How to make a horrible sourcing party?

Maybe, it makes sense to explain what a sourcing party is. This is supposed to be a cool event that is generating a lot of leads/referrals from you tech teams. You close one IT team in the room and force them go to their social media profiles and see if they remember someone cool working with them in the past so they could refer them and get a bonus.

I am working with the best team at Zalando to grow it so they could be even bester ( I know this word doesn’t exist) I meant awesome :)

Luckily, I had Claudia next to me, my amazing colleague who gave me some tips on how to do my best such as:

• Book a room in advance
• Put a blocker on the teams calendar
• Make the team excited by sending the invite/ #sourcingparty #pizza #fun
• Order food
• Come with a great mood
• Have a party music selection

I decided I will follow the instructions and here is how I messed everything up:

1. I ordered pizza forgetting about the people who are allergic to gluten (thanks to Valeria who gave me the heads up I ordered salads last minute)
2. The pizza guy delivered pizza one day before the party ( I got really mad, I checked the dates twice while making the order) be sure you check in advance!
3. I sent the invite to the team the week before, I sent it to the team/group email, surprisingly, nobody responded with the email to it, I thought they just are shy as they don’t know me that well. What happened next is, the domain blocked me as I’m not the part of the IT team and nobody had the invitation in the calendar (please check with several team members if they have the invite in the calendars prior to the party)

I came to the office, waiting for the lunch time, the time of the party- it’s good as all of the team members are free and hungry, I picked up the pizza and nobody showed up. Yes, nobody! I was grateful to have Javier next to me who called the team to come that’s where the fun begun.

I had the excel sheet prepared so people could add the links to the profile there. I shared it in advance but didn’t make it public so people could edit. Lesson learnt. Also, some people didn’t have the computer with them- be sure you will mention they need it on the email twice !

Now the successes- My favorite team had some pizza and added 70 profiles to the file. Amazing Frontends, Backends, Data profiles! I finally know them and they finally know I'm not that scary :)

How did we do it? Each of the developers was thinking of the best female developers they used to work for, great peers from uni, ex jobs and they gave the contacts to them to me. #teamup

Referrals are the best way to get the best in your teams, don’t screw your party and learn from my mistakes.

PS: the funny part, at the party we conducted with Julia before, Zalandos called the event “Sell your friends for pizza” (yes, developers do have great sense of humor)

Happy recruiting,

Anastasiia