How to Find the Right Talent: 12 Candidate Sourcing Strategies
Creating an excellent recruitment sourcing strategy is key to assembling the best team for the business – especially if you consider how competitive the job market is right now. Skilled specialists are in much higher demand than before, and seeing how difficult it is to find individuals with the right technical skills, it pays to create a sourcing strategy that can get ahead of these challenges.
Finding the right team member for the job is only one thing to consider in sourcing. Aside from filling in the skills gap, you also need to make sure that the people you attract to the job posting are a cultural fit for your company. Finding an employee that fits your company culture is essential to meeting your team’s maximum potential.
Seeing as how finding the right employee for your business is critical to its success, you may be wondering how to attract the right applicants for the job. The truth of the matter is that sourcing top talent for your company will require you to create an excellent sourcing strategy for recruitment, which we’ll tell you all about in this article.
What is Recruitment?
Recruitment and sourcing are two different things. Recruitment is the overall process of finding and hiring new employees for an organization. The process of recruitment starts from identifying if the company needs a new employee, posting job ads, conducting interviews to narrow down the pool of candidates, administering skills tests, and offering the best applicant the job.
Where Does Sourcing Come in in Recruitment?
Sourcing is a subtask in recruitment. As we’ve mentioned above, recruitment is a long process that involves finding and hiring new employees for an organization. Finding applicants for the job is sourcing.
Talent sourcing requires personnel to actively look for candidates who can match the needed job requirements. Sourcing will usually involve utilizing different platforms to attract candidates for the vacancy such as job boards, networking, and social media. Some recruitment personnel also tap into the company’s talent pool to fill their talent pipeline for current and future job vacancies.
Another important task that candidate sourcing specialists do is tap passive applicants who are not actively looking for a new job, but who are open to exploring new opportunities.
Following great sourcing strategy examples can help minimize the wait-time needed to fill a job vacancy, leading to smoother business operations.
What is a Sourcing Strategy?
The task of sourcing candidates is not an easy one. This is why you should work on your sourcing strategy and ensure that it’s in top form to attract high-quality candidates.
But before you start working on a new sourcing strategy, take some time to evaluate your current one, if you have one, and assess if you’re committing any of the mistakes we’ve listed below. If you don’t have a sourcing strategy yet, this section will help you avoid common sourcing strategy mistakes.
What are Common Sourcing Strategy Mistakes?
Lack of Long-Term Plans
Recruitment and sourcing are a long-term game. This means that a company should have its long-term plans in place and building your brand over the years should reflect these. You shouldn’t just be fixing your brand’s image for a short period of time. You should be implementing several initiatives in various aspects of the business to continuously paint your brand in a good light. If you focus on creating a positive brand image, you’ll find that it’s much easier to attract new applicants to your brand because they’ve already heard good things about you.
Ignoring Your Talent Pool
If you’ve been in the recruitment and sourcing industry for long, then you already know how important a talent pool is to your sourcing process. Talent pools are an excellent way to source candidates. Candidates in your company’s talent pool have already been vetted, so you may have a smoother and shorter recruitment process with these applicants.
Companies who have been in the market for long, usually have a talent pool ready. So, failing to utilize this resource can be a huge waste.
Balancing Must-Have and Nice-To-Have Qualifications
While a certain amount of specificity is required when posting jobs online, being too specific can also be a double-edged sword. Creating a very specific job description can limit the number of applicants for the job because they know that they don’t meet all the qualifications, which can also hinder you from finding applicants who may have the potential to grow into a role. Determine which qualifications are must-haves and nice-to-haves so you don’t miss out on potential candidates who may be a good fit.
Not Working with the Hiring Manager
Staying in alignment with your hiring manager is essential to sourcing the right candidates for the job. This is because hiring managers know the full scope of skills that are needed for the job, as well as the specific keywords that may be needed when making the job listing.
Work closely with hiring managers to give you clarity on whether the applicant may or may not be a good fit for the role. Over time, as you get more applicants for the job, try to stay in step with the hiring manager so you can adjust your sourcing strategy according to their feedback.
How Do You Improve Your Recruitment Sourcing Strategy?
Recruitment sourcing can be tricky to accomplish. So, don’t be disheartened if you don’t get it completely right on the first try. Sourcing candidates will take a lot of trial and error, and you’ll also need to hone your strategy over time. By the end of your sourcing process, you may end up with a very different strategy from what you started with.
Sourcing strategies are a living framework. As a company grows, so do its needs. These changing requirements are exactly why you should edit your strategy – to mirror company growth and to keep up with HR Recruitment’s demands.
If you’re looking to improve your sourcing strategy, here are some tips to help you:
1. Build Your Company Culture
Studies have shown that 69% of job seekers reject job offers from a company with poor branding. This just goes to show how much applicants evaluate a company’s branding when they’re applying for jobs. It makes sense seeing as how the new generation of workers prefer to work at a company that aligns with their values. This means that to keep your company a desirable option for applicants to work, you’ll need to build a healthy company culture and know how best to show its highlights.
A great way to talk about your brand’s culture and beliefs is by reflecting these on your company’s website, social media channels, and job ads. After all, showing – not telling, is the best way to go. By showing off these parts of your company, you’ll find that it’s much easier to attract high-quality talent because they see that your business aligns with what they believe in.
Go beyond talking about your company’s monetary successes. Talk about your company’s advocacies and what kind of workplace you offer to your employees.
2. Respond to reviews
It should be no surprise to hear that former employees are using websites like Glassdoor to review companies that they’ve worked in. Reviews posted on these websites can be read by anyone with an account, which means that these reviews are read by hundreds of people daily and it can shape their perception of your business. In some cases, it can even make or break an applicant’s decision to apply or accept a job offer from your company.
With hundreds of people reading these reviews daily, it’s best to simply respond with grace. We recommend responding to negative reviews and trying to address these on an internal basis. But, don’t forget to respond to these reviews kindly and to show everyone that you take these comments seriously.
3. Utilize Different Platforms
Nowadays, people aren’t just looking for jobs on job boards. People have also started taking to social media to find their next job. That being said, you may want to make sure that you optimize your job listings to appear on social media platforms as well.
Our tip? Try to find different industry groups where you can post your job openings. This is a great way to reach the right professionals and networks for the job.
4. Use Your Products and Services
When you’re sourcing candidates for the job, make sure to use all your assets to your advantage. One of the best assets you can utilize for this? Your company’s products and services.
If you believe that your company continuously puts out great products and services, then it’s only a matter of time before people start to notice and equate excellence with your brand. Using your products and services to market new openings can make your company much more attractive to candidates. So, don’t be afraid to use it.
If possible, partner with your marketing department and see how they can advertise any vacancies for your company to help with sourcing efforts.
5. Form Genuine Connections
If you’ve been sourcing candidates for a long time, you know that trust goes a long way and that one of the best ways to cultivate this is by building genuine connections. Having a genuine connection with your applicants can make sourcing and hiring candidates so much easier.
A great way to form genuine connections aside from networking is to update candidates about their applications – even if you reject them. Finding qualified candidates is hard enough, so don’t waste the opportunity to maintain relationships whenever you encounter one. This practice is essential to building your company’s talent pool and enabling a faster hiring process in the future.
6. Leverage Your Personal Network
Taking advantage of your personal network can make sourcing new applicants a breeze. The best part? Finding someone in your network can play to your favor because you already know this person to begin with – so you have an idea of whether they’re a cultural fit for your company or not.
Another benefit of using your personal network is that there’s already a level of trust on both sides, which can help streamline the hiring process.
7. Don’t Focus on the Checklist
During the sourcing and hiring process, you probably have a checklist of qualifications ready to make the process much easier. But remember, if you try to ensure that all the boxes are checked off – even if these requirements aren’t essential, you may miss out on a great candidate.
Don’t be too fixated on your checklists. Our recommendation? Make a checklist with the hiring manager and note down which qualifications are nice to have. This enables you to source a wider net for job applicants.
8. Make Attractive Job Ads
When you’re creating job ads for a vacancy, you need to make it look engaging. In the age of social media where eye-catching graphics and engaging copywriting are king, it’s easy for applicants to pass over your offer because they don’t find it intriguing enough.
Making attractive job ads can lead to an increased number of applicants. But of course, don’t just make it pretty. Make it informative too.
9. Talk About Pay and Benefits
A big deal breaker for job applicants is the pay and benefits that your company offers. We recommend that you address these issues as early as possible to ensure that you and the applicant are on the same page in terms of compensation.
10. Tap Previous Job Applicants
Using your company’s cultivated talent pool to your advantage can be a great way to source candidates for the job. A talent pool is usually a collection of applicants who have been vetted already but failed to meet the cut for the job. Tapping into this pool can lead to a faster hiring process.
If you’ve kept a good relationship with previous applicants by reaching out to them when their applications were rejected, you may just get a favorable response.
11. Listen to Feedback
Creating a candidate sourcing strategy isn’t just a one-time job. These strategies must be edited over time depending on the feedback you receive from hiring managers and managers to keep them effective. By listening to constructive criticism and implementing these changes, you can come up with a better strategy for a better sourcing process.
12. Use Referral Systems
Finally, making an employee referral program and implementing a referral system can be a great way to source candidates. Using your employees’ network can allow you to reach new groups and fresh talent.
By using a referral system, you can motivate employees to refer their friends and family for the job because they get compensated for their efforts. However, you need to make sure that you have a stable system that can keep track of these referrals like PasaJob.
PasaJob is a job referral platform that makes it easy for employees to refer their friends and family to job openings. They’ll get compensated for their effort and you get to speed up the hiring process. Now that’s a win-win.
Sign up today to register your business for PasaJob’s platform!
