Have You Tried These 5 Out-of-the-Box Ways to Source Candidates?
When you think of candidate sourcing, you probably immediately think of publishing ads on job boards, looking for fresh college graduates, or scouting for talent on LinkedIn. Although these techniques may bring in some numbers, they do not ensure quality.
When attracting and sourcing candidates, it is important to be active in the places where your ideal candidates are likely to be. You need to explore platforms beyond your traditional channels. In this article, we discuss some unusual, innovative, and out-of-the-box sourcing platforms that will help you find the perfect talent for your organization.
Use Your Employer Brand to Source Candidates
If you build a desirable employer brand, candidates will come looking for you. Here are a few things you can do to build your employer brand during your talent acquisition process.
• Build a career site that showcases your brand. Write a quirky job description, and include videos that talk about your company’s day-to-day activities and culture. Get your employees to share their work/life stories and pin them on your career site.
• Consistently engage with your audience on social media platforms by sharing news, stories, and other interesting things from your organization.
• Motivate your employees to share interesting stories of their own. You can nudge your marketing teams into helping them out.
• Leverage your general marketing efforts and tap into them for recruiting purposes as well.
Don’t just brand yourself as an amazing employer — genuinely do everything you can to be one.
Explore Social Media Platforms
Social media is a great way to reach out to all kinds of people. You can quickly establish first contact with candidates, ask them for work samples, read articles by them, and get to know them. Reaching out to a variety of candidates will boost the diversity in your workplace, and social media can help you learn so much more about a candidate than their resume can convey. Social media profiles can also help you validate the information on their resumes.
There are plenty of search and targeting options on social media. This allows you to direct your job ads and company information toward specific groups of people based on geography, education, age, gender, and other criteria. Don’t just stick to the usual platforms; explore less mainstream ones like Reddit, Snapchat, Flickr, and any other channels where your ideal candidates spend their time.
Don’t Miss Out on Niche Channels
When looking to hire candidates with very specific types of expertise, you can try niche channels like Quora, Slack, industry blogs, and other forums where experts are likely to gather. These channels allow you to asses a candidate’s knowledge, content, interests, involvement, networking skills, and community engagement before you even reach out to them. Sounds like a lot of homework to do? Don’t worry about gathering all the data. Tools like Freshteam will help you source from any channel, not just the job boards.
Also, using these channels allows you to tell candidates exactly what impressed you or caught your attention when you reach out to them. Candidates will value and appreciate that extra personalized touch, and they’ll want to connect with you even more.
Attract Skilled Talent Using Hackathons
Hackathons do not have to be confined to marketing efforts — they are an amazing tool for recruiting techies as well. Hackathons are a creative, engaging, and dynamic alternative to traditional methods of recruiting for companies of any size. Watching candidates work in a real-time environment helps you assess them better, and not just in terms of their technological skills. A hackathon also helps you see which candidates are team players, problem solvers, and performers under pressure. This ensures that you hire great candidates who add real value to your business.
Through a hackathon, you can do more than just hire people for your current openings. You can also meet plenty of candidates you may want to save for later. They may not be immediate hires, but they can be perfect choices for upcoming jobs and great additions to your talent pool.
Pro Tip:
Meet with people and build relationships instead of starting off with a job offer. Learn more about where they are from, their interests, and their strengths, and then use this information to build conversations with them.
Go Mobile!
Make it easy for your applicants to reach you by making your application process mobile-friendly. Candidates should be able to access job posts, career sites, application forms (some organizations accept LinkedIn profiles in place of resume uploads), and anything else through their mobile devices. The big job boards like Indeed, LinkedIn, and Monster have free apps for job seekers. If you can also give candidates an easier way to apply via smartphone, there will be more applicants for your jobs.
We hope you found this useful. If you are looking for an ATS that can help you with candidate sourcing, interview scheduling, offer management, and the entire recruitment process, do try Freshteam for free.
Freshteam by Freshworks is an all-in-one smart HR software that can help you with recruitment, onboarding, employee management, time-off approvals, and a lot more. From the moment you place a job requisition until the employee leaves the organization, Freshteam can take care of the entire hire-to-retire cycle. Source, screen, interview, and hire the best candidates using Freshteam.
This article by Freshteam is built on the original article that first appeared on the Freshteam blog.
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