Any sourcing ideas please.....

[Fiona Nelson-Lafuse]

I am looking for Sales Directors and Sales Engineers for a SmartGrid vendor for SE Asia. The candidates must have AsiaPac experience... and I have so far tried Conferences and competitors. I still have blogs, professional associations, Speaker bio's etc plus I connected with several people on linked in I think may have contacts in the niche.This company has already had another recruiter mine LinkedIn, so the people I'm looking for are going to be very hidden candidates. I would love ideas for search strings or other options please. I am thinking of HongKong, Singapore,Australia, New Zealand, possibly also the US, Europe and maybe South Africa.

Any suggestions very gratefully received!

Fiona

[Jody Davis]

Not sure why Sales Professionals would be considered hidden candidates.

Three things I would do

1) assume the other recruiter missed alot of profiles.Also it really comes down to timing and how you approach a candidate.  What was the method the other recruiter used?  Did they send them emails directly to their work OR call them?  Did they search each country?  Here is an example boolean string for New Zealand:

site:nz.linkedin.com/in site:nz.linkedin.com -pub.dir sales (engineer OR support)  Asiapac OR "Asia Pacific"

Also, search on groups within Linkedin that these people will join.

2) find professional associations is a great idea.   for each country or international

The owner of this site seems to be very resourceful:  http://www.thesalesengineer.com/

3) general CV and Resume search 

Good luck

[Fiona Nelson-Lafuse]

Thanks very much for your ideas Jody.

I agree with you totally on the hidden candidate thing, but for some reason these particular sales guys don't want to be found... I tracked one down in Indonesia who has nothing in their profile on Singapore Linkedin, public or on the site, and doesn't seem to appear anywhere else on the net that I can find so far.

I don't know anything about the other recruiter except that they told the client they had mined linkedin and their personal networks, which as you say definitely doesn't mean they know a lot about searching and they may have missed profiles.

Thanks again!

Fiona

Jody Davis said:

Not sure why Sales Professionals would be considered hidden candidates.

Three things I would do

1) assume the other recruiter missed alot of profiles.Also it really comes down to timing and how you approach a candidate.  What was the method the other recruiter used?  Did they send them emails directly to their work OR call them?  Did they search each country?  Here is an example boolean string for New Zealand:

site:nz.linkedin.com/in site:nz.linkedin.com -pub.dir sales (engineer OR support)  Asiapac OR "Asia Pacific"

Also, search on groups within Linkedin that these people will join.

2) find professional associations is a great idea.   for each country or international

The owner of this site seems to be very resourceful:  http://www.thesalesengineer.com/

3) general CV and Resume search 

Good luck

[Jody Davis]

Did you take in consideration that their titles will vary country to country.  Even in this country, their titles are different.

[Fiona Nelson-Lafuse]

I used Sales Director OR Sales Executive OR Sales Manager. Thinking about it, what i didn't use were the Account Manager type titles. Thanks for the help Jody.