4 Simple Yet Effective Sourcing Strategies to Land the Best Candidates in 2022
Hiring the best candidates for any industry or organization can be challenging and exhausting.
Today’s job market is highly competitive, and there is an increasing need to find the most competent and skilled candidates. This is why hiring managers are always looking for effective candidate sourcing strategies to optimize their recruitment process.
Candidate sourcing is the first step that recruiters need to take when hiring for any company. The process begins with reaching out to suitable potential hires, which consists of professionals, either passive or active candidates.
Therefore, having formulated talent sourcing strategies is the foremost step to optimizing your recruiting process and landing the best hires. Below, we look at a few.
1. Long-term Sourcing Strategies
When it comes to finding qualified candidates for any position, a detailed plan for sourcing strategies is the best option.
You can create and execute a long-term recruitment plan that includes a broader perspective of the candidates. Making a clear and viable recruitment plan will help you succeed in sourcing. Let’s look at the promising strategies you can quickly implement to source better candidates.
Identify the Goal
For any organization, the growth of their businesses matters to them the most. Therefore, your client or boss would be after you to bring them the best candidates that can contribute to the company’s growth. Consequently, you need to identify and recognize the goals to consider the best option to fulfill them.
Define Precise Sourcing and Recruitment Needs
Once you have a goal in mind, it would become much easier for you to define the sourcing and recruitment needs that can help achieve the end goal. By doing so, you would be able to decide better how to get the expected results. During the candidate sourcing process, you can also develop a skill map for your company to refer to.
Describe Your Target Candidate
Regardless of the organization or industry the business belongs to, there is always an ideal candidate profile that defines your expectations of the candidate you want. The target candidate has a particular set of skills, personality, qualifications, certifications, and other capabilities that you can measure all other applicants against. It would help you accelerate the hiring process.
Develop a Review Checklist
Making a productive checklist that your team can review will have lasting effects on sourcing. Checkpoints with accurate dates and events will increase the chances to measure performances that regulate the efficiency of your sourcing strategies.
Build the Brand Image
The way your company looks portrays a picture to the candidates. So, if your brand has a positive image in the market, the talent will draw towards you. On the other hand, companies with negative brand images struggle to convince employees to join their teams and get the average candidate. Candidates prefer to join a company with an excellent reputation in the market.
2. Building the Employer’s Brand
As mentioned above, building a brand is the most important thing you can do to source candidates for a position in the company. Here are some ways in which you can go about it.
Respond to Feedback
In today’s world, we always check reviews for a product before buying it online, and the same is the case with applying for a position. Applicants check the company’s reviews before applying for the job, and it is encouraging if the employer responds to reviews and feedback, both positive and negative. One recent statistical compilation by Glassdoor states that 86% of candidates and employees check company reviews and ratings to determine whether they want to apply.
Engage Your Employees
Create a platform where you can share your brand’s achievements and regular activities to show the positive image of your brand. Your employees’ positive experiences matter a lot to job seekers who will apply.
Involve Your Marketing Team
Your marketing team’s innovative skills can help make your brand image more creative and positive. Effective branding sends a message that the company is modern and in touch with the recent trends and developments. This is a significant point to convince the young portion of potential candidates.
Apply the Marketing Rule of Three
The marketing rule of three also applies in candidate sourcing. While linking with leads through cold emails or texts, your right approach towards three channels would increase hiring potential clients. Connecting the prospect, the recruiter, and the company over the periods of hiring enables the recruiter to scale the desired personality with relevant qualifications.
3. Sourcing Candidates from Your Existing Talent Pool
Whenever you post a new job on job boards, a company receives thousands of applications, out of which a hundred or so are shortlisted or even considered. Even if one of them is selected, the other applications don’t have to waste. Instead, they should be a part of your talent pool. Re-engaging the declined candidates from your talent pool can be a good sourcing approach to find suitable quality candidates for any future relevant job openings.
This way, you will find the quality candidate with relevant qualifications and hire them for future roles. Your continuous search through the talent pool will land you the best candidate, and you might not even have to put out a job posting if you manage to find candidates within your database.
This approach might not always work, and some might refer to it as a missed opportunity. However, communicating with past passive candidates will help build a portfolio of talented candidates for the future. Moreover, it would foster a positive image for your hiring organization.
Searching Within the Organization
There is the potential talent within the organization, simply waiting to be unearthed and polished most of the time. As a recruiter, one of your candidate sourcing strategies should be to look within the organization and search for any potential employees who can be a good fit for the new position that has just opened up. Here are some ways to find qualified talent within the company.
4. Internal Hiring
What if the right candidate is already working in your company? This process includes hiring internal talent for open roles, such as promoting their current jobs or moving them into higher positions.
Employee Referrals
Your talented employees are bound to have a qualified friend, relative, or acquaintance that might be a good fit for the role you are recruiting for. Therefore, you can gather employee referrals, and to optimize the process, you can incentivize the referrals. Consider giving incentives to the employees that refer candidates—a win-win situation for both.
Expand Your Online Candidate Sourcing Networks
Companies have a variety of channels to find deserving candidates. Most candidates are hired from social media platforms such as LinkedIn. Facebook has been the most common method to source candidates or job postings. The key is to finalize your desired candidate list and look at the relevant platforms to find the right one.
You can also involve the management or executives in the sourcing process by asking for their required skills and expectations from the applicant who should be selected for the position. Some of the questions you can ask them are as follows:
- Where do you want to see your company in the future?
- What do other companies focus on, and how will you assimilate similar services into your company’s goals?
- What title would be suitable for the currently vacant position?
The important takeaway for a hiring manager is to remember that you can’t source the best candidates with mediocre efforts, so employing a more strategic approach helps you find the right individual out of thousands of applications.
To learn more about candidate sourcing tools and recruiting strategies that can get the best hires your way, get in touch with us at Recruiter.com.
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