Top Recruiting Sourcing Strategies | Talent Sourcing Hacks

Recruiting sourcing strategies, sourcing recruiting strategies, sourcing techniques for recruiters — Top Recruiting Sourcing Strategies

Introduction

Recruitment without any confusion has an important place in any organization involved in business activities. But in the current times, companies are prioritizing it, as it’s one of the most crucial activities. This automatically makes recruiting sourcing strategies vital for them as well.,

If you are a recruiter, it’s important for you to create and implement a good sourcing strategy. This strategy will help you gather information about a plethora of qualified candidates that may prove beneficial for your firm in the future.

An optimal recruiting sourcing strategy is beneficial as it makes the hiring efficient plus it assures higher candidate retention. In addition to all of these benefits, it lowers the chances of getting wrong candidates for open positions.

You can enhance the candidate engagement experience by simply carrying out effective sourcing strategies. So, let’s dive into what you need to do for getting everything up & running.

What are Recruiting Sourcing Strategies?

These strategies are the procedures that recruiters use in order to search & engage qualified candidates for current & future roles they might be suitable for.

When you plan effective sourcing strategies it opens the gate of a wide range of candidates.

These strategies improve your chances of getting the right ones for your organization who will stick with them for a long period of time.

How to Implement Recruiting Sourcing Strategies?

Here are the 16 best recruiting sourcing strategies used by major growing businesses. It helps them on day to day basis to recruit the perfect candidates faster, let’s check them out:

1. Band together with the hiring manager

Team up with your hiring manager in the very beginning for the whole process. Make sure you both agree on what an ideal candidate seems like for a specific position.

Tips for improving communication & coordinate with your hiring manager:

Set a meeting quickly after receiving notification of job requisition to figure out about the role & what qualifications to look for.
Get the manager’s help to prepare the list of sourcing channels where the qualified candidates reside. Don’t forget to list the role-specific keywords.
Go through a few searches together to have a conversation about why particular candidates may or may not be a good fit.
Assess the whole talent pool to ascertain if there is a need to fasten or loosen up the requirement needs. Do this to make sure you find the right number of talent.

2. Map out your ideal candidate personas

It’s the starting point for your candidate sourcing. You have to identify important elements that’ll make the ideal candidate persona for a specific job role.

Personas are prepared to use as a benchmark while starting candidate sourcing.

Candidate personas are imaginary people created keeping in mind the characteristics, skills & qualifications that make up an ideal candidate.

3. Past candidates are best to get a head start

Getting a head start is of utmost importance for candidate sourcing, for this, there is no better place to get it than past candidates.

There are always qualified candidates that weren’t able to get to the top or are not fit for a specific role. If you have their information in your database then you can start engaging with them.

It is more likely you will find quality candidates with this strategy. Along with that, it will save you from going through the same evaluation process with them again.

4. Create a sourcing pipeline & maintain it

A sourcing pipeline is a group of candidates who have applied previously for open positions at your organization.

This pipeline also contains details about passive candidates & those candidates who are qualified but aren’t a right fit currently.

You need to create a sourcing pipeline and fill it with the passive candidates as well as those who weren’t got hired previously.

It doesn’t stop there, you need to consistently fill in candidate information of these types of candidates to keep things running.

5. Include candidates in your sourcing pipeline quickly

As you gather data about good candidates, add them immediately to your sourcing pipeline. Enter the information in your spreadsheet, ATS, or any other place where you collect data, that may become useful in the future.

6. Use ATS for sourcing candidates (One of The most Emerging Recruiting Sourcing Strategies)

It is a good idea to adopt a useful tool like the applicant tracking system (ATS). ATS will help you to move ahead with the candidates in a streamlined way throughout the sourcing & hiring processes.

You can reach out to candidates at different job sites & platforms with the luxury of a few clicks, it makes the sourcing experience amazing.

Also, ATS platforms offer a talent pool feature that lets you save the candidate data in a secure manner. Overall it’s a pretty good package to consider that comes in handy for sourcing quality candidates.

7. Add new online channels to your mix

There are already a lot of popular online channels to source candidates from. These include top job sites like Indeed & Monster, social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook & even Twitter nowadays.

Yes, these platforms are very good, but you can also look at other less common, more niche job sites & job boards for sourcing talent. The chances of getting responses from candidates from these sites are higher.

For instance, you can go on sites like Stack Overflow, AngelList & GitHub Jobs for searching for IT job candidates. You can find niche sites & platforms for finding candidates for a specific field of jobs like marketing, finance & others.

Add these to your sourcing channel mix to see the improvement in candidate sourcing right away. As these channels have the potential to enrich your talent pipeline so you have to use this sourcing strategy.

8. Involve offline hiring methods for candidate sourcing

Online is modern, advanced & the latest method of candidate sourcing, but that doesn’t make the offline methods less effective. Going out & interacting with people is a great way to reach out to good candidates.

When you are planning to locate well-qualified candidates, attend job fairs, different industry conferences, seminars & events. Also, you can organize meet-ups to meet with people from specialized fields to find great talent.

Talk with people in these meetings/gatherings & ask if they’re looking for a new job opportunity. If their answer is yes, you should get their information to contact them to provide details regarding the open position.

9. Leverage your employees’ network for talent sourcing

One more thing you can plan is to leverage the power of your employees’ online social networks for sourcing talent. Your employees not only can help you find hidden talent but also improve response rates from the candidates they are familiar with.

Conduct sourcing rounds with your team to find out if anyone from your employees’ social networks would be suitable for the vacant positions.

There are a lot of tools you can use to discover qualified candidates that are connected with your existing employees. Those tools include – Sourcing.io & Teamable.

10. Source candidates in advance for the roles that aren’t open yet

Generally, candidate sourcing is done for the currently vacant roles. But, sourcing can be done for the positions that are going to be available to fill in the future.

You should have a look at the growth plans of your company, then prepare a hiring strategy accordingly. Make it in a way that gives you insight into when you will have to make hires over the course of the year.

Work with the seniors & colleagues at Finance & HR to pinpoint the level & skills required once you have clarity on which teams need expansion. Add up the skills, your knowledge about the company & team culture to start sourcing for particular roles in a focused & continuous manner.

Eventually, this process will help you to be ready with candidates to review whenever the need for an employee for a specific role arises.

11. Prepare the best possible outreach messages for candidates

Well-crafted outreach messages for individual candidates are great to attract and engage them. These messages grab their attention & interest them to learn more about the open job role.

Remember you have to put the needs & wants of the prospective candidates before everything else. You need to put more weight on the goals of your candidates rather than your company’s to show them how you value them.

Some most effective practices to follow while crafting outreach messages:

Write a catchy subject line to immediately dazzle them & makes them open your message.
Personalization of messages with relevant info about the candidate is the key. Mention which of their qualities made you impressed.
Give them brief details about the role & company.
In the final section of the message, tell them how they could contribute their efforts to the team

It’s important to know your audience before you make the message. There are some preferences each type of professional has, and you need to keep their preferences in mind while preparing messages for them.

If you practice these techniques for preparing outreach messages you are more likely to increase the candidate response rate drastically. It will eventually be beneficial for your talent sourcing process.

12. Construct a strong employer brand that candidates desire

Constructing a strong employer brand along with the company’s overall brand is one of the most significant things to do. The reason behind this is simple, candidates would love to work with a company with a good reputation & goodwill.

If you build and maintain a positive image then there are high chances that more candidates will respond to your outreach messages. Not only that, job candidates will start to apply for open roles with happiness.

Most effective employer branding strategies:

Provide positive feedback on reviews – 86% of employees & job seekers do research company reviews & ratings to decide where to apply for a job. That’s why you need to constantly check review websites like Glassdoor and respond positively to the feedback you receive. Show that you value feedback and are will ing to take the necessary steps to make improvements wherever it is needed. This will create goodwill for you and display that you care for your employees.

Let your employees speak about your company – Encourage your employees to share their real stories about their work experiences. Your employees can also express what they like about working in your organization. Ask them to share their experiences via blogs & other relevant media. Conduct this practice to let people know that your company is a great place to work.
Team-up with your marketers – Work with your company’s marketing team for creating and distributing content across different channels. They utilize strategies that are the same as those strategies you require to spread your employer brand. So, it’s good to team up with them on this front.

13. Follow-up with all candidates including those who don’t respond

Send follow-ups emails to all candidates to make the top talent remember you. Also, you have to include those candidates in your candidates’ list who don’t respond. Your consistent efforts will help you build a healthy relationship with the prospective candidates.

You can share company news with them, wish them on their birthdays, congratulate them on achieving milestones & even when they get a new job. Also, it tells them you’re eager to know about them plus add them as your team member.

If the candidates have interest in an open position they’ll let you know easily. And in case they are not interested, they might refer someone from their friends to you.

14. Track your sourcing & recruiting metrics

You can ask yourself the following questions to track various metrics:

What’s the number of communication attempts are required to receive responses from candidates?
How much time does it take to nurture a candidate & convince them to apply for a position?
From the first interview of the sourced candidate to their hiring, how much time does this process takes?
Do the sourced candidates move faster through the screening process than the regular/general candidates?
From where the best candidates are sourced from?

Answers to these questions will give you a clear idea of where the top talent can be found. Plus, you will also find out how they like to get communicated through these. On this basis, you can plan your activities in such a way it makes your hiring efforts fruitful.

15. Keep in mind the internal hiring as one of the recruiting sourcing strategies

Yes, you can source candidates internally as well. It works pretty well when you’re expecting changes in your workforce plus are working on succession planning.

Remember that your existing employees are already familiar with your company and its work culture, vision, etc., that’s what makes them more valuable.

16. Employee referral program is among the great recruiting sourcing strategies

Last but not the least, you should also have to implement employee referral as well.

Generally, your employees might know someone who has great potential to be a great candidate for the open positions in your firm. They can be those people whom they have worked with them in the past.

So, ask your employees to recommend such candidates, so you can add them to your sourcing pipeline. It’s one of the major recruiting sourcing strategies that you can utilize.

EndNote

In the end, we only want to say that you should take advantage of these recruiting sourcing strategies we have mentioned here.

Use these strategies to make a proper plan to source talent that you wish to have. When you implement these strategies will show positive results for your search for talent.

As we have talked about using an applicant tracking system as a part of recruiting sourcing strategies, you can have a look at Recooty. It’s an excellent applicant tracking system that assists organizations to expand their team with a smooth plus easy experience.

Recooty helps you to find amazing candidates from different online channels and automates your recruiting activities as well. You can find candidates and directly store their data in the talent pool functionality it provides.