Delivering the Impossible: Who Could Have Predicted This?

When international travel stopped overnight, a sourcing and training business built around flying in for one-day workshops had to change completely, and fast. What follows is a working set of tools, habits and posting rules that replaced the old model, tested from a home office in Johannesburg during the hardest months of lockdown.

• Time management: The Pomodoro Technique broke long, uninterrupted screen time into 40-minute blocks with short breaks in between, using the Marinara Pomodoro Chrome extension as a reminder to actually stop.
• Scheduling: A free Calendly link ended the back-and-forth of finding meeting times across time zones. Other options mentioned include Sprintful and Focus.
• Communication tools: Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Slack and Discord each served a purpose, with Discord in particular offering a place to talk to other sourcers during a genuinely lonely stretch of lockdown.
• Sourcing software: SeekOut for tech sourcing and SourceWhale for running outreach campaigns became daily tools, automating tasks without losing the personal touch in messaging.
• Chrome extensions: uBlock Origin for blocking ads, an Auto Text Expander for canned LinkedIn replies, MultiHighlight for flagging keywords in search results, and ColorLinks for tracking which profiles have already been viewed.
• Personal branding: A commitment to posting on LinkedIn three times a week, built on a five-to-one rule: five posts that share industry knowledge or help others for every one post that asks for something. The approach replaced cold calling entirely for a year of new business.

Recommended reading includes The Robot-Proof Recruiter, Jan Tegze's Full Stack Recruiter, and the recent titles from Jonathan Kidder, alongside a running habit of adding new material to training content every week.

Your two greatest tools are your authenticity and your confidence, and being genuine and being a human being.

None of it required deep technical skill. The consistent thread is automating anything repeated more than twice, protecting focus during long stretches at a laptop, and staying visible online instead of waiting for travel and conferences to come back.