Sourcing Summit Europe Amsterdam 2019 – Summary

I couldn’t miss this year’s edition of Sourcing Summit Europe in Amsterdam. This is my third trip to SOSUEU, of which the second to Amsterdam. All three took place over the last year since I caught up with the summer edition in Tallinn as well. This trip, however, was unique, because I appeared as a speaker for the first time!

The conference itself once again amazed me but also surprised me! Why did it amaze me? The level of expertise was extremely high, as always. The number of participants was also impressive – over 400 people came to Amsterdam. As if that wasn’t enough, I received a huge dose of knowledge and inspiration. And there was also good fun 🙂

And why did the conference surprised me? Because under the Sourcing Summit brand, three large conferences were organized in Europe, each of which is slightly different from the rest – and all within one year! Last year in Amsterdam, many topics concerned the use of artificial intelligence in sourcing, automation and all kinds of tools at the cost of the “soft”, more human aspects of sourcing.

After this edition, I even wrote that the industry went crazy about tools. Almost every speaker took it as a point of honor to say something about the tools they use.

This year, the emphasis was spread exactly on the contrary – we talked much more about how to involve a candidate in the recruitment process than about how to find him and what role tools and robots play in it.

In my opinion, the two best presentations were Julia Jolkin’s “Closing the deal with relocation” and Laura González’s “Using psychology to improve sourcing power.” Both strongly discussed the use of soft skills and sales elements in the work of sourcer. And there were many more presentations about it, which I personally appreciate. In my opinion, it is as important as effective identification of candidates, and we talk about it even less.

I added my presentation on sourcer training to the pool of topics related to soft skills. I talked about what to look for when employing sourcers and how to train and mentor them so that they achieve high efficiency in a short time.

Why did I choose this topic in the first place? One of the things we’re – at Humeo – most proud of is our on-boarding process for new recruiters. It is a well structured and tested process – using it, we introduced 5 new people to our company this year.

As it turned out, there are more agencies in the world than just Humeo facing the challenges of implementing new employees. Therefore, the topic aroused great interest and brought great value to conference participants. Several people came to thank me for my presentation, with a few I got into a longer discussion about my speech. We were exchanging insights on our solutions.

By the way – about how our on-boarding process looks like and why it is so cool, you will soon be able to read on our blog 🙂

As you can see, this year’s Sourcing Summit turned more strongly towards the soft aspects of sourcing. This is as important as effective identification of candidates. Often, thanks to good soft skills, even better results can be achieved than with the help of research skills. Although, of course, it’s best to be good at both 😉

And what is the forecast for the future?

I will quote a conversation in which I took part:

What do you think we’ll be talking about at this conference in 10 years?
I think that we will be talking about the same – about the identification of candidates and about their effective involvement in the recruitment process.

This year it was the second one, we’ll see what the next year will bring 😉