The Secrets of Sourcing in South America........
Let me get all Mary Poppins on you and say "Pish Posh - there's nothing to sourcing in South America." Seriously - if you can source in the U.S. (construct a strategy, create Boolean string in the U.S.) you can source internationally. And I can't think of a better place to test out your strategy than in South America - in fact, let's use Brazil in our example! And I know you're concerned about the language barrier. To that I say, what language barrier? They don't exist with the many free translators online.
Before we get too deep into this subject, this all came about from one of the AIRS Sourcing Report's gentle readers - each month I invite anyone to send me a question or search they're struggling with and
I take it on. I heard recently from one of our readers who wanted to source SAP consultants in Brazil.
Well shoot, I haven't done that, but I have sourced for a ton of different openings and researched global internet networking sites, so I thought I might have a few ideas to get him started. I am a firm believer in a multi-pronged sourcing strategy, so it's definite that I would suggest investing in job boards, and I would also utilize country specific search engines like Yahoo! Brasil - but that's not our focus right now. Let's look at some additional ways to find candidates south of the equator.
First off, I'm an XRay fiend - as if you haven't figured that out by now from my posts on sites like ERE! I use the site: command ALL the time. I love it - it's one of the quickest ways to glean information off of the internet. So, as I'm considering the options to source for this SAP Consultant, I build a few quick strings. They go a little something like this:
site:br sap consultant (cv OR vitae OR resume OR profile OR bio)
site:br sap consultant (member OR attendee OR employee OR staff OR list OR directory OR alumni)
site:br inurl:cv sap
Why am I using site:br? Because I am asking the search engine to locate my string's search terms within Brazilian domains. I don't want results from the UK or Australia or anything like that! I just want documents coming from a .br domain for Brazil.
But wait a minute - let's look at those strings for a minute - I'm not a native of South America, but did study Spanish and Italian in high school and college. My common sense is nagging me that while "SAP" will be "SAP" in Portuguese (the language of Brazil - don't assume it's Spanish!), I'm concerned "Consultant" might mean something slightly different. With that in mind, I'm going to Google Translate to get the right version of the word for Brazil. Guess what? I found I may have better luck using the word "consultor"! I'll just substitute that for consultant - or better yet make it an "OR" statement in my string to improve my results. Here's my new string:
site:br (consultant OR consultor) (resume OR cv OR vitae OR profile OR bio)
And what about the Big Daddy of professional networking - LinkedIn? I have some other sites from an international perspective that I would utilize in my search - but that's another blog post. I built this simple string to XRay LinkedIn for our SAP Consultant:
site:linkedin.com/in (brazil OR brasil) sap
Fabulous results! I can certainly tweak the string further to delete directory results.
In a search like this, you also have to consider your Social Networking sites like MySpace and more importantly in Brazil - Orkut. You can XRay'em - use the LinkedIn XRay above as your model and substitute orkut.com and see what kind of results you get!
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