Global Talent Search

People are up in arms over the fact that some technical sourcer from Meta is paid $100k per annum. How are technical sourcers different from your run-of-the-mill HR personnel?

A technical sourcer from Facebook reached out to me (based in Singapore) over LinkedIn a few years back to apply for a role based in the US. The role eventually went to a well qualified person (based in France) who has published research and spoke at conferences. I follow her blue ticked twitter account (back when blue tick actually meant something) and that is how I know that she got the job. She was clearly a better candidate and one of the top talents in the field. To get top talent, you need to do a global search and outreach. Not everyone is looking for a job all the time, not everyone is searching job portals in other countries, but they may be interested in trying if a good opportunity arises. Most run-of-the-mill HR personnel simply post a job in the job portal and sit around waiting for applicants. After a supposed "global talent search", some manage to find these global talents right in our backyard, fresh out of the military.

Secondly, the role which I was approached for was directly relevant to my experience, so the technical sourcer had good understanding and was able to filter down the list of candidates and not waste the hiring manager's time doing the filtering. I have had my fair share of recruiters spamming me with job opportunities that are irrelevant to my domain or of a vastly different seniority compared to where I was at. As a hiring manager, I have had recruiters dump CVs which are totally irrelevant to the position I am hiring for. It is a waste of the hiring manager's time to weed through piles of CVs and shortlist less than 1 in 10 CVs for interview.

In short, if the HR personnel is simply posting a job description in various job portals and dumping all the CVs received into the hiring manager's inbox (because I am HR and I don't understand all these technical stuff), it requires far less skill and thus they are rightly compensated far less that a well networked technical sourcer who trawls through LinkedIn connections to find suitable candidates to extend an offer to interview.