Everyone was a candidate at some point in their lives. We have all been through it, no matter if we are helping people find jobs today. And from a recruiter’s perspective, just as it is hard enough for a candidate to find his dream job in a million companies out there, a recruiter’s job is just as hard, when it comes to candidate sourcing.
Recruiters in small businesses have to actually pick one person from a thousand candidates, sometimes even a million, if ATS or applicant tracking systems are involved. Though it can sound pretty scary to find the right person, HR consulting companies can take all that additional effort away and make it a lot less cumbersome for you. Let us now define candidate sourcing.
What Is Candidate Sourcing?
The proactive search for candidates to fill current and future job openings is called candidate sourcing. Recruiters typically use AI-powered sourcing tools or an ATS throughout the recruitment process, though the human element is what sets it above the par in professional HR consulting companies. In candidate sourcing, HR executives contact and prepare a list of potential candidates who can then be recruited by the organization.
Difference Between Sourcing and Recruiting
It’s like the difference between night and day. Just as night follows day beyond the sunset, recruiting comprises of next steps after candidate sourcing. But make note that you must get your employer branding and messaging right if you want to be great at candidate sourcing. That’s a lot of tactical and strategic thinking involved, which AI or other automated systems can help with, but cannot manage by themselves. In the next section, we will look at how we can source candidates for a job role in your company.
Challenges in Candidate Sourcing
Sourcing is not without its fair share of challenges. Some of these are attributed to causes within the company, some to the candidates, and others to the process itself. Some of the challenges are:
- Candidates uninformed of what the job entails
- Not enough time to procure the right candidates
- Number of applicants is low or they are of low quality
- Candidate unreachable most of the time
- Competitors want the same candidate, especially for executive roles
- Lack of visibility into how recruiters will make use of the opportunity
- Bias towards a particular group of candidates
- Unavailability of the right metrics
How to Prepare for Candidate Sourcing
1. Create an attractive employee value proposition (EVP)
How is your company different from the competition? What does your brand do to attract and retain talent? how great are your training programs and how is the work culture? How are your rewards and recognition programs? How great is the CSR and DEI initiatives of the company? Emphasise this in your brand communication across channels. Of course, there are elements of EVP that may be beyond your control such as the stability of your company in the market and the benefits and compensations which you offer, that may or may not be easy to control and are also dependent on the profits you make.
2. Make sure any development/promotion opportunities are advertised
When you’re promoting your vacancies, it’s important you highlight what progression the role can offer. Job searchers who know their skills are in demand can afford to be more selective in who they work for and if they’re thinking about their career path in the long run, they’ll be more attracted to a role that allows them to develop their skills and progress.
3. Your employees are your best brand ambassadors, make sure they’re selling you
Build a strong work culture that balances life and work. As Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. That is the importance of a great work culture, and it can transform your employees to become brand ambassadors, selling your company as a great place to work wherever they are. On the other hand, if the company culture is not that great or the salary and benefits dissatisfactory, they would not be motivated to spread a good word about you.
4. Promote your organisation’s values
Do you use social media to engage with clients and customers? Then it might be a good idea to promote your values on those channels where you engage most with the customers. For any one-way communication that emphasises how you are contributing to the world, through sustainability, ethical sourcing etc., use a website to post articles, blogs and press releases. If you want those top performers, then you must not only offer a great job but keep a great company ready and waiting for them.
How to Source Candidates
The candidate sourcing process follows initial planning and strategizing that was described in the previous section. After this begins the process of candidate sourcing, which has several steps. Let us now look at the steps in the candidate sourcing process.
1. Creating a candidate persona
This is how an ideal candidate for the job would look like. This includes the skills, interests, experience levels, and educational background of the ideal candidate. Human resources experts will create a persona document will all these features as a reference to begin the sourcing process.
2. Running the search
Once the candidate persona document is ready, you can start running searches based on the features that you have identified as being suitable for the position. If you are using an ATS, then you may need to identify keywords for each feature that you have listed. An instance of this could be: If you are hiring a programmer and one of the skills is debugging, then you can use keywords for tools that are used in debugging, in addition to the keyword ‘debugging’ itself.
3. Classifying leads
Sometimes the ATS or your team of candidate sourcing experts can come up with leads that may or may not be classified. You may need to classify the leads as being good, bad or even great. Sometimes the built-in AI in the ATS takes care of classification by analysing the received leads, retaining the top ones and rejecting the others. Such classification allows you to move to the next phase of establishing contact with the leads.
4. Connecting with leads
Once you have decided on the candidates that you will be contacting, you can then decide on the channels that you will be contacting them and the medium of communication. These methods would also depend on the contact information specified in the application, where the advertisement was posted, and the job role for which the candidate sourcing process was introduced.
5. Following up with personalized emails
If you do not receive a response when you send a message to a candidate, you must then send a personalized email inviting the candidate’s willingness to continue the job application. If the candidate is not willing to proceed further or if there is still no response from the candidate, you can mark the candidate(s) non-responsive and proceed with other candidates.
6. Reconnecting with passive leads
If active candidate sourcing is not working for you, then you could try reconnecting with passive candidates. These are those candidates you had considered for a role earlier but then had dropped before moving ahead with other candidates. The good thing about connecting with passive leads is that they would already be familiar with the needs of the job, your company profile, and the way you conduct interviews, making everything so much more streamlined.
7. Offline networking
This step may come a lot earlier than now and in conjunction probably with the digital search that you ran in Step 2. In this step, sourcing experts rely on offline networking to add more potentials to the talent pool. They might connect with friends who have expertise in this area asking for referrals or suggestion on what to look for in the ideal candidate and if needed begin the process at Step 1.
While these steps are to be followed for a sourcing endeavour, what matters most is the spirit to experiment. You must go back to the drawing board and decide if you must re-examine the skills necessary, see if you can include a bit of diversity in the role, and so on.
8 Strategies to Improve Candidate Sourcing
Candidate sourcing techniques are a dime a dozen you can find if you search the Internet. We have got you the best, so you benefit from our experience. Here are some candidate sourcing strategies or techniques you could use.
1. A recruitment database is your friend, or maybe not
A recruitment database can help you a lot when you are trying to source candidates. But be wary, if you contact candidates without their permission, you could be in a spot of bother. Better to ensure that they have opted in for communication from recruiters before you go ahead and mail them.
There’s another problem too. If the database is not accurate, you may be mailing or calling the wrong person too. Be ready to face such challenges.
2. Trust Trusty old social media to initiate your first contact
Social media is great as a conversation starter, but may not be for further follow-ups. How and when to transition from social media to emails is quite a skill by itself and something only a top sourcing expert would know.
3. Employee referrals could help you pick the best
A candidate referred by an existing employee could be the titan you need. They could be a lasting resource you could trust as much as your employee and turn to for the most challenging of tasks. And don’t forget to reward your employees well for their referrals.
4. Make your job posting stand out
Before you can attract the right candidates, you must have a great job description. Here are some tips that work:
Keep it short and simple. Do not write a very lengthy job description. Just keep it between 300 and 500 words.
Rely on a great opener but don’t get too creative. Sometimes a job description is too enticing. Pick your words carefully and keep it formal. A great hook is worth the thinking but then on rely on keywords.
Explain what is required on the job well. Your work is to make the task of recruitment easier so the candidate knows everything they are supposed to know. There should be no new information regarding the job that is provided by the recruiter, especially after the screening is over.
Explain the benefits well. What are the benefits of the role and that of working with your company? How great is the work culture and how friendly and forthcoming the people?
Put your jobs on the right boards. Make sure the job visibility is good by running searches on every job board with the keywords that your prospect is likely to use.
5. Diversify communication channels
You could always go back to the communication channels you prefer or pick a fresh one, that might yield some more information regarding the candidate and even offer a more personalized way of communication. Diversifying communication channels calls for quite a bit of an effort and here is where a recruitment firm shines, in picking one that is most apt for the role, the industry and the persona you are looking for. Talk to one today, and gain the benefits of expertise.
6. Assess internal talent
How good or great is the talent you already have on board? If you are recruiting a fresh person, how well would they complement those already on the team? What are the skills that are missing or in demand from your team? These are some crucial questions to ask before you hire a new person.
7. Build an effective candidate sourcing pipeline
Use AI if you have to or if you are convinced that it will bring business gains you cannot achieve otherwise. Source candidates not just for the present roles but also for strategic roles in the future. Plan ahead for any attrition by securing the right candidates to deal with it. In other words, always have a Plan B ready.
8. Network with the domain experts
There is no replacement for a domain expert. He/she can give insights into the job role that you would not have otherwise. This is especially true when you are hiring for a small business and this is a senior position. Keep your prospects close, but keep your experts closer.
Get The Right Sourcing Partner Today
Sourcing is the second step in the recruitment cycle and perhaps the most important of them all. You need a good sourcing partner for the planning phase which precedes sourcing, and then for sourcing itself and possibly a great recruitment firm to help you through the entire recruitment process.
The right sourcing partner can vastly improve the recruitment capability you possess, getting you talent that skyrocket your profits. A business is all about people and no one knows people as well as Alp Consulting, be it a small business or a bigger company it is providing HR consulting services for.
And it is with this intent that a subscription-based RPO has been started under the name of Rekpro. Want to know more about how a subscription-based RPO works? Talk to us today.
FAQs
What does sourcing candidates mean?
Sourcing refers to the process of searching for candidates to fill current and future job needs of the organization.
What is candidate sourcing software?
Candidate sourcing software simplifies the process of sourcing by automating several tasks for sourcing experts and using AI to shortlist great candidates from prospects, based on parameters provided.