Candidates are the fuel that keeps recruiting happening. Simply put, if you don’t have candidates in your pipeline, you won’t get anywhere far! In recruiting, typically this is remedied by a thing called sourcing. Instead of receiving job applications or passively adding candidates from network websites or job boards, this is a little more active.
By going through your network and digging a little deeper, you can often find great candidates that would be great additions to a pipeline objective. By contacting these individuals and initiating a conversation, you can start off a great relationship and get them into your recruiting funnel in no time.
Why Sourcing should be a big part of your recruiting process
According to a LinkedIn study on global talent trends, around 90% of professionals want to hear from recruiters. However, many of them resort to job board postings, social media and referrals in finding their next career move. Often, candidates are passively searching for job opportunities, not giving much thought to what they may want to do next.
Engaging in proactive sourcing is something that over 80% of companies have been doing to take advantage of this knowledge gap. The information and job opportunities are out there for many individuals, sometimes it just takes the connecting and learning stages to really take place to make it a reality.
Sourcing also gives you a competitive advantage in terms of keeping up with the top talent and diversity that is out there. For a company that only hires individuals who are actively applying, the company could become pretty uniform in its process. With an alternative route to talent and DE&I, it is something that every recruiter should partake in.
Talent Sourcing Strategies to Use
LinkedIn
The social media platform for business professionals has become the one-stop location for those seeking to learn more about where the candidates in a certain market are. By looking through entire networks of professionals, you can easily filter by location and job titles – making it really easy to start your sourcing process.
Specialized Third-Party
To supplement what you find on LinkedIn, there are often other third-party sourcing tools to help you find specialized or hidden talent that can’t be easily found. Top talent sourcing tools such as TopFunnel, Sourceress, Entelo and Hired are some of the top sourcing tools that recruiters use. For a number of recruiters, these are also ways to help initiate their search for more diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace.
An Applicant Tracking System
For many companies, having some sort of recruiting software is a no brainer. With the amount of hiring and applicants that usually need to be filtered through to find candidates with great fit – recruiting software helps you refine your recruiting process. With features like candidate tracking records, pipeline tracking, database searching and more, companies and recruiters alike are turning to ATS systems to streamline their recruiting.
Email Campaigns
In many industries that do outreach, creating messaging through email still definitely works in 2021! Whether you’re utilizing LinkedIn for its networking or keeping track of candidates in some sort of software, combining these efforts with email can be a really strong driver for recruiting success. Making sure that you take note of the different strategies that come with email outreach is really important too. Noting things such as optimal send times, subject lines, pre-text markup and obviously the content of the email itself. When each step in this process is improved, it benefits your open rates and reply rates overall. So don’t forget about email, as many people check their inboxes regularly for both professional and personal messages.
Employee Referrals
One place many recruiters forget to look to network is internally. There are often so many different people with a great big network of people who would be qualified to fill a position. According to this LinkedIn study, referrals are almost 4x as likely to be hired, with 82% of employees rating it the best sourcing option in terms of ROI. Think about it: if you had the chance to ask your close network of people if they could fill a job opening, imagine how much quicker you could make that placement. This means time and resource saving in the long run, bringing greater financial success to your business.
Conclusion
In recruiting, there are many steps to making your placements or hiring on new team members. It all depends on where you focus your time and energy. This is often one of the very first things that needs to be done in order to complete your recruiting process. Fundamentally, sourcing is needed and can be challenging at times. By utilizing these different channels and techniques, you can find new ways to make sourcing easier, thereby making your recruitment process more efficient.