3 Effective Sourcing Strategies To Accelerate Your Recruitment Process

Attracting the right candidates in the job market is a crucial first step to achieving business growth and establishing your employer brand. Naturally, if you want to come out ahead of your market counterparts, you first need strong individuals on your team who will help you get there.

The problem, however, is that nearly 52% of candidates  who apply for an open position are underqualified. Close to 47% of companies  report that very few or absolutely no ideal candidates apply for the roles they are trying to fill.

Therefore, instead of waiting for the right candidates to come to you, you need to direct your efforts toward strategically sourcing such candidates. Below, we look at a few candidate sourcing strategies in recruitment that can help you do just that!

1) Have a Robust Employee Referral Program In Place

A practical and engaging employee referral program can be a differentiator for attracting the best hires and fortifying your employer brand. It can help hiring managers in cost-effective candidate sourcing and hiring from within employees networks, speeding up the recruitment process, and mitigating the cost and time spent on each hire.

According to one recent study conducted by Yello, close to 94% of employees would refer their current company to a friend or acquaintance.

Now imagine what happens when recruiters know how to turn this to their advantage.

Hiring managers can include the following steps to create an exceptional employee referral program that helps source the best talent and yields results within no time.

Incentivize Employees for Showing Active Participation

Offering a referral incentive is one of the most critical components of an employee referral program aimed at attracting quality candidates. Some of the commonly leveraged referral rewards by companies today include cash rewards, prize rewards, and vacation rewards.

Intel is one company that has been using monetary referral bonuses for quite some time now to source diverse candidates. This American tech giant has implemented a direct incentivizing plan wherethe reward assigned toward each referral is doubled each time an existing employee successfully refers to a woman or someone from the minority class.

Many HR leaders now formulate referral bonus strategies that offer both monetary and non-monetary benefits.

Deploy a Diverse and Easy Referral Model

When it comes to creating an effective talent sourcing strategy to attract more participation from the employees’ end in terms of referrals, one best practice would be to maintain a proactive approach and keep things as simple as possible so that the referrer does not feel overburdened.

You need to think about candidate engagement simultaneously.

Talent acquisition leaders should try to establish a clear and concise referral policy that spills out all essential requirements and is supported by a reward so that employees get compelled to, but at the same time do not feel forced to make a referral.

Trustwave, a data security company based out of Chicago, is already seeing positive results with such a strategy.

At that company, employees can easily refer their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn followers for open positions. To make this process hassle-free and easy, the HR leaders at the company use Jobvite’s platform to send a company-wide broadcast to all employees every Friday. This message includes three to four featured job openings that employees can forward to relevant contacts on their social media channels.

Acknowledge Employees That Get You Good Hires

Lastly, showing appreciation and acknowledging employeesfor their efforts can take a long time to attract more referrals.

Share their stories and accomplishments with the rest of the employees and publically thank them for helping you locate, engage, and connect exceptional applicants with the talent acquisition team. This can also improve employer branding since such employees can be an excellent way to spread positive word of mouth.

One 2016 report by Gallup titled “Employee Recognition: Low Cost, High Impact” goes on to explain how employees are motivated by workplace recognition:

“Workplace recognition motivates, provides a sense of accomplishment, and makes employees feel valued for their work. Recognition not only boosts individual employee engagement but it also has been found to increase productivity and loyalty to the company, leading to higher retention.”

2) Consider Reaching Out to Former Qualified Candidates

Today, close to 73% of candidates  are passive job seekers.

Needless to say, if your candidate sourcing strategy isn’t targeting leads that are not actively applying for open positions at your company, you’re missing out on the best candidates that would have otherwise contributed toward the overall success of your organization.

One excellent way of targeting passive candidates is re-engaging former qualified leads by tapping into your existing talent pool or database. This is a perfect way to identify qualified candidates quicker.

Jacqui Maguire, Director of Talent Acquisition at Greenhouse.io, explains in a recentblog post , how reaching out to former qualified leads can speed up the process of sourcing and filling an open position:

“We had a departure that left a really important role empty, unexpectedly, at a time when the recruiting team was already at full hiring capacity. So I decided to ask Senior Recruiter Katie DiCioccio if there were any promising candidates from the last time the role was open. I was hoping this would give us a head start—and it did!

This quick search brought up one candidate who really stood out to the hiring manager. Instead of starting from square one, posting the job, and going through the whole process, we reached out to the candidate. We took what normally would have been a three-month search and made it into essentially a one-week process.”

Maguire isn’t the only talent acquisition leader who has achieved positive results with this sourcing strategy. There are endless such stories often doing the rounds within the recruitment space.

When crafting outreach messages for previously qualified candidates, spell out everything. Make the former employees realize that you are aware it may have been some time since you spoke with them last, and ask them if they are still interested in being employed at your company.

By doing this, you may be able to pique their interest again. It is also possible that the positive experience of such leads with you might lead to them recommending a qualified friend or colleague who may be interested.

Regardless of whether or not they are actively looking for a job at the time, your odds are still better with warmer candidates than with passive candidate sourcing-related outreach.

3) Diversify Your Search by Leveraging Multiple Channels

As talent acquisition leaders, we all know that most recruiters have their go-to channels to find potential hires.

While close to 48% of businesses  say that their top candidates come from employee referrals, as many as 95% of recruiters  utilize professional networking platforms such as LinkedIn as a primary sourcing tool to find top hires.

As widely as these channels are being used by recruiters today, several others haven’t been tapped into much. Consider adding some of these less commonly fished sources to the mix to augment your sourcing strategy and accelerate your hiring process in doing so!

For instance, if you’re planning on targeting more fresh, out-of-college active job seekers, you can start leveraging social media, like Instagram or Facebook. With a large population of Gen Z and Millenials on these platforms, you’ll have a good chance of finding younger job candidates. 

Some of the other channels you can think of experimenting with for sourcing include:

• Recruiters that provide on-demand sourcing and hiring options 
• Your company’s dedicated mobile app to attract referrals from employees
• Your existing Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to extract data about past candidates
• Content marketing channels such as your company’s virtual blog to attract candidates
• Social networks such as Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook for sourcing potential candidates in a targeted way
• Email marketing channels such as Gmail and Yahoo

Including this approach in your hiring process is essential because passive candidates may be more responsive to outreach messages on websites used less conventionally for sourcing. Additionally, profiles on such websites can yield specific information that provides good fodder for personalized outreach.

A few crucial questions that can help talent acquisition leaders decide which platform will help them best with their talent search include:

• From the perspective of a candidate deep in this domain for some time, where might you start a search for this?
• Where might a community of such candidates congregate if at all it did?
• What companies are focused on similar products/tech/services?
• Do people in this role go by multiple job titles? If yes, what are they?

To know more about candidate sourcing strategies in recruitment and what you can do to attract the best talent organically to establish your employer brand faster, get in touch with us at Recruiter.com .

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