Professional Documents
Culture Documents
5 Candidate
Sourcing Strategies
for Modern Recruiters
CONTENT
3 Introduction
INTRODUCTION
As a recruiter you always wish for talented candidates to come across your job posting. But, in this candidate driven market where most of the
talented candidates already have a job there is a huge possibility that the right talent might be interested working in your organization but is just
unaware about the vacancy. This is why traditional candidate sourcing from job boards don’t always work.
Most recruiters have backup plans when it comes to sourcing candidates. But, even after keeping multiple contingency plans for sourcing
candidates, the results are not always encouraging because traditional candidate sourcing methods are getting obsolete. There is a need for a
creative and proactive approach to create a breakthrough sourcing idea. With more attention to passive sourcing coupled with a change in
recruitment strategy from requisition style sourcing to community building, you can select the best candidates for the vacant position.
So does your candidate sourcing strategy need an overhaul? To find out that answer you need to dig deeper and ask these questions:
Are you limiting your candidate sourcing and attraction strategy to posting job descriptions on job boards?
Are you using the same strategies again and again in the hope that it will lead you to better results?
Are you avoiding to learn about new sourcing strategies and methods?
Are you overly dependent on manual process for all your work?
If the answer to most of these questions is yes, then there is a need for you to overhaul your candidate sourcing and attraction strategy.
To help you in the process, we have listed down 5 candidates sourcing strategies that can take you forward in your journey to eventual recruiting
stardom.
But this will not happen overnight and you will have to work tirelessly but it is important to start working towards it immediately. Simply having a career site
is not enough in today’s time. It is important for organizations to invest in their career site by writing relevant content and job information along with
enriching the employee experience and company culture.
SEO
Passive candidates are always waiting for an opportunity to subscribe to job alerts. Think about how
travel related consumer sites post alerts when their plane fare drops during the off season. In the same
way, you can use job alerts to attract great talent. Research shows that for job alerts. According to a
survey by Indeed, “44% of candidates are subscribed to job alerts.”
Have a page on your career site that talks about diversity and equal rights
Most of the organizations today talk about diversity and equal rights, but most of them are not
working on it. If you have a page on your career site that provides relevant information pertaining to $
diversity and equal rights it can create a positive impression amongst candidates, which can go a long
way in making them think about joining your organization.
Select the job boards that are right for your business
Every recruiter faces the problem of budget limitations. This makes it all the more important for you to spend your time on resources that make most
sense. Search for those job boards that can help you find the most qualified candidates as investing in such job boards will bring about a higher return
on investment.
It has generally been observed that large, mainstream job boards assist in attracting several qualified candidates. Use CareerBuilder, Glassdoor, Indeed or
Monster and then compare which one of these gives you the most qualified candidates.
Specialized job boards are specifically designed for a particular industry segment or business function. If you are looking to hire sales people, opt for job
boards like SalesHead.com to source quality sales people. Similarly, you can post on local job boards like Nexxt that help you reach candidates who reside
near your business. It is important to look for a niche job board that can work best for your business.
There are certain job descriptions that promote the job and not the organization. This is where recruiters go wrong. In a good job description the focus
should be on the challenges and outcomes for that position in that organization. Don’t just furnish the information pertaining to the job responsibilities
alone. Instead, try to answer questions like “Why should candidates join your organization?” and “What are the different challenges that they are going to
face after joining?”.
Set the tone right straight away with a perfect job title
Catch the attention of the candidates through a brief, engaging summary of the job
Be specific while outlining the job responsibilities
Clearly state the desired experience
Provide an overview of the organization
Give useful insight about the package being offered
You will have to use emails and spreadsheets which requires lots of manual administrative
work which can easily become cumbersome and confusing.
Never think about procrastinating this idea just because you think that it will require a big referral scheme from your side. The key is to remember that top
talent knows other top talent so it is likely that your high performing employees can provide you information pertaining to a great talent that can be
suitable for the position you are hiring for.
No wonder then, that employee referrals are one of the most successful hiring channels for recruiters. According to a research by Deloitte, 51% of recruiters
rank referrals as one of their top sources of hiring. Starting an employee referral program is one of the easiest things to accomplish. But, if you want good
employee referrals it will be totally dependent on the way you promote your referral program and the way the program is received by your existing
employees. Given below are 7 ways you can make your referral program a huge hit by maximizing your candidate sourcing efforts.
Build a
talent community
According to a research conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management, an organization with more than 1,000 employees spends approximately
$ 4,285 per hire. These organizations hire around 550 employees on a yearly basis, which means roughly $ 2.4 million is spent on recruiting. One way for
organizations to save their time and money in the recruiting process is by building a talent community. Let us look at some basic steps of creating a great
talent community.
There are two options available to you for building a Talent Community - Invest in build a native community or create groups on social networking sites. You
can create groups on Linkedin and Facebook and start inviting users to join. If you are planning to use a third party website for creating your community,
ensure that there are enough members of your target audience there and you can target them easily.
It is also critical for you to engage your group with relevant content about your
organization or industry. You can do this by:
Emailing your organizations news and milestones on top of the regular new job alerts that will keep your
group interested in your community and they will keep coming back for more;
Encouraging the group members to discuss their opinions by sharing their thoughts;
Posting a smart comment about an important industry trend can initiate out-of-the-box ideas and
top-quality thinking about the topic at hand;
Sending them a weekly or monthly update email with new product releases, interesting things that your
employees did recently, job fairs or other job related events that your organization is hosting / attending;
Encouraging the members to share the interesting posts on their social media networks;
Ensuring that there is a regular communication with the group members so that they remain engaged
with your community for a long time.
After building a talent community, you cannot just sit on it and let it turn into the recruitment version of a slush pile. Periodically review
the people in the community and see which one best fits for the latest positions in your organization. Once you see the right talent, send
the job to the person through email and ask them to apply for the position. The right person will thank you for your time and effort to
reach out to them. This will give you much better applications in return. Always make it a point to check on a regular basis if a person is
qualified enough for your latest opening.
The primary reason to opt for Recruiter Lite is it provides visibility of user
activity across different licenses. This helps you to ensure that the same
candidate is not contacted by multiple recruiters from your organization
which will obviously hurt your recruitment efforts.
Apart from the advantage of InMails, with the help of this LinkedIn premium
feature you can take advantage of Projects, Clipboards and Reports to
organize your time effectively. With the help of projects it is possible for you
to group users together under a specific heading like Project Managers in
Auckland. From there you can see the number of people contacted and
those who have responded. Reports allow you to track the usage of LinkedIn
account in terms of volume searches, InMails and daily logins.
It is also possible for you to share and discuss profiles with other recruiters
and hiring managers in your organization.
This way you will not have to run after candidates and conduct interviews for those who have no knowledge
about your organization or do not have any motivation except for collecting paychecks every month for the
position they are hired.
CONCLUSION
Candidate sourcing is an art that needs to
be learned by recruiters. In fact modern
recruiters need to don the role of sourcers
before initiating the recruitment process.
Before we sign off, here are some
concluding points for you to remember.
Connect with potential candidates by meeting them in professional events and let them know about the brands you are willing to work for. This should
include the rejected candidates as you can get an opportunity to discuss with them about their future plans. This way you will be able to create and
maintain a positive employer brand in their minds.
We hope the candidate sourcing strategies we have discussed in this ebook will give you ideas on sourcing the right candidates faster and easier and help
you become a successful recruiter.
What is Talentnow?
Talentnow is a technology leader in recruitment software
domain and has helped several leading organizations
seamlessly manage quality manpower recruitment. RecruitX is
a SaaS based ATS product from Talentnow which is built
exclusively for recruitment agencies and staffing companies.