Sourcing Challenge Show · Épisode 54 — vingt ans dans le sourcing

En mai 2020, Mark Lundgren — formateur, speaker international et hôte du Sourcing Challenge Show, m’a invité pour le 54ème épisode de son podcast. L’occasion de revenir sur mon parcours : d’une maîtrise en littérature à un master en RH, pour finalement depuis vingt ans chercher des gens d’autres ne trouvent.

On parle de tout : mes débuts en 2000 avec un annuaire et un téléphone fixe, le tournant 2013 quand je découvre le scraping via SourceCon, l’émergence de la communauté sourcing française, et ma stack d’outils, de Google CSE à PhantomBuster en passant par Octoparse et MixMax.

Dans cet épisode

Les débuts (2000) : Un stage trouvé par hasard après un cursus en communication et RP. Les premiers mois en ombre d’une sourceuse senior, (on parle de chargée de recherche à l’époque ! , mon premier brief solo (un manager de production en Alsace, les pages juanes et un minitel… comme seuls outils), et la première victoire après trois mois. À l’époque, chaque numéro de téléphone personnel est une conquête et une victoire.

Le tournant 2013 : Ma découverte de SourceCon avec Dean da Costa, les premières sessions de scraping, et la prise de conscience que la quantité de données ne remplace pas la réflexion sur ce qu’on veut vraiment.

Premier scraping : la communauté Kaggle française en entier : 1 600 profils. Résultat : “Qu’est-ce que j’en fais ?”

La communauté française : La solitude des premières années, puis la découverte d’une tribu au Sourcing Summit UK en 2018. Le développement progressif de la communauté en France : Link Humans France, la Slack community Recruiter’s Kitchen, les events mensuels à Paris.

Le stack outils : Google CSE → Octoparse (scraping + repeat actions) → PhantomBuster (enrichissement email) → MixMax (outreach multicanal : email, SMS, téléphone). Un process séquentiel, semi-automatisé, pensé pour tourner sous surveillance.

Sourcer en France pour des non-francophones : Deux conseils pratiques : maîtriser les déclinaisons masculin/féminin des prénoms et noms de famille, et toujours prendre contact en français en premier.

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Transcript

Transcription nettoyée depuis l’auto-génération YouTube. Quelques passages ont été reformulés pour la lisibilité mais le sens est fidèle à l’original.

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Mark Lundgren : Welcome to episode 54 of the Sourcing Challenge Show. I am your host Mark Lundgren. In this episode I sat down with Pierre-André Fortin from France and asked him how he got started in sourcing.

Pierre-André Fortin : I started in sourcing in 2000 — it was for an internship. I was preparing to access a master’s degree and before that I had a Bachelor in literature, which is quite different from recruiting and human resources. So I decided to make a shift during my studies and go on an internship. I had an experience in communication and PR, cold-calling journalists, convincing them to come to press meetings. So I looked for another opportunity and found a posting about sourcing. They said people coming from communication and PR were welcome, so I applied, got an interview, and they explained the job: finding people and convincing them to come in for an interview against a specification. On paper it sounded good.

I started the internship and during the first fifteen days I was shadowing a senior researcher. She was amazing : she did a lot of sketching. At that time there was no internet worth speaking of, so everything was by phone: identify people, call them back, try to have a conversation. It was a game, a sort of game.

After fifteen days they gave me my first brief: a production manager for a large retailer in the east of France. Really tough, nothing but a Yellow Pages book. After three months I succeeded. I was very happy. Every phone number, every personal contact felt like a victory. It was completely different from today, where in half a day you can find the right person. We had to manage scarcity back then.

After that I moved to a different type of profile — finance and banking. The job was completely different: no open position, just convincing people it could be interesting to talk to my partners. At the end of my internship I said: “Never again. I’ll never go back to recruitment.” I went back to school, finished my master’s, and arrived on the job market in 2001 — right into the first internet crisis. With a literature bachelor’s and an HR master’s in France, it wasn’t easy.

A friend of my stepfather had an editorial company looking for a researcher, so I went back into search. But it was completely different: he specialized in marketing research and my first assignment was a scientific director — someone between statistics, informatics, and data processing software. A data scientist, basically. That was fascinating.

What I love about this job is that it’s a bit like being James Bond. You go under the radar, you understand what companies do, what positions mean — you tour different organizations and try to target the right people. That’s been the goal at every firm I’ve worked for.

I stayed in search, then four years later moved to a different firm. And I’m still in recruitment twenty years after. I love it.

The real turning point was 2013. I was at my first firm as associate director during a difficult economic period, so we had to be creative with budgets. I discovered SourceCon through Jean de Costa. I started training myself — going deeper into English-language resources, going deeper into the web. In France at that time there wasn’t much on the topic, but it was a start.

I discovered it was very, very fun. I’m a geeky guy. I did my first scraping session and it was a complete paradigm shift. In 2000 you had to manage data scarcity: after one month you had fifty names in your notebook and that was a victory. When I discovered scraping, you could manage hundreds of people in a very short time.

The challenge changed: instead of finding enough people, you had to manage evidence — enrich the right data. Because when you go on a scraping session, you have to understand what you really want in the end. The first time I scraped, I pulled the entire French Kaggle community : 1,600 people. I said: “I’ve got everything.” And then: “What do I do with this?” So yeah, it was fun - but I learned to be more mature about data processing: what do I actually want, where am I going?

Mark : Having been in the community since 2000, you’ve seen the growth of sourcing in France. From a European — even global — point of view, France has produced a lot of strong sourcers. What happened in France that made sourcing something people were serious about?

Pierre-André : The researcher role is an old job. My first job in 2000 and today — it’s still the same goal, but completely different in practice. The goal is still finding people with a specific specification. But today the market is a candidate market — it has been in France for two or three years now — so sourcing is on the spotlight.

What changed for me personally was the community. When I was younger in the job, I suffered from loneliness. You do the work but you’re alone. I discovered some blogs around 2013, then a community. The first event I attended outside France was Sourcing Summit UK in 2018. A friend, David Sangar, said: “Come see.” I had already met Aleksandra Beka in Paris, who told me: “There’s this event, you have to come.” I went, and I discovered people speaking the same language as me. It was incredible.

When I came back to France, a community was starting to form. LinkedIn Humans France started organizing events more frequently. I met Morgan and others, conversations started. Then a Slack community arrived — led by Emily from Amazon, I think about eighteen months before this recording — then Recruitment Kitchen. It started to grow. We now try to organize a meetup every month in Paris. The community is young, mostly people entering the industry who want to learn, and that’s exactly where community accelerates knowledge transfer.

Mark : Beyond scraping — what does your sourcing tool stack look like?

Pierre-André : My go-to scraping tool is Octoparse. It’s not the simplest tool but I love it because it’s a scraper that can also run repeat actions. For example, when you have a site map you can scrape all the URLs and say “go” — and it crawls through all of them automatically. Very fast.

My process starts the same way the job always has: first, target your market — which are the leading companies? Then chart the titles. Once you have your company list and title list, you start matching.

I use Google Custom Search Engines and process the results with Octoparse. It’s semi-automatic — I set it up, let it run, and come back. For enrichment I use PhantomBuster to collect emails. Coverage depends on the region — sometimes around 30% — so I need to supplement with Network Booster and LinkedIn email extraction.

Then MixMax for outreach. I’ve been using it for four years and I’m happy with it. The analytics are solid. You can mix email, SMS, and phone campaigns. There’s a sequencing logic: when a step doesn’t get a response it moves to the next channel. I had one campaign where seven out of seven people responded — mix of email, SMS, and phone.

Mark : If you’re not a French recruiter and you’re asked to source people in Paris — what differences should you think about?

Pierre-André : Two things. First, in French there are different spellings for female and male names — you have to be intuitive about those variations. Second, when you contact people, it’s better to do it in French. In France, people respond better to French-language outreach. Of course it depends on the audience, but in general first contact in French is the right call.

Mark : If people want to keep in contact with you and see what you’re writing, how can they best do that?

Pierre-André : On LinkedIn. And I have my own blog at anara.fr where I write both French and English articles.

Mark : Thank you, Pierre-André.

Pierre-André : Thank you, Mark.