we make. My role is to build out a Strategic Sourcing function and help Recruiters see the value of market intelligence, market maps, talent maps, talent pipelines, etc.

I also got a little side project to help and boost the social media presence of BMC. It’s a great company and we don’t show enough of it to the world yet. We have really cool success stories, like Chevron who had to put 60 hours into finding errors in their systems before installing our software and thanks to us it is 5 minutes now. This should be out there! We also need to show more of us as a team because we are quite diverse, a really international bunch of great people. Plus we need to share all the fun we have here, like the planking or the pool championships we just had recently. 🙂

Q2. How do you define sourcing? Sourcing is……

FUN :)….I have always enjoyed sourcing. The moment right after you got a new role or project and start looking around, basically opening your first Google search literally gives me goose bumps every single time. 🙂 #weirdo… Than the whole process of figuring out, getting to know and understanding the market and the role itself and finding the best people is just great. I love to get to know new industries and become a Trusted Advisor. For me, Sourcing has to be a valued function in an organization on its own not just 10% of a Recruiter’s job.

Q3. 10 Sourcing tools I use daily are…

First of all I need good music in order to be able to focus on my sourcing task…Okay, no jokes. I always need Notepad and Google as a start (I know this is not so sexy but really useful). And then we can talk about all my little Chrome extensions that I use quite often, like Prophet, Discoverly, Email Hunter, Image Search, WhoWorks.At, Facebook Search Tool, and other tools like IFTTT, Rapportive, Sidekick, Time Converter (always confused with time zones :)). And many more but we already have 10.

Q4. Can you tell us five of the people you admire most in sourcing?

Well, my most respected Mentor is Balázs Paróczay from whom I learnt everything basically, the whole methodology and the mindset (and probably I am still the only one from the sourcing community who can write down his name correctly being a fellow Hungarian). Actually even before that I started to learn about sourcing by myself in my spare time (when sourcing was still not sexy and I was hiding it from the agency where I worked because Social Media was evil 🙂 ).

So the ever first webinar I watched was by the brilliant Shane McCusker (still love his accent) and then of course Johnny Campbell. When I started to actually get it I read everything by Glen Cathey, who is really the top person to follow in sourcing and you just need to know him. Lately it is getting harder and harder to find someone who can come up with something we don’t know yet so I am still looking for my 5th hero! Position open, Apply now 🙂

Always try to understand the market and the role first

Q5. One sourcing advice I can give to my peers is

Always try to understand the market and the role first. Without having a clear picture of what is the position about, which ones are the key requirements, and which ones are just the nice-to-have ones you cannot really create a good search and you will probably not find what you need. Always try to imagine what you are going to see when you find the result. Imagine the kind of person, their job, the words they use, the world they live in.

Understand them and talk to them with as much curiosity as you can. People love to talk about their jobs and sometimes they just need someone to take the time and listen to them carefully. Use all those information in your next search! That’s how you become an Expert!

Do you wish to share you sourcing story? If so, contact us.

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