Candidate sourcing is
the process of searching for, identifying and contacting potential candidates
for roles you are either recruiting for or will be recruiting for in the
future. LinkedIn reports 90% of people are open to learning more about new
opportunities, but only 36% of candidates are actively searching for a new job.
Building an effective
sourcing strategy in recruitment is essential. Over 80% of companies currently
source proactively.
1. Create candidate persona to hire better
2. Source candidates who are similar to
your candidate persona
3. LinkedIn X-Ray Search
3. Find a way to connect with your leads
4. Craft your personalized message to
engage candidates
5. Always value the candidate’s time
6. Always nurture your passive leads
7. Mind passive
candidates
8. Keep track of your
sourcing and recruiting metrics
9. Build your
employer brand
10. Use social media
and various platforms
11. Don’t forget about employee referrals
12. Use AI in
sourcing
13. Final word: Experiment,
Experiment, Experiment
1.
Create candidate persona to hire
better: An ideal candidate persona helps you identify the right channel, message
and strategy to source more qualified candidates. Creating a candidate persona
is a multi-step collaborative process, so you would need to talk to your team,
hiring managers and do some research before you fix on a persona.
1.
Source candidates who are similar to
your candidate persona: These candidates can be present on a number of
platforms, however, depending on your candidate persona, you can choose a
platform(s) of your choice. If I am recruiting developers, I would choose StackOverflow or GitHub as a candidate source, whereas if I am recruiting designers, I am better
with Dribble or Behance. There are multiple tools out there using which you can enhance your
sourcing efficiency:
3. LinkedIn X-Ray Search: LinkedIn X-Ray search tool helps
you create boolean queries to do an X-Ray search on LinkedIn. It gives you a
list of LinkedIn profiles, which match your search criteria.
Recruiterflow Chrome Extension
Once you have a list of LinkedIn/Xing/Angel.co/GitHub/Behance
profiles, whom you want to reach out to, just use the Recruiterflow Chrome
Extension to import these profiles to Recruiterflow in 1-click. You can
not only import their personal details but professional details like
Experience, Education, Skills as well. Hence expand your search-
Sourcing candidates directly is
one of the top
recruitment priorities for organizations.
StackOverflow SQL query generator: When you are looking for a
developer, there’s no better plan to find them other than StackOverflow.
However, searching through StackOverflow is not as simple as LinkedIn. In order
to search through StackOverflow, you need to build an SQL query. But even if
you are not a developer, you can this StackOverflow query generator to create
an SQL query by just giving some manual inputs.
4. Find a way to connect with your leads
Finding a set of perfect
candidates for a job is just the step in creating your talent sourcing strategy. Connecting with these leads and turning
them into applicants is the major objective of any sourcing exercise. First things first, decide which
channel to use to reach out to these users. I typically prefer LinkedIn messages to reach out to a sales guy vs
emails when it comes to reaching out to a developer.
Get their email if you want to
reach them through emails. You can use
tools like Hunter.io, ContactOut or Lusha to get their email address. In
case you want to reach out to them using social media, it’s always good to
connect with them using a mutual contact.
5. Craft your personalized message to engage candidates
One message doesn’s suit all.
This is true for recruitment! You need to personalize your message to
candidates to get more replies and enhance engagement. Talk about common
hobbies, common skills, why they are suitable for the role etc! Keep it short
and sweet and never try to oversell a position. Remember, these candidates are
not actively looking out and any overselling will only hurt your employer
brand.
You should talk about your
culture, team, vision and what drives your company in the 1st email.
One email is never enough,
depending on your position, you should always follow-up with your candidates. At Recruiterflow, we have seen reply
rates close to 45% for email sequences with 3 touchpoints and spread across 20
days. While your first email needs to be personalized, your follow-ups can
be templates and should be automated to help you save time.
6. Always value the candidate’s time
A number of companies excel at sourcing candidates and reaching
out to them. However, when it comes to the call to action in the email, they
lose out on a large number of qualified candidates. Your call to action should
always value the candidate’s time. Never ask them to:
·
Apply for a job as you are the one reaching out to them
·
Give a test before explaining on a call about the role and
recruitment process
·
Send their resume or cover letter in the first email as you
should have this information before you reach out to them
We studied close to 200k emails and the only thing that works
best is asking the candidate to come on a 10-15 mins call as per their
convenience, so that you can talk more about the role and the company. When you
are asking a candidate to spend the next 2-3 years of professional journey with
you, the least you can do is spend 10-15 mins with them initially to value and
appreciate their time.
7. Always nurture your passive leads
Sourcing
and recruiting passive candidates is always a
challenge. That’s why nurturing your existing candidate database is the key to
maintaining a healthy talent pipeline. Whether you are recruiting actively for
a job or not, you should always nurture your existing candidate database. Keep
them updated about the latest happenings at your company, wish them on birthday
and/or anniversary, reach out to them casually every 6 months. Nurturing your
candidate database ensures that when the next time your candidate is ready to
make a switch, they will surely reach out to you. Remember, recruiting is a
marathon and not a sprint.
8. Mind passive candidates
Be wary of spending your time on passive candidates. Of course, they’re a great potential
resource, but tread carefully and do your due diligence. Are they interested in
talking to you? Great! But if they’re not, don’t waste your time. For example,
if you’re looking at passive candidates, don’t be surprised to discover their
LinkedIn profiles are out of date. People who aren’t interested in new
opportunities have little motivation to update their profile and list all their
current skills and experience.
9. Keep track of your sourcing and recruiting metrics
Ask
yourself various questions and track different metrics, namely:
·
How many messages and communication attempts it takes to get an
initial response from a candidate.
·
Engaging with candidates you’ve found is often the most
overlooked step of the sourcing process. If you want to improve your reply
rate, you need to:
·
Get data on the types of messages that are actually effective.
·
Establish template analytics to see which ones get the most
responses.
·
Track emails and see when they’re being opened.
·
How long it takes to nurture a candidate and convince them to
apply for a role.
·
How long it takes from the initial interview of a sourced
candidate to hire.
·
Whether candidates that you’ve sourced move through the
screening and interview process faster than general applicants.
·
Where are the best candidates sourced from?
Essentially, monitoring metrics allows you
to build up a clear picture of where the top talent is hiding and how they like
to be communicated with, meaning you can then optimize your approach to
maximize your hiring success, saving you time and money.
10. Build your employer brand
Attract
potential talent by marketing your company towards your target group. When
you’re working on company branding to attract customers, figure out employer
branding too. Millennials are more inclined to work for and
stay at a company they have an emotional connection with, so give them
something to connect to. Check out these awesome killer
recruitment videos for ideas.
11. Use social media and
various platforms
Use social media and platforms to develop
your company branding. Instagram is a great platform for building employer
branding, for example.
Recruiters use social media to source candidates for various job levels, ranging from hourly employees
to upper management.
12. Don’t forget about employee referrals
The old staffing cliché rings true: “good
people know good people”. Referrals can be the top source for quality
candidates. Ask your employees for referrals, encourage them to refer
candidates who qualify for your roles and consider working up an employee
referral program as an incentive. Employee referrals are known to reduce
time-to-hire, improve quality of hire and
increase retention rates, so reward your employees with the money you save.
1.
Use AI in sourcing
Source from databases that use artificial
intelligence (AI). Sourcing can benefit from AI in two ways – automation and
accuracy. Automated sourcing uses recruitment technology to find candidates
online who fit the requirements of your role. This not only improves your
efficiency metrics but decreases time to fill and cost per hire as well. AI can
find patterns in resumes and candidates who are better matches for a job’s
requirements. AI can also reduce bias at the
sourcing stage by removing the need for human decision making.
14. Final word: Experiment,
Experiment, Experiment
Finally, remember
that sourcing strategies in recruitment are like snowflakes: no two are exactly
alike because what your organization requires will be significantly different
to what someone else wants.
Creating
a talent sourcing strategy is an iterative process. You should always run
multiple experiments for all the above 6 points and see what works and what
doesn’t work for your company. Define your KPIs before you start your
experiments and always benchmark your results and iterate for getting a more
efficient talent sourcing strategy. You can use tools like Tableau or an ATS
like Recruiterflow or even Excel to record and get these numbers.
Lastly it doesn’t matter whether
you’re running a recruiting agency or hiring in-house, trying to increase your
organization’s recruiting effectiveness, or just become a better recruiters
yourself, these data driven talent sourcing strategies will help you build a
better recruitment engine.
0 Comments