Most of you aren't going to want to hear this...

[Maureen Sharib]

The recovery's coming. Okay, I know you want to hear THAT. For the first time in many months I received several calls during the past week for sourcing services. I used to receive dozens, in the good old days but several calls in one week will do it for me.

Here's what you probably don't want to hear: If you're not ready for the recovery you're not going to make it. And here's what I mean as "ready" as it applies to sourcers: You'd better know how to telephone source 'cause this time around, unless you're absolutely fabulous at Internet sourcing like the gurus Shally, Glenn and Glen are, you're not going to survive. Your lunch has been eaten by low-cost providers from overseas. No kidding. I'm sorry to tell you and if you're not aware of this you've had your head stuck in the sand for a couple years now.

People are SICK of receiving stuff they can easily find for themselves. And if you don't think they don't take your names, stick them into a search engine and run a search on them - think again! THIS is what more and more of them today are considering "easy" to find, after your hard-earned work produced them. Never mind they have no hope of ever mastering the complicated boolean syntax you did that brought the names up out of the ether - once they have the name, and they can get it into a google bar, it's gonna come up and reveal its source.

They will pay you, however to find stuff that they cannot find themselves. And one of the ways you can find stuff that your customers can't find is to call into companies for the information. No, it's not easy. If it was easy they'd do it themselves or some low-cost provider would pick up on it. The solace is in the fact, though, that it's pretty simple.

"Simple" is a deceivingly sophisticated word.

There's a technique that works for phone sourcing and several that don't. And you successful phone sourcers reading this know what I mean. What say you?

“Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music -- his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting -- that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.” ~ Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet, Novelist, Dramatist and Critic, 1854-1900)

[bill josephson]

You're 100% right. Passive "invisible" candidates is what the companies working with me want--that's it.

Bill