When it comes to hiring the right people, an efficient sourcing strategy is critical. This is especially relevant in today’s extremely competitive talent market. In fact, according to a Monster global report, 9 out of 10 employers struggle to fill jobs - with nearly 30% of them agreeing that the skills gap has increased over the last years. If this trend continues, companies must find ways to attract and retain top candidates from a limited talent pool.
While the idea of sourcing candidates is nothing new, many employers still find it challenging to implement sourcing strategies effectively. On average, recruiters spend almost ⅓ of their workweek sourcing candidates for a single role. Nevertheless, this and other candidate sourcing issues can easily be fixed with the right approach. In this article, we will give you a simple, five-step process for efficient candidate sourcing.
Create a Candidate Persona
It is impossible to find the right candidate without a clear understanding of what personal and professional traits the ideal candidate should possess. Therefore, the first step in designing your sourcing strategy must be the creation of candidate personas. It will give your sourcing and recruitment strategy more direction. By knowing your organizational needs, you can build the ideal candidate image based on data surrounding previously successful hires within a specific position or department. A candidate persona should include factors such as skills, employment history, educational background, personality traits and career goals.
Identify the Best Sources of Talent
While traditional sourcing strategies might work well for everyday hiring needs, they don’t always connect recruiters to specialized talent. Therefore, it is essential to consider various sources of talent when looking for the right candidate.
As part of your sourcing strategy, create a list of candidate sources that can connect you to top talent. Depending on your industry, these sources can be places like online communities or niche job sites.
Create an Outreach Plan
After creating a candidate persona and identifying potential sources of candidates, you’ll want to create an outreach plan to attract talent. First of all, determine which outreach channels to use. The common mistake of many recruiters is that they reach out to potential candidates via personal channels such as Facebook, Instagram, or messenger apps like Telegram. When reaching out to passive candidates, it’s always better to use traditional channels, like email and Linkedin.
Plan on using personalized messages while reaching prospective candidates. Although they usually take more time than generic messages, they are much more likely to get a better response rate.
"A successful outreach message has three key characteristics: it's personalized, it's relevant, and it takes the candidate's career goals into account. You can't send a bulk email that does that. And even if a candidate isn't interested in the opportunity, it's still worth the investment to send a thoughtful outreach message because it can work as a connection for future referrals or pipelining."
Norma Jean McClain, President of TekChix
Always Nurture Passive Candidates
About 73% of candidates in the job market are passive candidates. If you are only searching for active candidates, you are missing out on many talented professionals. Other benefits of targeting passive candidates include less competition, less pressure on the process, and higher quality of hires. Passive candidates are statistically more likely to be highly qualified and require less training. Therefore building and maintaining a healthy talent pipeline is essential to efficient recruitment.
Whether you are recruiting actively or not, you should always nurture your candidate database. Candidate nurturing will help you develop a strong talent pipeline and hire top candidates by building long-lasting relationships with passive candidates. Keep people in your database updated about the open roles and reach out to them at least every six months. Engaged passive candidates will surely reach out to you when ready to change the job.
Implement Technology
Candidate Sourcing can benefit from technology in two ways - automation and accuracy. Recruitment tools source candidates both internally and externally, saving recruiters hours of time. Technology not only decreases time and cost per hire but also improves efficiency metrics. In fact, 68% of recruiters believe investing in recruitment tech is the best way to improve hiring performance.
Sourcing tools can automate processes such as keyword searches, which saves a significant amount of time for hiring managers. For example, Employa allows users to set unlimited search criteria and prioritize them for more accurate results. Employa can also automatically asks candidates questions to fill in the information gaps in resumes, sends personalized messages, and shares feedback with candidates to leave a positive impression. With tools like Employa, candidate sourcing can become much more efficient so that recruiters can dedicate more time to more valuable hiring tasks such as interviewing candidates.